Bacteria and viruses evolve, very very quickly in some cases. There is a reason the immune system can't stop all infections despite it's rather interesting complexity. The worst effect is of course false positives, losing all your neurons to a confused nanobot is not a fun thing.
Fully? Hardly. Just enough to find things that engage them. Though I definitely agree high quality mentoring (not only for bright students, but in general) that can help make students aware of possibilities is something we could use more of that would be generally valuable
but it seems it's often true that teachers in this position were happy to let kids who'd demonstrated they knew the material work quietly on something else which interested them. The whole damn point of the school system is that children and even adults DON'T learn better on their own. After all what's the point of having teachers at all if students can learn everything on their own? And yeah bright little Timmy may be able to pick up addition on his own but for calculus he may require some extra help.
I'd argue where that's true, it's real education at its finest for everyone involved.:) Not really. What is learned is often not of much use and too unconnected to help. Children need structured teaching and need to learn in an organized manner. The opposite is how we get programmers who still use gotos and the like. Unlearning bad habits is a lot more work than learning good ones to begin with.
My observation is that this is sometimes true, but not enough to work as a complete generalization. Often it's absolutely true that teachers or schools don't have anything else to do with these kids -- but it seems it's often true that teachers in this position were happy to let kids who'd demonstrated they knew the material work quietly on something else which interested them. There are tons of things you an do with such kids, the whole problem is that even if a teacher wants to they have no idea what to do. Furthermore the school doesn't allow them to do anything outside their own classroom.
And especially at a secondary level, many teachers absolutely will let kids who demonstrate precocious understanding move beyond the typical sequence.. Except that guidance is needed. A lot of subjects do have a proper way of being taught without which learning them is nearly impossible.
I agree there are some people who work like that, and I think you can beat the genuine desire to actually help people out of educators just like you can beat the desire to learn out of kids. But a genuine desire to help out is the reason a lot of educators are there in the first place. And when they no longer have a genuine desire to help students they become administrators and develop a god complex. Guess who I'm referring to as "the school" in my posts. I have gone to magnet schools and I have met exactly two administrators who actually gave a damn. One retired and the other went to work at a private school probably because he couldn't take the ego maniacal moron who replaced the other one anymore.
Re:This article is like waving a red flag at a bul
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Failing Our Geniuses
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But who has the most opportunity to get by in life despite of a weak education system? Those born to wealthy or well connected parents who are capable of gaming the system and providing special attention to their children.
... on whether or not the gifted student is smart enough to figure out how to use resources to direct their own learning.
The point? I think most of the smart kids -- especially if they have any kind of decent direction from parents, or a counselor, or some kind of mentor -- can take advantage of the existing system just fine, and learn to find resources outside of it to further their own goals. Kids are kids. Just because a kid is a genius doesn't make him anything other than a kid. You're expecting these kids to not only be smart but also extremely motivation and fully knowledgeable about what is possible.
You know what they'll figure out on their own? That it takes 10 minutes to get the password of every student in the school. Why? Because it's about the most interesting thing they can do during school hours.
How do you expect a kid to be motivated about anything when they're forced to sit for 6 hours a day in a chair and be subjected to repetitive babbling on things they learned the first time the teacher said it. Of course any attempt to claim they already know this will be returned with a "too bad, you need to stay in this class since we don't care how boring it is" response from the school. And no the school doesn't care how good the child is or how gifted they are but simply sends out the same form reply anytime someone even dares to ask to do something different.
Achievement levels off once you start generating knowledge yourself. Learning logarithms when you're 10 instead of 14 isn't going to make you significantly more likely to "cure leukemia or stop global warming". No but the difference between learning them at 10 and being interested in learning more, and dropping out of school at 16 due to disgust and utter boredom will.
BS. If his adds are based on clicks then displaying the ads LOWERS his revenue as it lowers the click through rate of the ads on his site (and ad providers will judge the site as being of lower quality).
Since we are in school for three years prior to our decision, we have taken the subjects we are about to evaluate. And most people stick with their favourites, I do not see a problem. In many subjects there are multiple facets and the low-level courses do not necessarily reflect the work one would usually do in the major. I have heard numerous people complain that they didn't like math when they took say pre-calc but when they had to take calculus they actually enjoyed it (and vice versa).
It's systems like that which lead to asian EE students. They're told their whole lives they have to be an EE or they'll get disowned (yes literally). Within a year of starting college they realize they hate being an EE but continue on due to the massive brainwashing they were subjected to. After two or three years they realize that they'd rather kill themselves than spend their life being an EE. By then they're however too deep into it to quit so they continue on. After they graduate they quickly choose a masters program in something that is not EE and plan to never work as one in the future. Well the smart ones at least.
This allowed the universities to know the minimum level and rely on the expected knowledge of all the students in a given course, and there was no need for foundation years, or spending the first term or two catching everyone up. Huh? If someone needs to catch up they take more classes and if they don't need to catch up they don't. I've exempted myself from tons of required classes because they were below me and no one complained.
Personally I'm a recent college graduate. I know statistics and CS well, majored in the former and somewhat in the later actually. I work on economics problems which necessitate a knowledge of economics. I plan to work as a consultant for biologists necessitating a strong biological knowledge. I know computational biology which likewise has been useful indirectly and will probably help directly. I've also used optimization theory concepts that I've picked up in classes from three different departments.
I'd have shot myself in the British system probably. I don't want to be a lab or code monkey, I want to think and solve problems. That you can't get with a narrow focus. I don't want to be bored in 15 years of what I do.
We're always traveling into the future so using it to mean going forward is mostly pointless.
Time travel as understood by everyone except apparently you to imply going into the past. If you want to argue details or pedantic semantics then you're welcome. Everyone else will just call you an idiot of course but please go right ahead. After all it's a great public service for idiots and assholes to tell the rest of the world about it so that we can avoid you.
The basic structure of relativity guarantees that any mechanism for faster-than-light travel is also automatically a mechanism for time travel. No, certain constrained forms of FTL travel are perfectly fine from what I can tell. One method is wormholes with the property that virtual particles cause them to collapse if their arrangement hits the "can violate causality" point. As I understand it specifically no time travel is possible if there is only one FTL route (ie: the wormhole itself) between the two endpoints of a wormhole (ie: other routes can involve FTL travel but the total time it takes has to be more than any non-FTL route).
You can also always just claim that relativity is not perfectly correct and go on from there (I think hyperspace as a universal frame of reference is the common one), nothing says it has to be perfectly right after all.
In fact, ozone has quite a beneficial property in correct quantities, including cancer therapy, mold or smoke eradication, even water treatment (most high end swimming pools use ozone rather than very harmful chemicals such as chlorine). ...All except one of those involve killing living organisms. Rat poison is also damn useful but I wouldn't want it in the air or eating it.
I haven't read the book but based on the summary alone I can make a quick guess at the guys intellectual prowess. He claims from what I can tell that the current molecular system is irreducible which I don't find surprising at all for two reasons:
a) The current molecular systems is not the one that originally evolved or the one that existed at any point in the past. Evolution removes unnecessary pieces and those pieces are quite likely the building blocks (now replaced with more efficient and specialized versions) that are essential for it to be reducible.
b) The structure that this evolved from may be a lot different from what it is now. It may be irreducible (partially by the previous point) to anything close to its current role but its past role may have been very different. The reason or even form of the past role may be impossible to determine without knowing the exact environment that it evolved in. For example modern blood types are apparently the result of them, by pure luck, bestowing resistance to humans against certain disease (which will not exist in a million years but blood types still may in some new role).
c) Our current knowledge of molecular biology is primitive in terms of our predictive power and is based almost fully on analysis of what we see. We cannot predict what is possible given slightly different molecules or subtle changes, we simply lack the computing power for it.
In other words I find someone claiming that there is no evolutionary path to something a strong indication of their idiocy or irrationality. We simply do not know enough to make any such claim as we cannot predict to any degree other mitigating but now invisible factors (ie: due to c we cannot predict the possibility of a or b being the case).
Also if someone really wants that data it'd be a lot easier for them to just steal it from my home (with server included), kidnap me then have me give it to them, install a root kit on my systems after breaking into my home, etc. Hell if its the government they can even do all this legally.
Also from what I understand right now any sort of override makes data unrecoverable (baring government agencies maybe) due to the density of modern drives.
If one happens to think the standardized tests fail to measure what we want students to learn, then it's a bad thing.
In either case, however, the solution is to make sure the tests are measuring the right things. There are a lot of people who feel the tests aren't doing that - so let's fix the tests. No they believe that standardized tests cause teachers to teach for the test. Not what is on the test but for the test itself. It is an inherent problem of standardized tests. God knows I did better on my AP Calc exam than otherwise because I found certain patterns based on practice tests.
Furthermore standardized tests inherently assume that everyone is the same when in reality we are not and furthermore there are limitations on what types of questions can be on such tests.
Of course I'm serious. Show me the trajectory of that 17 mile wide rock coming at the Earth, and we can talk. By then we'll likely be dead or essentially dead. Unlike you the rest of us don't want the human race to die off because we were too stupid.
Are you scared of a black hole swallowing the Sun, because you've seen that happen to other suns on TV, too? Not really, the chance of that is a lot more remote than an asteroid and we have no may to deal with it given current technology.
When this has nothing to do with asteroids, and everything to do with more covert Star Wars missile defense funding. Of course it does, so how is that tin foil hat of your fitting?
Had you instead built your organization around a large, dynamic, pluggable pool of junior or standard-fare programmers, you would be able to complete the work at a significant cost savings. Since we all know that group decisions by lots of idiots are great ways to organize and run things. A million monkeys on a million typewriters may create Shakespeare one day but the other days they'll just give you giberish.
Your uber programmers do the interesting things and the DESIGN of the project which is probably most of the true work. Your managers then help assign grunt work to various moderately skilled programmers. Truly junior programmers would just create an utterly unmanageable mess of code in most cases so they get whatever crap is left over.
Repeat after me. CS is not programming. College isn't there to spoon feed you everything, you need to learn things on your own. You apparently can't program. Oh sure you know things about programming but in the end you can't program. Welcome to reality, you don't know the practices or the libraries or the methods used in the real world.
If you want to be a programmer then you need all that knowledge which in many cases only experience can bring. Now if you learn on your own, talk to people, read books, code things on your own time and look at lots of code then you don't need as much experience to teach you it all.
If you don't want to be a "programmer" in that strict sense then that's fine as well. That's why graduate degrees and non-production coding CS jobs exist. However if you want your code to go into actual software used by others then you need to bite the bullet and get the experience. More importantly you need to LEARN from that experience and understand why tis valuable beyond being a lien on your resume.
Do we abandon approximately one half of Earth's population to the choice between unemployment or a genetically predestined career? Half? I never knew half the world was without gender. I mean how does does "males are predisposed to being IT" somehow morph in your twisted mind into "males have no genetic predisposition." Your inherent bias is apparently making you blind to the point.
Ah yes, another person who knows nothing but likes to spout out BS.
The US crime rate is mostly due to Americans being scared enough to keep guns around to protect themselves from other Americans. Not really. Washington, DC has the highest crime rate in the nation and it is essentially illegal to own a gun.
Hah. Gang violence between gang members. You crack me up. People violence between people, people who have forgotten how to behave. If you can't understand the difference between gang violence and simply regular crime then thats not my problem.
I was simply stating what I see as the truth. A gun would give me the best odds against any weapon reassuming I spent some time learning to use it of course. I have no chance unarmed against even a knife nor would I likely have a chance in a knife fight (and I'm young, the average 40 year old would be off even worse). Criminals are armed so your logic makes no sense, you seem to somehow assume that without guns criminals will go away magically or that unarmed civilians are all kung-fu masters.
I guess my counter-nitpick to the original content was that you don't have to store infinite states to allow the user an infinite set of states to choose from. I disagree. You need to somehow store the state that you choose. Assuming they are distinct there are only a finite number of different objects that can be stored in a computer system in a given finite amount of time. As a result there is an inherent limit on what you can choose from since in the end you only have a finite number of things to choose from.
We can talk about real numbers but we can only ever choose from a finite set of those real numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it'd be very dangerous, after all you not only need oxygen in there for it to explode but the right mix of it with the natural gas.
Bacteria and viruses evolve, very very quickly in some cases. There is a reason the immune system can't stop all infections despite it's rather interesting complexity. The worst effect is of course false positives, losing all your neurons to a confused nanobot is not a fun thing.
but it seems it's often true that teachers in this position were happy to let kids who'd demonstrated they knew the material work quietly on something else which interested them. The whole damn point of the school system is that children and even adults DON'T learn better on their own. After all what's the point of having teachers at all if students can learn everything on their own? And yeah bright little Timmy may be able to pick up addition on his own but for calculus he may require some extra help. I'd argue where that's true, it's real education at its finest for everyone involved.
... on whether or not the gifted student is smart enough to figure out how to use resources to direct their own learning.The point? I think most of the smart kids -- especially if they have any kind of decent direction from parents, or a counselor, or some kind of mentor -- can take advantage of the existing system just fine, and learn to find resources outside of it to further their own goals. Kids are kids. Just because a kid is a genius doesn't make him anything other than a kid. You're expecting these kids to not only be smart but also extremely motivation and fully knowledgeable about what is possible.
You know what they'll figure out on their own? That it takes 10 minutes to get the password of every student in the school. Why? Because it's about the most interesting thing they can do during school hours.
How do you expect a kid to be motivated about anything when they're forced to sit for 6 hours a day in a chair and be subjected to repetitive babbling on things they learned the first time the teacher said it. Of course any attempt to claim they already know this will be returned with a "too bad, you need to stay in this class since we don't care how boring it is" response from the school. And no the school doesn't care how good the child is or how gifted they are but simply sends out the same form reply anytime someone even dares to ask to do something different.
I'm reminded of Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.
BS. If his adds are based on clicks then displaying the ads LOWERS his revenue as it lowers the click through rate of the ads on his site (and ad providers will judge the site as being of lower quality).
Personally I'm a recent college graduate. I know statistics and CS well, majored in the former and somewhat in the later actually. I work on economics problems which necessitate a knowledge of economics. I plan to work as a consultant for biologists necessitating a strong biological knowledge. I know computational biology which likewise has been useful indirectly and will probably help directly. I've also used optimization theory concepts that I've picked up in classes from three different departments.
I'd have shot myself in the British system probably. I don't want to be a lab or code monkey, I want to think and solve problems. That you can't get with a narrow focus. I don't want to be bored in 15 years of what I do.
We're always traveling into the future so using it to mean going forward is mostly pointless.
Time travel as understood by everyone except apparently you to imply going into the past. If you want to argue details or pedantic semantics then you're welcome. Everyone else will just call you an idiot of course but please go right ahead. After all it's a great public service for idiots and assholes to tell the rest of the world about it so that we can avoid you.
You can also always just claim that relativity is not perfectly correct and go on from there (I think hyperspace as a universal frame of reference is the common one), nothing says it has to be perfectly right after all.
Time TRAVEL implies going back in time. Relativistic distortion is NOT time travel.
I haven't read the book but based on the summary alone I can make a quick guess at the guys intellectual prowess. He claims from what I can tell that the current molecular system is irreducible which I don't find surprising at all for two reasons:
a) The current molecular systems is not the one that originally evolved or the one that existed at any point in the past. Evolution removes unnecessary pieces and those pieces are quite likely the building blocks (now replaced with more efficient and specialized versions) that are essential for it to be reducible.
b) The structure that this evolved from may be a lot different from what it is now. It may be irreducible (partially by the previous point) to anything close to its current role but its past role may have been very different. The reason or even form of the past role may be impossible to determine without knowing the exact environment that it evolved in. For example modern blood types are apparently the result of them, by pure luck, bestowing resistance to humans against certain disease (which will not exist in a million years but blood types still may in some new role).
c) Our current knowledge of molecular biology is primitive in terms of our predictive power and is based almost fully on analysis of what we see. We cannot predict what is possible given slightly different molecules or subtle changes, we simply lack the computing power for it.
In other words I find someone claiming that there is no evolutionary path to something a strong indication of their idiocy or irrationality. We simply do not know enough to make any such claim as we cannot predict to any degree other mitigating but now invisible factors (ie: due to c we cannot predict the possibility of a or b being the case).
Please provide a reference. Everything I have read says that it is impossible on modern hard drives using modern equipment.
Also if someone really wants that data it'd be a lot easier for them to just steal it from my home (with server included), kidnap me then have me give it to them, install a root kit on my systems after breaking into my home, etc. Hell if its the government they can even do all this legally.
Also from what I understand right now any sort of override makes data unrecoverable (baring government agencies maybe) due to the density of modern drives.
Furthermore standardized tests inherently assume that everyone is the same when in reality we are not and furthermore there are limitations on what types of questions can be on such tests.
Your uber programmers do the interesting things and the DESIGN of the project which is probably most of the true work. Your managers then help assign grunt work to various moderately skilled programmers. Truly junior programmers would just create an utterly unmanageable mess of code in most cases so they get whatever crap is left over.
Repeat after me. CS is not programming. College isn't there to spoon feed you everything, you need to learn things on your own. You apparently can't program. Oh sure you know things about programming but in the end you can't program. Welcome to reality, you don't know the practices or the libraries or the methods used in the real world.
If you want to be a programmer then you need all that knowledge which in many cases only experience can bring. Now if you learn on your own, talk to people, read books, code things on your own time and look at lots of code then you don't need as much experience to teach you it all.
If you don't want to be a "programmer" in that strict sense then that's fine as well. That's why graduate degrees and non-production coding CS jobs exist. However if you want your code to go into actual software used by others then you need to bite the bullet and get the experience. More importantly you need to LEARN from that experience and understand why tis valuable beyond being a lien on your resume.
I was simply stating what I see as the truth. A gun would give me the best odds against any weapon reassuming I spent some time learning to use it of course. I have no chance unarmed against even a knife nor would I likely have a chance in a knife fight (and I'm young, the average 40 year old would be off even worse). Criminals are armed so your logic makes no sense, you seem to somehow assume that without guns criminals will go away magically or that unarmed civilians are all kung-fu masters.
We can talk about real numbers but we can only ever choose from a finite set of those real numbers.