I've enjoyed the efforts of universities like MIT putting lectures online via podcast. I'm also a big fan of the idea of educational programming on TV. I mean, this stuff already exists, but it gets generally low hit counts.
I don't really think that the issue facing the country is a lack of science resources (though, more thoroughly trained teachers are definitely needed), but more a fundamental shortcoming in how people (at least in the states) perceive education, specifically science education. It's seen as a chore and not a privelage, and as a result people far too easily dismiss it as "boring".
Teaching science is a delicate balance, I suppose. On the one hand, you want to wow kids with the broad concepts and show them how vast and far-reaching the effects of science can be. On the other, you don't want to blind them to the fact that science at any kind of professional level is deeply steeped in complex mathematics.
The "solution" thus far, is to weed out the kids early on who can't handle the complex mathematics, but I think the "solution" could benefit from a bit of balance.
Without mathematics, chemistry and physics would be boring. Without chemistry and physics engineering would be impossible. Without engineering, computer science would be useless. Without computer science, today's best designers would be bored. Without today's best designers, many questions of logic would go unpondered. Logic is rooted in mathematics.
This may not be as intuitive as you state, and I think there may be two different things under discussion here.
While mining of data for movie recommendations becomes easier as you add n rankings from user x, it isn't intuitively obvious that better recommendations may result from knowing more about movie y.
In other (perhaps more confusing) words, augmenting the data type movie to include attributes like release date, executive producer, and another 100 specific details may reveal more relationships about a viewer's movie preferences than simply having them rank another 100 movies.
In even yet another set of words, it's not about increasing the number of samples, it's about enhancing the resolution of existing points. This is maybe not as intuitively obvious as what you were suggesting.
At least, this is what I think the article was getting at:)
Apple isn't very anti-choice. In fact, most everyone who uses a Mac chooses to do so.
Also, you totally neglect the type of "geeks" you may be referring to. A UI geek might prefer that the processing of in-context items be the priority of the processor. A business geek might prefer that power draw be minimized so that they can use the phone longer without a recharge. A blogger geek might prefer certain email accounts ONLY refresh when being viewed and not when he's trying to snap a picture. Etc, etc.
The lockdown of Apple devices that you so seem to despise, is actually the reason that so many people like them. They are built as hermetically-sealed pretty boxes that do what most people need them to do without any fuss or need to share the gritty details.
9 hours?!?! I don't think I could sleep for that long if I wanted to. At 8 you're already sleeping for 1/3 of your life. If you work a normal job you're spending about another 1/3 at work. That leaves only 1/3 of your life for self-motivated activity. Personally, that's just not enough for me, so I've tried to acclimate myself to less sleep (generally 4-5 hours a night and about 8 on Sundays), and am doing my best to find a job that more closely fits with my interests (but being just about fresh out of school, I realize I probably need to "pay my dues" for a while).
Just playing Devil's Advocate here, as I pretty much have a bunch of different rigs with a bunch of different specs and recognize that each one has it's place:
1. Computers and devices are proprietary: Yeah, sure, but they're catering to a niche market of generally untechy types. They are a boutique computer brand and should be faulted no more than Ferrari for not making an all-purpose station wagon.
2. Difficult to repair and upgrade: Again, niche untechy types. Repair is as easy as taking the rig to a local Apple store; their warranties generally last as long as they claim the machine will be good for (read "no need for upgrades"). They pretty much tell you when you buy a computer "this'll be pretty good for about 4 years or so," and then you think about buying a new one. As for simple stuff, like adding RAM and upgrading software, Macs are generally super easy to upgrade.
3. Significantly overpriced for their specs: Actually, my Mac (a 24-inch iMac) runs Vista better than all of the entry-priced Dells, and is cheaper than the higher end ones (yeah, I know I'm stupidly using Vista as a benchmark here, but you get what I'm getting at).
4. Pain-in-the-ass to develop for: This is only because the market share is so small. Supply and demand are at work here. There's nothing inherently difficult about developing for Macs, but as long as their's no big market for it, there's nothing to pay the developers with.
5. Locked down tight: Nontechy types generally don't care about the innards of their OS, and again, that's who the core audience is for these machines.
Apple didn't really have to try hard to "convince" anyone of anything when it comes to their machines. They make pretty, and pretty usable, devices for people who are looking for exactly that. And you know what? They're doing a pretty awesome job.
My math geek friends and I used to call gambling in Vegas and playing the lottery the "Math Tax." People who suck at prob and stat usually are the only ones who get audited:)
I feel as though you might be dismissing Aedipus and ink too easily. Sure these things may seem silly and frivolous when conclusions are extrapolated after application to an individual, but imagine the power behind analyzing hundreds of thousands of responses to the same set of ink blots (essentially, what the KNN approach is) with a small weight distributed to account for those who think their moms are hot (post-calculation hueristics to catch outliers).
Since psychology is largerly based on statistics
Perhaps. I'd like to pose this question, though: Is psychology based on statistics, or is statistics just a particularly convenient way of expressing what we know about psychology?
Excellent point!
The only way wars are truly settled (as long as you recognize that signed treaties are often just fake promises covering up what will certainly be later-realized hostile intentions), is when one side runs out of enough source material (i.e. soldiers and weapons, and leaders to command those soldiers and weapons) for the war to continue.
If war was as emotionally detached as having two proxy groups duke it out, then the matter could be simplified to simply have two single robots duke it out. Why stop there, it could just be two people playing a game of chess to determine the outcome of what would otherwise be horrific battles. In fact, in a fair and balanced enough world where decisions were made logically and with mutual empathy and understanding, most difficult decisions (where either outcome is potentially beneficial/detrimental to everyone involved), wars could be simplified to coin tosses.
The issue is that conflicts, and by extension wars, are too inherently tied to emotion and people's false notions of pride (in religion, patriotism, etc.) which is in and of itself an ethical dilemma. If the world at large were socially evolved enough to solve all it's problems with coldly logical robot wars, then there really wouldn't be a need for war to begin with.
How the iPod works is easy...
1. Create a recognizable branding.
2. Dedicate yourself to the production of pretty consumer electronics with nifty functionality.
3. Appeal to a small but fiercely loyal fan base.
4. Market the HELL out of said products.
5. Profit.
Excellent point. Just because a scenerio has reached a level of complexity that it becomes very difficult to predict its outcomes accurately shouldn't qualify it as random.
I always thought it was silly that if people are willing to recognize the predictability (to at least a somewhat reliable degree) of something as complex as global weather patterns, then how could they claim that something like a dice roll was random when it's clearly a MUCH smaller system? The only difference is that the morning news doesn't invest millions of dollars on computers, distributed networks of remote site data collection and trained professionals to figure out if I'm going to get an easy 8 or snake eyes.
Actually, with the Nike+ features and its solid state memory, the nano is the best bet for runners and athletes.
I personally could care less about the touch screen interface, as I've grown quite used to navigating with the click wheel on my iPod without looking at it (like when I'm playing songs in the car and want to skip tracks, etc. without taking my eyes off the road). The tactile feedback is necessary there and not provided by the touch screen.
For my purposes (mainly listening to music in my car on long trips and during my daily commute), the higher the capacity, the better. That being said, I won't be moving on the new iPod Classic as it suffers from what I considered the one drawback of all the previous flagship iPods, the moving parts of the harddrive.
What I was really hoping for with this release was some large capacity solid state memory iPod with a click wheel. I didn't get that, and so will probably not move on a new Apple device this time around.
Now, my listening habits are personally kind of all over the place, but most of the time I like to put my iPod on shuffle and skip around through my songs randomly. Given that, a huge capacity isn't really necessary; even if I listen to only half of the songs that can be stored on an 8 gig device, I'll still have about 100 hours of music. Given the battery life on these things, I would never go that long before plugging it into my computer where I'd have the opportunity to swap songs around.
All that being said, with the recent price drop on the iPhone (and the fact that I already have AT&T as a carrier), the iPhone is kind of the best buy option here. Especially since it offers the prospect of consolidating my two most frequently used handheld devices. The one draw back: it's not compatible with any FM transmitters yet, rendering it useless in my car!
Especially considering that a few weeks ago there was an article here on/. talking about Microsoft making a go at the graphics tool market (putting it in competition with the Adobe CS products). I wonder if this is like an "F.U." from Adobe. A corporate pissing contest of sorts?
"Both the man and the computer presumably do massive amounts of "brute force" computation on their very different architectures"
There's a joke somewhere in there about how essentially all nerds (chess players,/.ers and highly specialized super computers alike) spend their free time doing massive amounts of brute force to their architectures... But I'm not going to make it...:)
Ionic wind engines not only keep the chips cool, but they promise to leave them smelling fresh and clean. I learned all about this technology on a late-night infomercial:)
Slashdot Mirror
I've enjoyed the efforts of universities like MIT putting lectures online via podcast. I'm also a big fan of the idea of educational programming on TV. I mean, this stuff already exists, but it gets generally low hit counts.
I don't really think that the issue facing the country is a lack of science resources (though, more thoroughly trained teachers are definitely needed), but more a fundamental shortcoming in how people (at least in the states) perceive education, specifically science education. It's seen as a chore and not a privelage, and as a result people far too easily dismiss it as "boring".
Teaching science is a delicate balance, I suppose. On the one hand, you want to wow kids with the broad concepts and show them how vast and far-reaching the effects of science can be. On the other, you don't want to blind them to the fact that science at any kind of professional level is deeply steeped in complex mathematics.
The "solution" thus far, is to weed out the kids early on who can't handle the complex mathematics, but I think the "solution" could benefit from a bit of balance.
Ugh! Another awesome project that'll be delayed by your not-in-my-orbital-backyard shenanigans! ;)
The iPhone does everything it promises to do, and it does it elegantly. What could you possibly mean by "wasted hardware?"
Without mathematics, chemistry and physics would be boring. Without chemistry and physics engineering would be impossible. Without engineering, computer science would be useless. Without computer science, today's best designers would be bored. Without today's best designers, many questions of logic would go unpondered. Logic is rooted in mathematics.
:)
I think we all need each other, folks
This may not be as intuitive as you state, and I think there may be two different things under discussion here.
:)
While mining of data for movie recommendations becomes easier as you add n rankings from user x, it isn't intuitively obvious that better recommendations may result from knowing more about movie y.
In other (perhaps more confusing) words, augmenting the data type movie to include attributes like release date, executive producer, and another 100 specific details may reveal more relationships about a viewer's movie preferences than simply having them rank another 100 movies.
In even yet another set of words, it's not about increasing the number of samples, it's about enhancing the resolution of existing points. This is maybe not as intuitively obvious as what you were suggesting.
At least, this is what I think the article was getting at
Apple isn't very anti-choice. In fact, most everyone who uses a Mac chooses to do so.
Also, you totally neglect the type of "geeks" you may be referring to. A UI geek might prefer that the processing of in-context items be the priority of the processor. A business geek might prefer that power draw be minimized so that they can use the phone longer without a recharge. A blogger geek might prefer certain email accounts ONLY refresh when being viewed and not when he's trying to snap a picture. Etc, etc.
The lockdown of Apple devices that you so seem to despise, is actually the reason that so many people like them. They are built as hermetically-sealed pretty boxes that do what most people need them to do without any fuss or need to share the gritty details.
9 hours?!?! I don't think I could sleep for that long if I wanted to. At 8 you're already sleeping for 1/3 of your life. If you work a normal job you're spending about another 1/3 at work. That leaves only 1/3 of your life for self-motivated activity. Personally, that's just not enough for me, so I've tried to acclimate myself to less sleep (generally 4-5 hours a night and about 8 on Sundays), and am doing my best to find a job that more closely fits with my interests (but being just about fresh out of school, I realize I probably need to "pay my dues" for a while).
Silly Devil's advocate:
;)
Uhh, yeah. I hold my tape recorder up to my computer speakers and then put the cassette in my WalkMan
Just playing Devil's Advocate here, as I pretty much have a bunch of different rigs with a bunch of different specs and recognize that each one has it's place:
1. Computers and devices are proprietary: Yeah, sure, but they're catering to a niche market of generally untechy types. They are a boutique computer brand and should be faulted no more than Ferrari for not making an all-purpose station wagon.
2. Difficult to repair and upgrade: Again, niche untechy types. Repair is as easy as taking the rig to a local Apple store; their warranties generally last as long as they claim the machine will be good for (read "no need for upgrades"). They pretty much tell you when you buy a computer "this'll be pretty good for about 4 years or so," and then you think about buying a new one. As for simple stuff, like adding RAM and upgrading software, Macs are generally super easy to upgrade.
3. Significantly overpriced for their specs: Actually, my Mac (a 24-inch iMac) runs Vista better than all of the entry-priced Dells, and is cheaper than the higher end ones (yeah, I know I'm stupidly using Vista as a benchmark here, but you get what I'm getting at). 4. Pain-in-the-ass to develop for: This is only because the market share is so small. Supply and demand are at work here. There's nothing inherently difficult about developing for Macs, but as long as their's no big market for it, there's nothing to pay the developers with.
5. Locked down tight: Nontechy types generally don't care about the innards of their OS, and again, that's who the core audience is for these machines.
Apple didn't really have to try hard to "convince" anyone of anything when it comes to their machines. They make pretty, and pretty usable, devices for people who are looking for exactly that. And you know what? They're doing a pretty awesome job.
My math geek friends and I used to call gambling in Vegas and playing the lottery the "Math Tax." People who suck at prob and stat usually are the only ones who get audited :)
Perhaps. I'd like to pose this question, though: Is psychology based on statistics, or is statistics just a particularly convenient way of expressing what we know about psychology?
Ahh crap. Someone woke up the Cloverfield monster.
Excellent point!
... IMHO.
The only way wars are truly settled (as long as you recognize that signed treaties are often just fake promises covering up what will certainly be later-realized hostile intentions), is when one side runs out of enough source material (i.e. soldiers and weapons, and leaders to command those soldiers and weapons) for the war to continue.
If war was as emotionally detached as having two proxy groups duke it out, then the matter could be simplified to simply have two single robots duke it out. Why stop there, it could just be two people playing a game of chess to determine the outcome of what would otherwise be horrific battles. In fact, in a fair and balanced enough world where decisions were made logically and with mutual empathy and understanding, most difficult decisions (where either outcome is potentially beneficial/detrimental to everyone involved), wars could be simplified to coin tosses.
The issue is that conflicts, and by extension wars, are too inherently tied to emotion and people's false notions of pride (in religion, patriotism, etc.) which is in and of itself an ethical dilemma. If the world at large were socially evolved enough to solve all it's problems with coldly logical robot wars, then there really wouldn't be a need for war to begin with.
published since 1998 by college student Nick Ciarelli
Come on, dude. Get on the ball and get that Underwaterbasketweaving degree finished!
How the iPod works is easy... 1. Create a recognizable branding. 2. Dedicate yourself to the production of pretty consumer electronics with nifty functionality. 3. Appeal to a small but fiercely loyal fan base. 4. Market the HELL out of said products. 5. Profit.
But I was all ready to kick butt at Super Mario with my Power Glove!
They're going to use their FOAD to come after our precious bodily fluids!!!
Excellent point. Just because a scenerio has reached a level of complexity that it becomes very difficult to predict its outcomes accurately shouldn't qualify it as random.
I always thought it was silly that if people are willing to recognize the predictability (to at least a somewhat reliable degree) of something as complex as global weather patterns, then how could they claim that something like a dice roll was random when it's clearly a MUCH smaller system? The only difference is that the morning news doesn't invest millions of dollars on computers, distributed networks of remote site data collection and trained professionals to figure out if I'm going to get an easy 8 or snake eyes.
Actually, with the Nike+ features and its solid state memory, the nano is the best bet for runners and athletes.
I personally could care less about the touch screen interface, as I've grown quite used to navigating with the click wheel on my iPod without looking at it (like when I'm playing songs in the car and want to skip tracks, etc. without taking my eyes off the road). The tactile feedback is necessary there and not provided by the touch screen.
For my purposes (mainly listening to music in my car on long trips and during my daily commute), the higher the capacity, the better. That being said, I won't be moving on the new iPod Classic as it suffers from what I considered the one drawback of all the previous flagship iPods, the moving parts of the harddrive.
What I was really hoping for with this release was some large capacity solid state memory iPod with a click wheel. I didn't get that, and so will probably not move on a new Apple device this time around.
Now, my listening habits are personally kind of all over the place, but most of the time I like to put my iPod on shuffle and skip around through my songs randomly. Given that, a huge capacity isn't really necessary; even if I listen to only half of the songs that can be stored on an 8 gig device, I'll still have about 100 hours of music. Given the battery life on these things, I would never go that long before plugging it into my computer where I'd have the opportunity to swap songs around.
All that being said, with the recent price drop on the iPhone (and the fact that I already have AT&T as a carrier), the iPhone is kind of the best buy option here. Especially since it offers the prospect of consolidating my two most frequently used handheld devices. The one draw back: it's not compatible with any FM transmitters yet, rendering it useless in my car!
Hey, man. Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms!
YOU HAVE A BENDER?!?! Do you give hime beer and cigars?!?!
Especially considering that a few weeks ago there was an article here on /. talking about Microsoft making a go at the graphics tool market (putting it in competition with the Adobe CS products). I wonder if this is like an "F.U." from Adobe. A corporate pissing contest of sorts?
"Both the man and the computer presumably do massive amounts of "brute force" computation on their very different architectures"
/.ers and highly specialized super computers alike) spend their free time doing massive amounts of brute force to their architectures... But I'm not going to make it... :)
There's a joke somewhere in there about how essentially all nerds (chess players,
Ionic wind engines not only keep the chips cool, but they promise to leave them smelling fresh and clean. I learned all about this technology on a late-night infomercial :)