umm... it has been well documented that caffeine is a psychotropic drug, and with prolonged use the chemical nature of the brain changes. when a caffeine tolerant system is not presented with caffeine, withdrawal symptoms occur, i.e. "caffeine headaches." over time, the brain will readjust and not "expect" the caffeine to be present, and withdrawal goes away.
see, this is all KNOWN. read wikipedia on caffeine if you don't believe me (as far as i can tell the article is in line with what i was taught in neurology classes). what was not known until the study referenced in this post is that caffeine tolerant people do not receive any positive effects from caffeine, but rather only homeostasis (i.e. "brought to normal"). it was previously assumed that caffeine consumption would eliminate withdrawal symptoms AND provide simulation. it is the "...AND stimulation" that the study suggests does not happen.
just because what you think sounds smart doesn't mean it has any basis in science...
does anyone remember the onscreen keyboard for palm os that broak everything down into nine buttons? to hit a letter there were two different ways:
you hit one of the nine squares
you moved in a direction to fill in the other nineteen letters
it was much faster than graffiti, and i was able to use it reasonably close to my typing speed (using the software's speed check) with my foldout keyboard.
having a degree in china means that you can be turned down for that many more jobs. a bachelor's degree means that you get a better job in a factory or a mine.
its not email's fault that people using it don't proofread! i often write emails, save the drafts, and return to the email later in the day or even days later, to get a fresh perspective and eradicate superfluous comments and clarify meanings.
am i the only one who thinks we live in a culture that finds a movie that makes 25 million to be unsuccessful? i play traditional irish music, and let me tell you this much, if some people recognize someones name, then you've hit it big. never mind hear that person play. millions of people have heard of the movie, and obviously many people enjoyed it. why isnt that enough?
the best part is that some of the articles are so lame that you just have to rewrite them and make fun of them. whereas some other articles are really funny, with jokes you won't get unless you really understand what the article is supposed to be about (which i dont always).
i think its a good new use of wiki's to challenge the whole wikipedia mindset. many people i talk to think wikipedia invented wiki's. wiki's can be so much more than a wikipedia or an uncyclopedia, but the majority of people right now are so limited with what they believe a wiki can do that we gotta start challenging assumptions anywhere./
i'm sure someone else has said this. but why dont you save yourself the money and not look? i type about (including capitalization, which i'm not doing) 80-120 words per minute, depending on the complexity of the language used and whether or not i care to type quickly. i got this speed through practice. typing. spending one or 2 saturdays typing on typing programs (i learned to type when i was young, before 3rd of 4th grade i believe) every once in a while.
i taught myself dvorak (i used to be at least 40 or 50 wpm) and also analyzed my finger posture and my thought structure (different ways to type faster).
any good typist doesnt look, regardless of the keys. when i used dvorak i didnt look, and couldnt look (cuz the keys had qwerty labels) and didnt want to look. good typing is like anything else, good work. if you dont want to work at it, dont think that a keyboard is going to make your typing better.
psst. chinese does have phonetic elements. cf. qing(3) meaning to invite. blue-speak? i think not. blue is for phonetic reasons.
sorry i could only get a simplified hanzi:
http://www.chinesecorner.org/hanzi/qing3_10_a.gif
actually many people do have air in their skulls, not their brains. and they are just as intelligent as everyone else and most of the time no one ever knows there was air in their head that reduces their brain size because they are normal people. head size != brain size.
10 digits, yes. however, in a passphrase... the idea is not to remember 10 digits, but ten words. its the same data amount. plus, the average person can remember, "little bo peep cut his toe while drinking a wall of tv", even though its nonsense, than, "asdfasdfaxx11221".
and dont most people just use one password for everything anyways?
well, you said nothing about intelligence. but i was just generalizing all the people who care only about presentation and not about context. perhaps i shouldnt have picked on you, but i am getting kind of tired of reading everyone correcting everyone else's grammatical mistakes. plus i just had fun doing it, haha and its not that big of a deal, ^_^.
i think when you dont accept that spelling isnt the standard of intelligence, you should hand in your "human being card" and take up your "l'il dimunitive grouch club" membership card.
when you talk to people in real life, do you correct their grammar? if you dont have anything useful to say, constructive, meaningful, or at least self expressive, then dont say it.
i agree. the only thing i dont like is that it wont let me record a disc on another computer, but o well. i got it to record, not to listen to music. no one gets a minidisc player to listen to music.
well, he would. he chose to write in english rather than in latin. how dare he.
he also made up words constantly... how can you listen to a man on proper useage if he himself made up his own useage?
i had fully planned on leaving a nice system behind so people could read my mail and find all my files. now, i am fully aware that no one would do it, or read any of it, or save any of it, but i'm dead, what would i care? and besides, i'm too lazy. it would never happen. but i can pretend.
when it said html formatted i didnt realizse i had to insert my breaks myself. and i have encountered this before. sorry, it makes me seem stupider than i already am! ^_^
oh, i disagree. memorization should be done by the teacher. by that i mean, the student shouldnt realize they are memorizing new words. because a teacher should subtly introduce new words, and check if the student knows them by using them and asking for input that requires knowing what the word means. then, the teacher has to periodically do it again to make sure they havent forgotten, and to do it right after they HAVE forgotten so they are reminded. it is a very subtle, difficult technique. you need to be able to read people, understand when they absorb a word and when they dont, and have to be able to read what they are thinking. as such, most people cannot do that.
the problem with vocabulary practice is best described by a situation a friend of mine (who has taught french in africa and america for a decade or 2) showed to me. he picked up the pepper shaker, and said, "le poivre". so, i connected the pepper shaker to the word poivre. if he had given me a sheet that said:
the pepper, le poivre
i wouldve connected the word poivre to the word pepper to my idea of pepper. which means you then have an extra connection to the word that will hamper your conversation. if you learn words by memorizing vocab lists, that is all you will be able to do. spout vocab lists. not be able to converse.
yes, you can take the words you learned in vocab lists and transition them to have real life meaning and application on a subconscious level. but that takes a lot of work. that is why most people find language learning so hard, because teachers give them all that work to do and dont even tell them that they have to do it. forcing people to restructure their thoughts for words they had already restructured their thoughts to learn without telling them they had to is a very difficult little mind game. and the thing is teachers dont realize tehy are doing it. the teachers who do speakt he language (i have seen spanish teachers who dont really speak spanish) had to do this themselves. and dont realize they did it.
the way to get around this block caused by your little favorite tool of lists (which is a categorization, a nice concrete absolute you can grab onto instead of dealing with the mushy uncertainties and spontanaity of real life) is for teachers to do more work. be better trained. know how to read what students are thinking, know when they are paying attention, how they are, why they are not understanding something, and what thought they have in their heads instead of the ones they are supposed to have, and ultimately how to coax the right thought into the head of the student without any effort. work is different than effort. a good artist can spend weeks and months on an intricate piece of work with little effort. not because they werent working hard, or challenging themselves, but because they were doing it, flowing it, not forcing it. even if it was expanding their perceptions and limits to do it.
but you are right. we should just do things the easy way, the less efficient way, because its easier on the part of the teacher. because, after all, that is all learning is about. teachers getting money for their jobs, and not working or learning or expanding themselves. just forcing the students to learn wrong and then letting the students who care enough go through a whole mental restructuring concept by concept to get it to the point it shouldve been given to them by the teacher.
it is not easy to restructure your perceptions of something, and that is what computer software for learning forces students to do if they indeed want to have the knowledge at a real life applicable level. it creates a perception of a meaning of a word, that is at least one degree further away from how it needs to be used in real life. it is like telling someone to push a button on the keyboard rather than you pushing it yourself. it is an unnecessary step that takes too long and is much harder than just pressing the button yourself.
like an interpreter. people learn languages (besides for intellectual interest) becaus
i agree with that, completely. teachers are too afraid / dont know any better. techies usually know little about education. and as for lab time, it depends on course structure, its not a bad idea.
thats why i think that in order to reform education, there needs to be work done outside of schools. independent groups, working at learning and teaching eachother, for no credits, no money, no institutions. just learning and growth. i think it could happen and that they could do a lot. would they ever be widespread? i dont know. and who knows if the school system would pay attention, probably not. if something doesnt want to change, i say change without it.
yes, it really would. but have you seen the software?
my point is that there are other more important educational needs besides computers. i'm not trashing computers, i just dont think they can fix everything.
and you are exactly right. we spend all this time making faster, fancier computers that can do so many things, so much faster. but little work has been done to make them work better with people. like what doug engelbart says. the real power of computers is their ability to network people together. but where is this networking? we network our computers, not ourselves.
there are no permanent logs of internet sites (which is completely possible, not only does the technology exist to do it but the system had been conceived for longer than the internet has been around), we cannot work real time on projects together. we just sit sit around in forums and email eachother.
we should at least be able ot by now have a network of people, all sitting together over, looking at the same document, as one person works on it, and then they can comment with them and all decide what to change as it is happening, while the one person in charge mediates all the suggestions and enacts them. or something like that. instead, we all work at our own little computers, hunched over, type up stuff, and send it to eachother when we are done. you can get a lot more collaboration when you work together on documents, rather than passing it back and forth. and perhaps it wouldnt work for all types of docuemnts (productivity wise) but we should be given the option.
Slashdot Mirror
i never trusted google.
umm... it has been well documented that caffeine is a psychotropic drug, and with prolonged use the chemical nature of the brain changes. when a caffeine tolerant system is not presented with caffeine, withdrawal symptoms occur, i.e. "caffeine headaches." over time, the brain will readjust and not "expect" the caffeine to be present, and withdrawal goes away. see, this is all KNOWN. read wikipedia on caffeine if you don't believe me (as far as i can tell the article is in line with what i was taught in neurology classes). what was not known until the study referenced in this post is that caffeine tolerant people do not receive any positive effects from caffeine, but rather only homeostasis (i.e. "brought to normal"). it was previously assumed that caffeine consumption would eliminate withdrawal symptoms AND provide simulation. it is the "...AND stimulation" that the study suggests does not happen. just because what you think sounds smart doesn't mean it has any basis in science...
does anyone remember the onscreen keyboard for palm os that broak everything down into nine buttons? to hit a letter there were two different ways: you hit one of the nine squares you moved in a direction to fill in the other nineteen letters it was much faster than graffiti, and i was able to use it reasonably close to my typing speed (using the software's speed check) with my foldout keyboard.
since when were kanji logical? i love my chinese characters, but i love them because they're obscenely difficult.
having a degree in china means that you can be turned down for that many more jobs. a bachelor's degree means that you get a better job in a factory or a mine.
its not email's fault that people using it don't proofread! i often write emails, save the drafts, and return to the email later in the day or even days later, to get a fresh perspective and eradicate superfluous comments and clarify meanings.
am i the only one who thinks we live in a culture that finds a movie that makes 25 million to be unsuccessful? i play traditional irish music, and let me tell you this much, if some people recognize someones name, then you've hit it big. never mind hear that person play. millions of people have heard of the movie, and obviously many people enjoyed it. why isnt that enough?
the best part is that some of the articles are so lame that you just have to rewrite them and make fun of them. whereas some other articles are really funny, with jokes you won't get unless you really understand what the article is supposed to be about (which i dont always). i think its a good new use of wiki's to challenge the whole wikipedia mindset. many people i talk to think wikipedia invented wiki's. wiki's can be so much more than a wikipedia or an uncyclopedia, but the majority of people right now are so limited with what they believe a wiki can do that we gotta start challenging assumptions anywhere./
i'm sure someone else has said this. but why dont you save yourself the money and not look? i type about (including capitalization, which i'm not doing) 80-120 words per minute, depending on the complexity of the language used and whether or not i care to type quickly. i got this speed through practice. typing. spending one or 2 saturdays typing on typing programs (i learned to type when i was young, before 3rd of 4th grade i believe) every once in a while.
i taught myself dvorak (i used to be at least 40 or 50 wpm) and also analyzed my finger posture and my thought structure (different ways to type faster).
any good typist doesnt look, regardless of the keys. when i used dvorak i didnt look, and couldnt look (cuz the keys had qwerty labels) and didnt want to look. good typing is like anything else, good work. if you dont want to work at it, dont think that a keyboard is going to make your typing better.
psst. chinese does have phonetic elements. cf. qing(3) meaning to invite. blue-speak? i think not. blue is for phonetic reasons. sorry i could only get a simplified hanzi: http://www.chinesecorner.org/hanzi/qing3_10_a.gif
actually many people do have air in their skulls, not their brains. and they are just as intelligent as everyone else and most of the time no one ever knows there was air in their head that reduces their brain size because they are normal people. head size != brain size.
10 digits, yes. however, in a passphrase... the idea is not to remember 10 digits, but ten words. its the same data amount. plus, the average person can remember, "little bo peep cut his toe while drinking a wall of tv", even though its nonsense, than, "asdfasdfaxx11221".
and dont most people just use one password for everything anyways?
jef raskin started the project, and steve fired him.
well, you said nothing about intelligence. but i was just generalizing all the people who care only about presentation and not about context. perhaps i shouldnt have picked on you, but i am getting kind of tired of reading everyone correcting everyone else's grammatical mistakes. plus i just had fun doing it, haha and its not that big of a deal, ^_^.
i think when you dont accept that spelling isnt the standard of intelligence, you should hand in your "human being card" and take up your "l'il dimunitive grouch club" membership card. when you talk to people in real life, do you correct their grammar? if you dont have anything useful to say, constructive, meaningful, or at least self expressive, then dont say it.
i agree. the only thing i dont like is that it wont let me record a disc on another computer, but o well. i got it to record, not to listen to music. no one gets a minidisc player to listen to music.
Shouldn't that be long haired yippies in jeans and black turtlenecks?
well, he would. he chose to write in english rather than in latin. how dare he. he also made up words constantly... how can you listen to a man on proper useage if he himself made up his own useage?
wellifyouwanttobetechnicaltheromansdidnthavetwoset sofletterslikewedoandtheydidnthavepunctuationorspa cingsowhydontyoujustletlanguageevolvebecauseifyouw anttobereactionarythanwhytheheckareyounotwritingin allmajusculeorminisculelettersohthatsrightbecausel anguageuseagechangesovertimewhoknew
i was waiting for someone to mention the altair... seems rather silly that no one had yet.
i had fully planned on leaving a nice system behind so people could read my mail and find all my files. now, i am fully aware that no one would do it, or read any of it, or save any of it, but i'm dead, what would i care? and besides, i'm too lazy. it would never happen. but i can pretend.
when it said html formatted i didnt realizse i had to insert my breaks myself. and i have encountered this before. sorry, it makes me seem stupider than i already am! ^_^
oh, i disagree. memorization should be done by the teacher. by that i mean, the student shouldnt realize they are memorizing new words. because a teacher should subtly introduce new words, and check if the student knows them by using them and asking for input that requires knowing what the word means. then, the teacher has to periodically do it again to make sure they havent forgotten, and to do it right after they HAVE forgotten so they are reminded. it is a very subtle, difficult technique. you need to be able to read people, understand when they absorb a word and when they dont, and have to be able to read what they are thinking. as such, most people cannot do that. the problem with vocabulary practice is best described by a situation a friend of mine (who has taught french in africa and america for a decade or 2) showed to me. he picked up the pepper shaker, and said, "le poivre". so, i connected the pepper shaker to the word poivre. if he had given me a sheet that said: the pepper, le poivre i wouldve connected the word poivre to the word pepper to my idea of pepper. which means you then have an extra connection to the word that will hamper your conversation. if you learn words by memorizing vocab lists, that is all you will be able to do. spout vocab lists. not be able to converse. yes, you can take the words you learned in vocab lists and transition them to have real life meaning and application on a subconscious level. but that takes a lot of work. that is why most people find language learning so hard, because teachers give them all that work to do and dont even tell them that they have to do it. forcing people to restructure their thoughts for words they had already restructured their thoughts to learn without telling them they had to is a very difficult little mind game. and the thing is teachers dont realize tehy are doing it. the teachers who do speakt he language (i have seen spanish teachers who dont really speak spanish) had to do this themselves. and dont realize they did it. the way to get around this block caused by your little favorite tool of lists (which is a categorization, a nice concrete absolute you can grab onto instead of dealing with the mushy uncertainties and spontanaity of real life) is for teachers to do more work. be better trained. know how to read what students are thinking, know when they are paying attention, how they are, why they are not understanding something, and what thought they have in their heads instead of the ones they are supposed to have, and ultimately how to coax the right thought into the head of the student without any effort. work is different than effort. a good artist can spend weeks and months on an intricate piece of work with little effort. not because they werent working hard, or challenging themselves, but because they were doing it, flowing it, not forcing it. even if it was expanding their perceptions and limits to do it. but you are right. we should just do things the easy way, the less efficient way, because its easier on the part of the teacher. because, after all, that is all learning is about. teachers getting money for their jobs, and not working or learning or expanding themselves. just forcing the students to learn wrong and then letting the students who care enough go through a whole mental restructuring concept by concept to get it to the point it shouldve been given to them by the teacher. it is not easy to restructure your perceptions of something, and that is what computer software for learning forces students to do if they indeed want to have the knowledge at a real life applicable level. it creates a perception of a meaning of a word, that is at least one degree further away from how it needs to be used in real life. it is like telling someone to push a button on the keyboard rather than you pushing it yourself. it is an unnecessary step that takes too long and is much harder than just pressing the button yourself. like an interpreter. people learn languages (besides for intellectual interest) becaus
i agree with that, completely. teachers are too afraid / dont know any better. techies usually know little about education. and as for lab time, it depends on course structure, its not a bad idea. thats why i think that in order to reform education, there needs to be work done outside of schools. independent groups, working at learning and teaching eachother, for no credits, no money, no institutions. just learning and growth. i think it could happen and that they could do a lot. would they ever be widespread? i dont know. and who knows if the school system would pay attention, probably not. if something doesnt want to change, i say change without it.
yes, it really would. but have you seen the software? my point is that there are other more important educational needs besides computers. i'm not trashing computers, i just dont think they can fix everything. and you are exactly right. we spend all this time making faster, fancier computers that can do so many things, so much faster. but little work has been done to make them work better with people. like what doug engelbart says. the real power of computers is their ability to network people together. but where is this networking? we network our computers, not ourselves. there are no permanent logs of internet sites (which is completely possible, not only does the technology exist to do it but the system had been conceived for longer than the internet has been around), we cannot work real time on projects together. we just sit sit around in forums and email eachother. we should at least be able ot by now have a network of people, all sitting together over, looking at the same document, as one person works on it, and then they can comment with them and all decide what to change as it is happening, while the one person in charge mediates all the suggestions and enacts them. or something like that. instead, we all work at our own little computers, hunched over, type up stuff, and send it to eachother when we are done. you can get a lot more collaboration when you work together on documents, rather than passing it back and forth. and perhaps it wouldnt work for all types of docuemnts (productivity wise) but we should be given the option.