E-Rater (a product with which I have some familiarity) is specifically sold to improve form and grammer, and the product explicitly states that it does not grade content.
So, what you are saying is that the students will figure out how to write with excellent grammar and form, in order to get good grades.
Well, yeah.
That's the whole point. That, and the fact that you can have a student write a short essay in 30 minutes, and give them immediate feedback on what they have done wrong, as far as sentence form and grammar are concerned.
Generally, a student may know what they want to say, and have difficulty putting it into English prose in a way that might convince the reader that they have a clue about that of which they speak.
Don't think it matters? What kind of result do you think Mr. Churchill might have received if he had stated, "Them Nazis is bad, we gots to beat em."
Mr. Perelman spent a month of effort carefully crafting an essay that said nothing, eloquently. If our students can do that, more power to them.
Permitting terrorism and hatred are awful things. They lead, directly or not, to real dangers to society and to humanity at large.
However, consider the danger posed by a government given the power to say, "There are things you must not know." Not official secrets, which have some justification, but thoughts of people who think our governmental system is unfair - which is what Islamist thought is all about. How about thoughts about which God is the "right" God? Thoughts about what constitutes Evil or Good?
Governments have been in the business of thought control ever since Socrates, and probably a long time before that.
Whatever danger access to terrorist web sites constitutes to society, giving a government the ability to decide which thoughts you should think and which thoughts are criminal acts is a far greater hazard to humanity than any nut case with a bomb can ever be.
So, isn't this going to be a whole lot like the US pulling out of the LHC project, when they thought that by doing so, it would torpedo the whole project?
And as for "Leaving ESA with no rockets" -- whose rockets are going to space station? In fact, whose technology was vital to the space station, what country flew the first piece of the US "origami" space station? It wasn't the US. NASA is great at viewgraphs and theme parks, but as far as science goes, they're rapidly falling behind.
Going back to the moon is not small potatoes, by any measure.
The pessimistic case, it's done by Government, will cost a fortune and get us what, a publicity stunt? Worse, NASA will take it seriously, develop extensive plans for what we really ought to do, and then as soon as the publicity wears off, cancel everything at even more cost. 1972, deja vu.
In the what-should-be-done vein, we (humans) need to go to the moon, plant a base, and then develop that base into an industrial economy in its own right. This means that we will need to find resources on the moon, develop them, and aim for a self-sustaining colony.
No politician will ever support this, because the time frame of such a project is fifty years, or a hundred years. Where's the electability in that? What political force in the US could ever conceive of something that didn't pay off in the current election cycle? What money manager would invest hard cash in a project that was two hundred quarters out? Nobody I know.
China, maybe. They are not (yet) governed by short sighted kapitalists (sic) or even more short sighted politicians.
I would think that the fastest (timeline) to having a large presence in orbit around the moon would be to boost ISS to lunar orbit, or possibly (stability?) a figure-8 orbit around earth and moon. That gives us a large, stable presence, in a relatively short time frame. ISS is nice, but it's not really doing anything super useful in LEO.
One of the reasons that the US doesn't have the supercollider and CERN does is that they reused all their old equipment. We had similar equipage, the Tevatron, but no, SSC had to be all brand new, and ended up being so great it was never built.
We have a large, manned habitat, already in orbit. Use it.
Over 30 years of hiring programming staff, what I have found is the converse of your proposition.
People who are not good at solving brain teasers are poor at being good programmers. If they are good at solving brain teasers, that really doesn't say anything about whether or not they will be effective as programmers.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't add a few words about "being effective." It's not ability to produce code that counts, it's ability to produce code that can be maintained later by other, less effective programmers. A good solid foundation is absolutely necessary, as is sufficient commentary so that someone who is stone cold on the code can dig into it and fix things, or change parameters. The long term cost of code is not creation of code, it is maintenance of code.
Looking at code is an important hiring criterion, but it is also something that is simply and totally out of the ability of an HR person to achieve. Perhaps the idea of using brain teasers is simply because it is a screening process that can be carried out by HR.
So, out of eight hundred kilos of moon rocks, some beancounter at NASA is having apoplexy about a half-kilo of rocks not having proper paperwork to document where they have gone?
He's right. These samples are unique. As long as the bureaucrats rule, NASA doesn't have a chance in Hell of going back and collecting another 800 kilos of rocks. This guy knows that these samples are irreplacible becasue he knows that NASA will never be able to do what they did back when engineers called most of the shots.
Let him rant. Just like rare earth metals, in a few years we will be able to buy all the moon rocks we want, from the Chinese.
"... A solar-powered, visually unobtrusive, encrypted cell network sounds like something I'd like to sign up for..."
If someone built such a network stateside, it would take two months tops for someone to start screaming that it was there in order to distribute child pornography. You'd be totally villified over the next few months, so that by the time your trial came up, "they" might just as well take you out and shoot you.
Get together a list of people who are willing to take action. Get board member and managment phone numbers.
Start calling them, 24/7. No person call more than once a day. Coordinate times, so that they receive calls every ten minutes, 24 hours a day. It is important that no one person call more than once per day. If you have 140 people, you can call every ten minutes for an entire day with no duplicates. If the phone answers, provide a polite, succinct message such as, "Please stop sending me email". It is important that no one be abusive or hostile.
Sorry, there is no way to reduce the amount of energy it takes to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.
This magic catalyst makes it go faster, but there is an absolute, defined energy required, and it would take an Act of God to modify this.
If you want hydrogen fuel, great, but you have to put in as much energy as you get out later. Some forms of energy are more convenient than others, for instance "sunlight in desert" is less useful than, say a couple gallons of gasoline. Catalysts let you shuffle them around faster, but they do not let you set aside the laws of thermodynamics.
Does no one understand the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?
No system can be observed, or modeled, without affecting the system itself. In short, knowledge of the model invalidates the model.
Consider stock trading strategies. Presume that there exists an optimum strategy. A trader implements this strategy and is successful. Other traders, desiring to be successful, attempt to discern and emulate this strategy. When enough traders start to adopt the model, the model fails. In mathematical terms, there are high order terms that become increasingly significant as time goes on, until the model breaks down and becomes chaotic.
This effect is seen daily, in weather forecasting. At the end of last century, megabucks were thrown at weather modeling, trying to develop the ability to have long term, specific forecasts. These efforts failed in their original form, but resulted in a deeper understanding of complex systems and in well developed chaos theory. The end result is the knowledge that we can forecast weather pretty well tomorrow, not so well three days from now, and only in the most vague general way for next week. No model can work long term.
When economists, and budget offices, and (omg) poiliticians start talking about "over ten years" one has to laugh. The economy can't be forecast next month, and trying to extrapolate a trend over ten years is complete and utter handwaving.
Put it in sunlight and it gives off hydrogen and oxygen, in stoichiometric ratio, from the two sides.
So, if you take this thing and put it in a two-gallon zip bag with a cup of water, in a short time, you have a bomb.
Hydrogen-Oxygen explosions are no joke. This invention sounds like a way for someone to get hurt, by accident. Presumably one would like to have the fuel and oxidizer come off in disjoint, non-connected spaces.
Disclaimer: Note that any descriptions of hypothetical events are metaphorical in nature, and do not intend to portend, suggest, incite, or reflect any overt act, present or future, whatsoever.
The fact that backscatter scanners use X-rays in amounts that can't meet national standards isn't even an issue.
In point of fact, as long as nobody can prove that they have had a large radiation dose - tough with "nothing in pockets, etc" - then the TSA is off the hook. Time has taught us - those who listen - that politicians don't mind endangering or even killing people, as long as it can't be traced directly back to them, and as long as it doesn't actually apply to them, themselves.
Well, how about the completely idiotic idea of clamping some ion thrusters on the thing and moving it to lunar orbit. Mothball it, park it in orbit around the moon, then you have a place to go if you just happen to be in the vicinity of the moon.
It certainly won't generate a lot of space junk that would worry anyone.
At the risk of Piling On, let me point out that NASA spent nearly two billion dollars on developing plans for their Great Space Station. After years and years of practice, they had produced many viewgraphs and powerpoint presentations. And who flew the first piece of the space station? The Russians, of course. Whose spacecraft ferry crew to and from the space station? The Russians, of course. Who launches resupply missions to the space station? The Russians, of course.
And as for wasting nine billion dollars, what did we get for nine billion dollars? Some nice animations about what a great thing the Constellation program ought to be. We have a booster launch that wasn't even a new booster, it was the same old Solid Rocket Booster that blew up the Challanger, with a dummy fifth segment. And the spacecraft? What a spacecraft. A recycled Apollo capsule.
The NASA we have now is a ghost of what it was. The good engineers have left (and gone to SpaceX, among many others) and what we are left with are slackers and bureaucrats, and a labor force that wants to keep doing whatever they are doing. Should they learn something new? Oh, heck no. Let's just try to go back to the glory days of Apollo, and relabel it "Constellation".
There is absolutely no riskier plan on or off Earth, than not taking any risks.
Slashdot Mirror
Hahaha...
Oh, Buahahahahaha... hahaha...
Hahaha.... (hic) hahahaha...
stop, pleast stop (hic) hahahaha.....
Well, yes.
E-Rater (a product with which I have some familiarity) is specifically sold to improve form and grammer, and the product explicitly states that it does not grade content.
So, what you are saying is that the students will figure out how to write with excellent grammar and form, in order to get good grades.
Well, yeah.
That's the whole point. That, and the fact that you can have a student write a short essay in 30 minutes, and give them immediate feedback on what they have done wrong, as far as sentence form and grammar are concerned.
Generally, a student may know what they want to say, and have difficulty putting it into English prose in a way that might convince the reader that they have a clue about that of which they speak.
Don't think it matters? What kind of result do you think Mr. Churchill might have received if he had stated, "Them Nazis is bad, we gots to beat em."
Mr. Perelman spent a month of effort carefully crafting an essay that said nothing, eloquently. If our students can do that, more power to them.
*YAWN*
Another 3-D-ified movie. Another way to get eyeballs that want to fall out on the pavement and a stiff neck.
Remember Star-Trek the Movie? All sorts of special effects, because the film creators had no clue what an audience might want.
They just don't learn.
Permitting terrorism and hatred are awful things. They lead, directly or not, to real dangers to society and to humanity at large.
However, consider the danger posed by a government given the power to say, "There are things you must not know." Not official secrets, which have some justification, but thoughts of people who think our governmental system is unfair - which is what Islamist thought is all about. How about thoughts about which God is the "right" God? Thoughts about what constitutes Evil or Good?
Governments have been in the business of thought control ever since Socrates, and probably a long time before that.
Whatever danger access to terrorist web sites constitutes to society, giving a government the ability to decide which thoughts you should think and which thoughts are criminal acts is a far greater hazard to humanity than any nut case with a bomb can ever be.
Yet.
So, isn't this going to be a whole lot like the US pulling out of the LHC project, when they thought that by doing so, it would torpedo the whole project?
And as for "Leaving ESA with no rockets" -- whose rockets are going to space station? In fact, whose technology was vital to the space station, what country flew the first piece of the US "origami" space station? It wasn't the US. NASA is great at viewgraphs and theme parks, but as far as science goes, they're rapidly falling behind.
Going back to the moon is not small potatoes, by any measure.
The pessimistic case, it's done by Government, will cost a fortune and get us what, a publicity stunt? Worse, NASA will take it seriously, develop extensive plans for what we really ought to do, and then as soon as the publicity wears off, cancel everything at even more cost. 1972, deja vu.
In the what-should-be-done vein, we (humans) need to go to the moon, plant a base, and then develop that base into an industrial economy in its own right. This means that we will need to find resources on the moon, develop them, and aim for a self-sustaining colony.
No politician will ever support this, because the time frame of such a project is fifty years, or a hundred years. Where's the electability in that? What political force in the US could ever conceive of something that didn't pay off in the current election cycle? What money manager would invest hard cash in a project that was two hundred quarters out? Nobody I know.
China, maybe. They are not (yet) governed by short sighted kapitalists (sic) or even more short sighted politicians.
I would think that the fastest (timeline) to having a large presence in orbit around the moon would be to boost ISS to lunar orbit, or possibly (stability?) a figure-8 orbit around earth and moon. That gives us a large, stable presence, in a relatively short time frame. ISS is nice, but it's not really doing anything super useful in LEO.
One of the reasons that the US doesn't have the supercollider and CERN does is that they reused all their old equipment. We had similar equipage, the Tevatron, but no, SSC had to be all brand new, and ended up being so great it was never built.
We have a large, manned habitat, already in orbit. Use it.
Over 30 years of hiring programming staff, what I have found is the converse of your proposition.
People who are not good at solving brain teasers are poor at being good programmers. If they are good at solving brain teasers, that really doesn't say anything about whether or not they will be effective as programmers.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't add a few words about "being effective." It's not ability to produce code that counts, it's ability to produce code that can be maintained later by other, less effective programmers. A good solid foundation is absolutely necessary, as is sufficient commentary so that someone who is stone cold on the code can dig into it and fix things, or change parameters. The long term cost of code is not creation of code, it is maintenance of code.
Looking at code is an important hiring criterion, but it is also something that is simply and totally out of the ability of an HR person to achieve. Perhaps the idea of using brain teasers is simply because it is a screening process that can be carried out by HR.
The resistance of interconnects grows polynomially, not exponentially, as they decrease in size.
It's an important difference. As sizes get small enough, we start to see stochastic effects, but we're not there yet.
So, out of eight hundred kilos of moon rocks, some beancounter at NASA is having apoplexy about a half-kilo of rocks not having proper paperwork to document where they have gone?
He's right. These samples are unique. As long as the bureaucrats rule, NASA doesn't have a chance in Hell of going back and collecting another 800 kilos of rocks. This guy knows that these samples are irreplacible becasue he knows that NASA will never be able to do what they did back when engineers called most of the shots.
Let him rant. Just like rare earth metals, in a few years we will be able to buy all the moon rocks we want, from the Chinese.
"... A solar-powered, visually unobtrusive, encrypted cell network sounds like something I'd like to sign up for..."
If someone built such a network stateside, it would take two months tops for someone to start screaming that it was there in order to distribute child pornography. You'd be totally villified over the next few months, so that by the time your trial came up, "they" might just as well take you out and shoot you.
Silly.
Need to buy an iPad and hand-write notes. That way, any lack of typing skills won't cause you any problems.
Get together a list of people who are willing to take action. Get board member and managment phone numbers.
Start calling them, 24/7. No person call more than once a day. Coordinate times, so that they receive calls every ten minutes, 24 hours a day. It is important that no one person call more than once per day. If you have 140 people, you can call every ten minutes for an entire day with no duplicates. If the phone answers, provide a polite, succinct message such as, "Please stop sending me email". It is important that no one be abusive or hostile.
Just keep calling. Every ten minutes.
Sorry, there is no way to reduce the amount of energy it takes to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.
This magic catalyst makes it go faster, but there is an absolute, defined energy required, and it would take an Act of God to modify this.
If you want hydrogen fuel, great, but you have to put in as much energy as you get out later. Some forms of energy are more convenient than others, for instance "sunlight in desert" is less useful than, say a couple gallons of gasoline. Catalysts let you shuffle them around faster, but they do not let you set aside the laws of thermodynamics.
Does no one understand the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?
No system can be observed, or modeled, without affecting the system itself. In short, knowledge of the model invalidates the model.
Consider stock trading strategies. Presume that there exists an optimum strategy. A trader implements this strategy and is successful. Other traders, desiring to be successful, attempt to discern and emulate this strategy. When enough traders start to adopt the model, the model fails. In mathematical terms, there are high order terms that become increasingly significant as time goes on, until the model breaks down and becomes chaotic.
This effect is seen daily, in weather forecasting. At the end of last century, megabucks were thrown at weather modeling, trying to develop the ability to have long term, specific forecasts. These efforts failed in their original form, but resulted in a deeper understanding of complex systems and in well developed chaos theory. The end result is the knowledge that we can forecast weather pretty well tomorrow, not so well three days from now, and only in the most vague general way for next week. No model can work long term.
When economists, and budget offices, and (omg) poiliticians start talking about "over ten years" one has to laugh. The economy can't be forecast next month, and trying to extrapolate a trend over ten years is complete and utter handwaving.
Put them around 5 gallons of dry cleaning solvent, and make a Cerenkov neutrino detector.
Put it in sunlight and it gives off hydrogen and oxygen, in stoichiometric ratio, from the two sides.
So, if you take this thing and put it in a two-gallon zip bag with a cup of water, in a short time, you have a bomb.
Hydrogen-Oxygen explosions are no joke. This invention sounds like a way for someone to get hurt, by accident. Presumably one would like to have the fuel and oxidizer come off in disjoint, non-connected spaces.
Disclaimer: Note that any descriptions of hypothetical events are metaphorical in nature, and do not intend to portend, suggest, incite, or reflect any overt act, present or future, whatsoever.
The fact that backscatter scanners use X-rays in amounts that can't meet national standards isn't even an issue.
In point of fact, as long as nobody can prove that they have had a large radiation dose - tough with "nothing in pockets, etc" - then the TSA is off the hook. Time has taught us - those who listen - that politicians don't mind endangering or even killing people, as long as it can't be traced directly back to them, and as long as it doesn't actually apply to them, themselves.
Yah, and how did that work out?
Does anyone other than RMS actually care about EMACS? Sounds snide, but it's a serious question. How many people are using emacs these days?
Well, how about the completely idiotic idea of clamping some ion thrusters on the thing and moving it to lunar orbit. Mothball it, park it in orbit around the moon, then you have a place to go if you just happen to be in the vicinity of the moon.
It certainly won't generate a lot of space junk that would worry anyone.
At the risk of Piling On, let me point out that NASA spent nearly two billion dollars on developing plans for their Great Space Station. After years and years of practice, they had produced many viewgraphs and powerpoint presentations. And who flew the first piece of the space station? The Russians, of course. Whose spacecraft ferry crew to and from the space station? The Russians, of course. Who launches resupply missions to the space station? The Russians, of course.
And as for wasting nine billion dollars, what did we get for nine billion dollars? Some nice animations about what a great thing the Constellation program ought to be. We have a booster launch that wasn't even a new booster, it was the same old Solid Rocket Booster that blew up the Challanger, with a dummy fifth segment. And the spacecraft? What a spacecraft. A recycled Apollo capsule.
The NASA we have now is a ghost of what it was. The good engineers have left (and gone to SpaceX, among many others) and what we are left with are slackers and bureaucrats, and a labor force that wants to keep doing whatever they are doing. Should they learn something new? Oh, heck no. Let's just try to go back to the glory days of Apollo, and relabel it "Constellation".
There is absolutely no riskier plan on or off Earth, than not taking any risks.
Funny you should use the term "just at hand" ...
The thing is about Bing, I don't really feel the need to remember details about porn sites or fabulous marketing "But Wait, There's More!" sites.
And I remember the details of sex, as it relates to me, without any assistance at all.
Maybe next year, when I'm older and more decrepit...
You know, destroy-on-tamper isn't particularly tough. Use a random third-factor key, and after some number of attempts, trash it.
It would be quick, and as unrecoverable as the key itself.