Ooh, sorry, another note. There is actually such a thing as infertility because ovulation happens before the `impure' period ends. There are couples who are seriously unable to concieve because of this. Currently, religious authorities advise you to get medical assistance with this, but it certainly couldn't help to have children before modern medicine became involved (which, of course, is something you are commanded to do -- at least one boy and at least one girl).
>That came from a lack of understanding of science at the time. Hemmoraging was a sign of potentially contageous illness.
Interesting. However, you do not become ritually impure if the blood can be attributed to non-uterine or wound causes, from what I read. You do not become impure if your nose bleeds, for example. A woman is also ritually impure from menarche until just before she gets married. If she's contagous, she can pass it to other women, just not men.
There are certainly purity laws that make sense from a hygene point of view. However, these ones are somewhat difficult to justify.
>Sex laws served two purposes. They held the family units together and guaranteed growth of the nation (more offspring than parents) as well as preserving the purity of the group.
Have you looked at the family purity laws? What is so terrible about touching your wife while she's in labour? What's so terrible about touching her only 6 days after she's had a midcyle spot? Even if she's having her period, I think that passing the salt is probably not so bad.
>The people that were most vehemently opposed to slavery at the time were the right-wing conservative fundamentalist Christians. You know, the type that go around preaching "Repent or go to hell!"
>His meaning is perfectly intelligible, but some language snobs (very few of whom are actually linguists and know anything much about language) pretend not to be able to understand certain accent/dialects in order to feel superior.
Incomprehension often has very little to do with that. A friend of mine moved to MA from NC at the same time as I moved from CA. She could not understand most people there, most people there could not understand her. I could, on the other hand, understand both of them. I've been at at least one conference in which two non-native speakers of English could not understand each other at all, and required a native speaker to translate.
There are simply certain grammatical patterns that I don't understand well, if at all. It has nothing to do with snobbery; I simply can't understand, most likely because I haven't been exposed to it all that much.
When using media of international exchange, I would certainly try to make myself comprehensible. I spend quite a lot of time trying to do this in my research papers and communication. Writing in unambigious, grammatically correct English (or something approaching it) is the first step towards sharing ideas with a wide audience. People limit their communication and opportunities by the language they use.
>Wow, you're lucky. Most of the Ph.D. students I know don't really enjoy their jobs that much.
I've been told that a good way to decide whether to go for your PhD is to look at the following question: do you love working in subject X so much that you can't imagine yourself doing anything else? If you can honestly answer "yes" to that question, you're much, much less likely to drop out, and you're much less likely to be as tortured during the process. I won't deny it's hard, and stressful, and sometimes painful, but... I can't imagine myself doing anything else.
> In addition, in order to be an econ major, you often have to take advanced math courses (for me it was Calc 3 so that I could take Econometrics).
If you think that's an advanced math course, I have a whole world of excitement for you. Seriously, there's wonderful stuff out there that you haven't even gotten near.
I've observed that math is a really great thing to study if you want a lot of options. With a small amount of training, you can do almost anything, because you have the critical thinking skills and the rigorous framework to understand it. I'm not saying that a math major could apply to a PhD in economics and necessarily get in without any additional training, but that it wouldn't be hard to get that training. The PhD program might even be more than interested in accepting someone who they had to train. Going the other direction would be considerably more difficult.
Another interesting example is in finance. Financial companies hire physicists and mathematicians like crazy when they can get their hands on them (I've heard they also like theoretical computer sciences). Basically, they want people with advanced mathematical training, who they can direct at the problems of finance. From what I've seen, hiring the other direction would be very, very difficult.
Math is mind-broadening. There are so many different structures and models to apply to problems in other fields. I've seen quite a few people be very sucessful simply by understanding more math than `needed' by their field, and applying it.
>I would rather not work at all. And most people feel the same way, if they would just admit it.
I would rather work. I simply love what I do. I'm sure I could get away without working for the rest of my life, but I'd go up the wall within a few days. Ask most PhD students, they'll probably say the same. (Given how we're paid, we'd better love what we're doing!)
I think it's more of a difference in how you approach it. Today, in fact, I'm going to write part of a paper. It's not particularly fun, but by doing so, I get to do the fun part: I get to talk to people and say "look at this incredibly cool thing I did". I also get to do the incredibly cool things, and tease apart the Gordian knots that keep people from communicating in useful ways.
I believe the ACs point was that the EULA isn't giving you any consideration. You bought the software (looks like a sale, smells like a sale, at least). You made a deal where you give money for software. How does running that software constitute additional consideration?
To attempt to answer my own question, I seem to remember a very, very, very stupid judgement a while ago in which it was ruled that since the computer copies the software to cache, it violated copyright law unless you were specifically given permission to run it. Frankly, this seems rather moronic to me: if they are selling you software, it's clearly for the purpose of running it. It's implied that it's fit for the purpose.
In the case of ongoing services, you are giving money and accepting a "reasonable" TOS in exchange for the service. That makes perfect sense to me. Shrink-wrap software is a whole different kettle of worms.
>People WILL save if they know the government isn't going to bail them out.
There's a very simple test for this. What happened before we had the program in place? We can look up the answer, but just to be very simple, I'll point out that it was sufficiently bad that it inspired people to come up with a scheme in the first place, and that scheme was/staggeringly/ popular.
I'd say that's probably a reasonably good indication that people may not do so well without SS, or some elder-care program like it.
>If you can ask about being a primary caregiver, you can make intellegent descisions, rather than just guessing on sex and age like employers do now.
I'm pretty sure that this is also illegal. I'm not saying it makes it go away, I'm sure that it doesn't. However, you're not supposed to be making decisions based on that.
I'm quite non-visual in the way I approach mathematics, generally, but I've done quite well in studying calculus, linear algebra, and other branchs of mathematics.
I'm not sure it's really necessary. Math is, however, often explained in those terms, which would give an advantage to spacial thinkers. Different teaching techniques are more helpful to different people, as people think differently.
>No-one disourages anyone from doing the sciences.
You're either a man or a very lucky woman. I'm a PhD student in computer science. I do cryptography, which is a rather logical, math-based discipline.
I have been discouraged from "doing the sciences" more times than I can comfortably count. I have been told "little lady, you can't possibly have any idea what you're talking about. where is your husband?" at a research conference. It didn't stop me, but you'll probably admit that with enough such exposures, it might just stop a pretty high proportion of people.
Hey, I'm good at what I do. What good could it possibly do to perpetuate this sort of crap, when it makes smart people avoid diciplines in which they are capable and qualified?
>This is something I strongly disagree with. An example from work: >We can't have a meeting at 2. I have to get my kid from school.
You're talking about people who have been working 80 hours a week for years. These are, by and large, not people with young kids. These are the people who have had to move any possible family plans out into the future when they're past being junior faculty. My guess is that these are not the sort of people at your work.
> I would contend both of us would be professionally obligated to take B.
In the U.S., asking about family planning during a job interview is illegal for exactly that reason.
>I have never met a man who is concerned about being able to track all the traffic.
I know of at least one famous one (David Sedaris), and I have at least two friends who do not have driver's licences for exactly that reason.
Personally, despite some problems with my vision, I've never managed to hit anything. I recently was in my first accident: my car was parked, and a man from up the street ran into it. (I was not in the car at the time.)
>My problem with ultra-feminists isn't that they want equal rights for women - but that they neglect their own feminity and innate motherhood to achieve it.
I am good with math. I am good with children. There is no conflict between these two statements. Excelling in my research does not make me less feminine; my ovaries are right where they've always been.
>Sure, women could need more "training" to develop their math skills, but really... what's the big deal?
There is a school of thinking that says that failure of the student is also a failure of the teacher. What is wrong with learning what methods of teaching work and don't work on people of different mindsets. Personally, I'm very non-visual in how I think about mathematical topics, so the "look at the pretty picture" signal processing textbook I had was opaque to me. It certainly didn't mean I had an inability to learn the material (as I had already learned much of it in honors physics), it just spoke to my difficulty with the teaching technique. Failing to improve our teaching techniques to reach out to every student who is willing and capable of learning is simply a waste and a failure.
I can drag-and-drop pdf equations into Keynote already, which I don't find at all inconvenient. However, they stay in place as the text moves about, which is a real problem, especially since the text will move right over them.
If I need to say that the ciphertext \lambda_i is sent to all players, I want the sentence to stay intact as I continue to edit the slide, and not spend a large fraction of my work hours moving equations about.
Ah, certainly it can import them (in fact there's a rather nice LaTeX equation editor that you can use to drag and drop), but Keynote 1 CANNOT have pdfs as inline images. (I asked someone on the development team.)
If a pdf was inline, then I could just drop an equation in, say HERE, and keep editing. As the text moved around on the slide the equation would keep moving around with the text. Right now, one has to move ALL of the equations on a slide as one edits, as the text keeps moving around.
I was hoping that Keynote 2 would have this feature, but I have not found someone who knows. Thus my desperate plea, and wish to offer reasonably large sums of money for the feature.
Does anyone know if there's inline PDF in keynote as well? (Add an image of some sort, and the text flows around it)
This is a really important capability to the more mathematically inclined among us, who would like to have inline equations. The number of hours I have spent moving my equations around when I change the text is really disturbing.
(Actually, if this works in any presentation software that runs on a mac besides LaTeX, I'd love to know about it. Especially if I can save slides as PPT for my advisor.)
I wonder if Apple would take it well if I called them up and offered them a bunch of money in exchange for this feature.
You're going to find grade grubbers wherever you go. I haven't gone to Brown, but I know other grad students who have, so I don't believe it's signifigantly different in how much people care about learning, in general.
A few reasons why you might be seeing more of it (at least in the undergrads): 1. There are more of them. Any annoying characteristic shows up more times for the same frequency. In addition, since it's such a large school, many of the more interesting students won't talk to their TAs or profs, since they believe they have better things to do than wait in the (percieved) long line.
2. Berkeley has some odd admissions requirements for some majors. I switched from L&S undeclared to EECS, which took a bit of doing and a good dollop of high grades. Students have been downright desperate to be admitted to L&S CS, since they have been admitting fewer students than anticipated, cuminating several years ago in denying every student who applied (and a few suicides).
So I'm sorry you're having to deal with grade-grubbing undergrads, but it also may be a matter of perspective, as you're a grad student now. (If you're talking about the grad students, I have heard that grades really do matter for grad students, but I haven't taken more than a few grad classes there.)
>I've been on both sides of the fence, since I did my undergrad at an Ivy and am working on a graduate degree at a big, not particularly good public university.
I thought the idea was to do it the other way around: pay the public institution less, get paid more by the private one! Just teasing, though.
(that and where you get your graduate degree will probably matter more than your undergrad)
>work straight for the manufaturers and cut out the middleman.
There's a slight problem with that: the manufactuers are often working on thin margins and don't want to assume the risk. Just as an example, take theoreticians. Their research has led to much more efficient ways to construct circuits, perform tasks, and led to a better understanding of what is and is not possible and efficient. No one really wants to pay them, though many people benefit from their work. Cryptographers are often in the same bind: they make interesting new things possible, and find out about fundamental insecurities in old things. Just because some company would probably benefit from their work, it doesn't mean they want to pay them for it.
>Even if I wanted to continue doing research...with $10 million I can do my research on my own terms...
Part of what's great about working at a leading research lab or university is that you work with interesting, intellegent people. Talking to people about what you're working on and what they're working on can spark useful ideas. Having people around to say "look, here's what I'm doing, isn't it cool?" is incredibly valuable for feedback and morale.
I often work largely on my own. However, it doesn't mean that that sort of interaction isn't valuable to me, or to many other researchers.
>The joy of achievement alone may be enough wherever this guy lives (la la land maybe?), but here in the real world we take cash on the barrel head...accept no substitutes.
Well, there certainly do seem to be a lot of places in the real world like that. Open source software springs to mind as an example. Researchers all over the world give their discoveries and inventions freely.
I take that back; many wish for recognition in their field, and money enough to live and pursue their work unhindered. Royalties, however, are not sought by many in the "real world".
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh, sorry, another note. There is actually such a thing as infertility because ovulation happens before the `impure' period ends. There are couples who are seriously unable to concieve because of this. Currently, religious authorities advise you to get medical assistance with this, but it certainly couldn't help to have children before modern medicine became involved (which, of course, is something you are commanded to do -- at least one boy and at least one girl).
Lea
>That came from a lack of understanding of science at the time. Hemmoraging was a sign of potentially contageous illness.
Interesting. However, you do not become ritually impure if the blood can be attributed to non-uterine or wound causes, from what I read. You do not become impure if your nose bleeds, for example. A woman is also ritually impure from menarche until just before she gets married. If she's contagous, she can pass it to other women, just not men.
There are certainly purity laws that make sense from a hygene point of view. However, these ones are somewhat difficult to justify.
Lea
>Sex laws served two purposes. They held the family units together and guaranteed growth of the nation (more offspring than parents) as well as preserving the purity of the group.
Have you looked at the family purity laws? What is so terrible about touching your wife while she's in labour? What's so terrible about touching her only 6 days after she's had a midcyle spot? Even if she's having her period, I think that passing the salt is probably not so bad.
Lea
>The people that were most vehemently opposed to slavery at the time were the right-wing conservative fundamentalist Christians. You know, the type that go around preaching "Repent or go to hell!"
One word: Quakers.
Lea
>His meaning is perfectly intelligible, but some language snobs (very few of whom are actually linguists and know anything much about language) pretend not to be able to understand certain accent/dialects in order to feel superior.
Incomprehension often has very little to do with that. A friend of mine moved to MA from NC at the same time as I moved from CA. She could not understand most people there, most people there could not understand her. I could, on the other hand, understand both of them. I've been at at least one conference in which two non-native speakers of English could not understand each other at all, and required a native speaker to translate.
There are simply certain grammatical patterns that I don't understand well, if at all. It has nothing to do with snobbery; I simply can't understand, most likely because I haven't been exposed to it all that much.
When using media of international exchange, I would certainly try to make myself comprehensible. I spend quite a lot of time trying to do this in my research papers and communication. Writing in unambigious, grammatically correct English (or something approaching it) is the first step towards sharing ideas with a wide audience. People limit their communication and opportunities by the language they use.
Lea
>Wow, you're lucky. Most of the Ph.D. students I know don't really enjoy their jobs that much.
... I can't imagine myself doing anything else.
I've been told that a good way to decide whether to go for your PhD is to look at the following question: do you love working in subject X so much that you can't imagine yourself doing anything else? If you can honestly answer "yes" to that question, you're much, much less likely to drop out, and you're much less likely to be as tortured during the process. I won't deny it's hard, and stressful, and sometimes painful, but
Lea
> In addition, in order to be an econ major, you often have to take advanced math courses (for me it was Calc 3 so that I could take Econometrics).
If you think that's an advanced math course, I have a whole world of excitement for you. Seriously, there's wonderful stuff out there that you haven't even gotten near.
I've observed that math is a really great thing to study if you want a lot of options. With a small amount of training, you can do almost anything, because you have the critical thinking skills and the rigorous framework to understand it. I'm not saying that a math major could apply to a PhD in economics and necessarily get in without any additional training, but that it wouldn't be hard to get that training. The PhD program might even be more than interested in accepting someone who they had to train. Going the other direction would be considerably more difficult.
Another interesting example is in finance. Financial companies hire physicists and mathematicians like crazy when they can get their hands on them (I've heard they also like theoretical computer sciences). Basically, they want people with advanced mathematical training, who they can direct at the problems of finance. From what I've seen, hiring the other direction would be very, very difficult.
Math is mind-broadening. There are so many different structures and models to apply to problems in other fields. I've seen quite a few people be very sucessful simply by understanding more math than `needed' by their field, and applying it.
Lea
>I would rather not work at all. And most people feel the same way, if they would just admit it.
I would rather work. I simply love what I do. I'm sure I could get away without working for the rest of my life, but I'd go up the wall within a few days. Ask most PhD students, they'll probably say the same. (Given how we're paid, we'd better love what we're doing!)
I think it's more of a difference in how you approach it. Today, in fact, I'm going to write part of a paper. It's not particularly fun, but by doing so, I get to do the fun part: I get to talk to people and say "look at this incredibly cool thing I did". I also get to do the incredibly cool things, and tease apart the Gordian knots that keep people from communicating in useful ways.
Lea
I believe the ACs point was that the EULA isn't giving you any consideration. You bought the software (looks like a sale, smells like a sale, at least). You made a deal where you give money for software. How does running that software constitute additional consideration?
To attempt to answer my own question, I seem to remember a very, very, very stupid judgement a while ago in which it was ruled that since the computer copies the software to cache, it violated copyright law unless you were specifically given permission to run it. Frankly, this seems rather moronic to me: if they are selling you software, it's clearly for the purpose of running it. It's implied that it's fit for the purpose.
In the case of ongoing services, you are giving money and accepting a "reasonable" TOS in exchange for the service. That makes perfect sense to me. Shrink-wrap software is a whole different kettle of worms.
Lea
>People WILL save if they know the government isn't going to bail them out.
/staggeringly/ popular.
There's a very simple test for this. What happened before we had the program in place? We can look up the answer, but just to be very simple, I'll point out that it was sufficiently bad that it inspired people to come up with a scheme in the first place, and that scheme was
I'd say that's probably a reasonably good indication that people may not do so well without SS, or some elder-care program like it.
Lea
>If you can ask about being a primary caregiver, you can make intellegent descisions, rather than just guessing on sex and age like employers do now.
I'm pretty sure that this is also illegal. I'm not saying it makes it go away, I'm sure that it doesn't. However, you're not supposed to be making decisions based on that.
Lea
I'm quite non-visual in the way I approach mathematics, generally, but I've done quite well in studying calculus, linear algebra, and other branchs of mathematics.
I'm not sure it's really necessary. Math is, however, often explained in those terms, which would give an advantage to spacial thinkers. Different teaching techniques are more helpful to different people, as people think differently.
Lea
>No-one disourages anyone from doing the sciences.
You're either a man or a very lucky woman. I'm a PhD student in computer science. I do cryptography, which is a rather logical, math-based discipline.
I have been discouraged from "doing the sciences" more times than I can comfortably count. I have been told "little lady, you can't possibly have any idea what you're talking about. where is your husband?" at a research conference. It didn't stop me, but you'll probably admit that with enough such exposures, it might just stop a pretty high proportion of people.
Hey, I'm good at what I do. What good could it possibly do to perpetuate this sort of crap, when it makes smart people avoid diciplines in which they are capable and qualified?
Lea
>This is something I strongly disagree with. An example from work:
>We can't have a meeting at 2. I have to get my kid from school.
You're talking about people who have been working 80 hours a week for years. These are, by and large, not people with young kids. These are the people who have had to move any possible family plans out into the future when they're past being junior faculty. My guess is that these are not the sort of people at your work.
> I would contend both of us would be professionally obligated to take B.
In the U.S., asking about family planning during a job interview is illegal for exactly that reason.
Lea
>I have never met a man who is concerned about being able to track all the traffic.
I know of at least one famous one (David Sedaris), and I have at least two friends who do not have driver's licences for exactly that reason.
Personally, despite some problems with my vision, I've never managed to hit anything. I recently was in my first accident: my car was parked, and a man from up the street ran into it. (I was not in the car at the time.)
Lea
>My problem with ultra-feminists isn't that they want equal rights for women - but that they neglect their own feminity and innate motherhood to achieve it.
I am good with math. I am good with children. There is no conflict between these two statements. Excelling in my research does not make me less feminine; my ovaries are right where they've always been.
>Sure, women could need more "training" to develop their math skills, but really... what's the big deal?
There is a school of thinking that says that failure of the student is also a failure of the teacher. What is wrong with learning what methods of teaching work and don't work on people of different mindsets. Personally, I'm very non-visual in how I think about mathematical topics, so the "look at the pretty picture" signal processing textbook I had was opaque to me. It certainly didn't mean I had an inability to learn the material (as I had already learned much of it in honors physics), it just spoke to my difficulty with the teaching technique. Failing to improve our teaching techniques to reach out to every student who is willing and capable of learning is simply a waste and a failure.
Lea
I can drag-and-drop pdf equations into Keynote already, which I don't find at all inconvenient. However, they stay in place as the text moves about, which is a real problem, especially since the text will move right over them.
If I need to say that the ciphertext \lambda_i is sent to all players, I want the sentence to stay intact as I continue to edit the slide, and not spend a large fraction of my work hours moving equations about.
I would love to use LaTeX for presentations, but my advisor uses PPT. You can't really blame her for wanting to snag my slides for her own use.
If I could output ppt files without a problem, I'd still be using LaTeX.
Lea
Ah, certainly it can import them (in fact there's a rather nice LaTeX equation editor that you can use to drag and drop), but Keynote 1 CANNOT have pdfs as inline images. (I asked someone on the development team.)
If a pdf was inline, then I could just drop an equation in, say HERE, and keep editing. As the text moved around on the slide the equation would keep moving around with the text. Right now, one has to move ALL of the equations on a slide as one edits, as the text keeps moving around.
I was hoping that Keynote 2 would have this feature, but I have not found someone who knows. Thus my desperate plea, and wish to offer reasonably large sums of money for the feature.
Lea
Does anyone know if there's inline PDF in keynote as well? (Add an image of some sort, and the text flows around it)
This is a really important capability to the more mathematically inclined among us, who would like to have inline equations. The number of hours I have spent moving my equations around when I change the text is really disturbing.
(Actually, if this works in any presentation software that runs on a mac besides LaTeX, I'd love to know about it. Especially if I can save slides as PPT for my advisor.)
I wonder if Apple would take it well if I called them up and offered them a bunch of money in exchange for this feature.
Lea
You're going to find grade grubbers wherever you go. I haven't gone to Brown, but I know other grad students who have, so I don't believe it's signifigantly different in how much people care about learning, in general.
A few reasons why you might be seeing more of it (at least in the undergrads):
1. There are more of them. Any annoying characteristic shows up more times for the same frequency. In addition, since it's such a large school, many of the more interesting students won't talk to their TAs or profs, since they believe they have better things to do than wait in the (percieved) long line.
2. Berkeley has some odd admissions requirements for some majors. I switched from L&S undeclared to EECS, which took a bit of doing and a good dollop of high grades. Students have been downright desperate to be admitted to L&S CS, since they have been admitting fewer students than anticipated, cuminating several years ago in denying every student who applied (and a few suicides).
So I'm sorry you're having to deal with grade-grubbing undergrads, but it also may be a matter of perspective, as you're a grad student now. (If you're talking about the grad students, I have heard that grades really do matter for grad students, but I haven't taken more than a few grad classes there.)
lea
>I've been on both sides of the fence, since I did my undergrad at an Ivy and am working on a graduate degree at a big, not particularly good public university.
I thought the idea was to do it the other way around: pay the public institution less, get paid more by the private one! Just teasing, though.
(that and where you get your graduate degree will probably matter more than your undergrad)
Lea
>work straight for the manufaturers and cut out the middleman.
There's a slight problem with that: the manufactuers are often working on thin margins and don't want to assume the risk. Just as an example, take theoreticians. Their research has led to much more efficient ways to construct circuits, perform tasks, and led to a better understanding of what is and is not possible and efficient. No one really wants to pay them, though many people benefit from their work. Cryptographers are often in the same bind: they make interesting new things possible, and find out about fundamental insecurities in old things. Just because some company would probably benefit from their work, it doesn't mean they want to pay them for it.
Lea
>Even if I wanted to continue doing research...with $10 million I can do my research on my own terms...
Part of what's great about working at a leading research lab or university is that you work with interesting, intellegent people. Talking to people about what you're working on and what they're working on can spark useful ideas. Having people around to say "look, here's what I'm doing, isn't it cool?" is incredibly valuable for feedback and morale.
I often work largely on my own. However, it doesn't mean that that sort of interaction isn't valuable to me, or to many other researchers.
Lea
>The joy of achievement alone may be enough wherever this guy lives (la la land maybe?), but here in the real world we take cash on the barrel head...accept no substitutes.
Well, there certainly do seem to be a lot of places in the real world like that. Open source software springs to mind as an example. Researchers all over the world give their discoveries and inventions freely.
I take that back; many wish for recognition in their field, and money enough to live and pursue their work unhindered. Royalties, however, are not sought by many in the "real world".
Lea