I've spent several years reading up on this topic (New Scientist, journals, web), and I've never, once, ever seen an article that showed evidence for a physiological cannabis dependency that wasn't subsequently trashed (for poor experimental procedure) or that wasn't unsupported by follow-up studies.
I'm not saying you're provably wrong here, but the mainstream medical opinion of health professionals around the world is that cannabis is physiologically totally non-addictive.
Sorry, I think you mis-spelled "anti-Microsoft Web Development crowd".
St's not just Slashdot, it's almost every web developer who knows what they're doing.
(The clueless ones just tend to code to IE then spend their time cussing out every other browser in the world for all getting it "wrong" in almost exactly the same way.)
Really? All the boxing styles I've been exposed to emphasise frequent, full-contact sparring as a vital part of the development process.
In contrast, not many martial arts styles do this - there are some (Muay Thai, Full-Contact Karate, etc), but they're massively outweighed by the majority that either don't spar or practice non- or semi-contact sparring. Good styles will try to edge people into this (eg, by always holding contact pads against your body, to condition you to taking blows), but many don't.
Boxing is a very good style of self-defence in that it makes you hard to hurt... and if you can hit the other guy quickly and accurately[1] you may well lay him out with a single punch. However, from a technical point of view it's more or less a complicated dance.
Practice boxing to build up your stamina and resistance to impact, then learn something quick and brutal like Ju-Jitsu, Wing Chun or Krav Maga for actual fighting.
Someone who was technically perfect at boxing but trained like a martial artist ("weak" repetition, semi-contact, etc) would be slit up a treat by someone who trained normally at their chosen martial arts discipline, since most martial arts have strikes and techniques that boxing simply has no answer to.
A martial artist who trained and built themselves up like a boxer would still kick a boxer's arse, since boxing is such a fundamentally limited "martial art", in terms of strikes, blocks, throws, locks, gouges, groundfighting and the like.
Boxing trains you to fight with above-the-waist, padded, hands-only combat. In a real fight you can be hit anywhere from the top of your head to having your instep stamped on. While boxers are scary motherfuckers because of the way they train, boxing as a martial art is technically very poor.
[1] Harder than it looks in a real fight. Much harder.
To quote a standup comedian: "This War On Terror's a great idea - remember when they had a War On Drugs... and you couldn't buy drugs any more?".
The high-profile cash-black-hole that is TWoD is a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars, and quoting a page of misleading, strawman or unsupported arguments from the very people tasked with propagating it won't do a lot to convince anyone.
"Legalization proponents claim, absurdly, that making illegal drugs legal would not cause more of these substances to be consumed, nor would addiction increase."
I don't know of anyone who claims that legalising drugs wouldn't (at least potentially) increase their use, but the whole point of drug leagalisation is the recognition that such drugs may be used safely without being abused.
Increasing drug use and increasing drug addiction (say, "drug use" and "drug abuse") are two completely separate things. It's been empirically proven time and again that it's "It's clear from history that periods of lax controls are accompanied by more drug abuse and that periods of tight controls are accompanied by less drug abuse."
Again, use of the "mixing of drug use and drug addiction" straw-man. And it's also silent on how the periods of tight controls are accompanied by increased crime, ballooning prison populations, increased power to organised crime syndicates providing the illegal drugs, increased medical risk to users from impure and badly-produced drugs and the criminalization of entire sections (predominently the young and/or ethnic minorities) of the population.
"During the 19th Century, morphine was legally refined from opium and hailed as a miracle drug. Many soldiers on both sides of the Civil War who were given morphine for their wounds became addicted to it, and this increased level of addiction continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal -- and, like some drugs today, seen as benign medicine not requiring a doctor's care and oversight. Addiction skyrocketed. There were over 400,000 opium addicts in the U.S. That is twice as many per capita as there are today."
This is an argument for greater education, not against the drugs. Anyone who thinks an addictive substance is harmless and beneficial under all circumstances needs setting right - it doesn't autmoatically mean we should ban the substance, along with all its beneficial properties.
And frankly, if they went from "opium and cocaine are good for you, and you should take them daily in horse-doctors' quantities" to "opium and cocaine are the devil's candy, and one line or pipe will make your head explode" and only got a 50% reduction in addicts, there are probably waaaaay better ways to spend the WoD propaganda money - like, say, researching treatments or caring strategies for addiction, or funding educational (as opposed to scare-tactics propaganda) campaigns.
Note also that this is again talking about "addicts", not "users". Sure enough, if something's suspected to be beneficial by the bucketload and then they discover it's addictive, I'd expect people who took it to be a little more careful and sparing with it, and hence avoid addiction more successfully. Hell, at least they know now it's addictive at all, and that alone is going to help avoid accidental addictions (as opposed to addictions caused by over-prescription or user-apathy).
And that's just the first three paragraphs - there are problems, straw-men and faulty reasoning galore throughout the page.
The first link is basically about how if you're encoding quantum states onto photons and sending them down the line, then someone could theoretically scramble or block the communication by inserting a logic gate or polariser somewhere along that line.
How is this news? You can scramble regular classical communication by cutting the wires or "inserting a logic gate" into the communication process. Hell you can scramble semaphore by inserting a barn in the wrong place.
What, did the author think because it was all quantum-y it was going to be magically immune to something that amounts to cutting the wires between the two communicators?
There's nothing interesting, clever or new about stopping or scrambling encrypted communication. Now, if you can decrypt or decrypt-modify-reencrypt, then you're on to something.
Oh, and:
"In Wu and Lidar's anti-malware protocol, all the network members share a secret sequence of timings that tell them when the network is live, meaning they can operate their machines and share qubits between them, and when it is idle."
Right, so it basically slaps a "shared private key" system (with all the problems that brings with it) on top of a quantum-encrypted link. Again, what's all that new here?
Plus, it's deliberately screwing up the article classification system. Articles are grouped into classes because that allows people to easily weed out articles they don't want to see.
If I decide I want to read about the Enlightenment WM and don't give two shits about some cartoonist's voice coming back[1], then by "humerously" mis-filing articles you're breaking useful functionality for (arguably) not a very funny joke.
And yes, I am a stickler for correct classification of data - what's the point in having a classification system if you're not going to use it? (Grump;-).
[1] Actually, his troll-blog aside I like Scott Adams a lot and I'm very happy for him. However, that's not the point.;-)
Correction: Weed is not physiologically addictive, only psychologically.
Plenty of things are physiologically addictive (caffeine, heroin, cocaine, etc). Weed is not.
Psychological addiction is "real" addiction, but:
1. It's normally not as physically/medically dangerous as physiological addiction, because it's only your behaviour and attitudes which change, not your body-chemistry. Psychological addiction won't damage your body - the worst it'll do is make you carry on doing things that might.
2. There's no guarantee that anyone will ever get psychologically addicted to anything. Take heroin regularly for more than a few months and (barring genetic freaks) it's more or less certain you'll get addicted. Play WoW for ten years, and it's entirely likely at the end of it you'll be able to put it down at the end of it and never touch it again.
3. If something's "only" psychologically addictive, we historically don't tend to ban it. Shopping, chocolate, sex and gambling are all psychologically addictive, so banning everything which may cause pysychological addiction is clearly a non-starter.
Because it's "only mental" this tend to be where we draw the line between "banning dangerous activites" and "not being a nanny-state" - ultimately psychological addiction is merely a question of discipline, determination or strength of character, and most people believe they shouldn't be banned from their hobby activity simply because some people aren't adult enough to know their own limits.
You raise an interesting point when you say "the number of dimensions doesn't depend on the content, it depends on the presentation".
Perhaps we should clarify:
"Text" is one-dimensional - you read along the line (left-right in English, other ways in other languages), and that's it. You can read faster or slower, but the medium still has only one dimension (eg, think a printout from a ticker-tape machine).
"A page" is a two-dimensional medium - you read along lines, but can skip down whole lines (importantly, not just "reading the same content faster" as with plain "text", above) to jump to later content.
"A book" is a two-(or arguably three-)dimensional medium - you read along the line, can "random access" down the page, or can "random access" to various depths of the book. I'm not sure, though, that the fact that sequential chunks of information on the same subject are artificially divided up into pages really qualifies books to be a three-dimensional medium (it's basically exactly the same mechanism, just the presentation of the book forces a different physical action to get the same effect).
Video is one-dimensional - you don't scan each frame left-right/top-bottom, at least as far as you're normally aware you "just look" at the screen. Time also isn't a dimension any more in video than it is for ticker-tape text, as it's presented to you in a strict sequence at a strict speed. Innovations like "chapters" on DVDs and the progress bar on digital media players provide an extra dimension to navigate (whihc is why they can be so useful) - they allow you to move straight to a specific point rather than just moving in the same dimension a bit faster (eg, as FFwd with a VHS does).
MMORPGs are oviously three-dimensional - they simulate the real world's three dimensions. Other computer graphics systems may be up to four-dimensional, if they allow you to move freely back and forth in time.
Hypertext is multi-dimensional - you see a 2D text page, but from there you can navigate to a potentially unlimited number of other pages by clicking links (and clicking a link is navigating along another conceptual axis). More importantly, you couldn't ever get to these other pages by continuing to read the item you're reading - it's not like a ticker-tape or FFwd on a video where the content has a strict order and you can only choose to see it faster - you're moving on a completely different axis, to unrelated bits of information with no order or sequence.
True, "web pages" are 2D, but "hypertext" as a medium is multi-dimensional.
I don't think we do have to switch - we have different media for different jobs.
Reference material and information repositories will always be mostly text, and this will likely eventually all turn into hypertext. These are two-(or multi-)dimensional media, which makes it easier to search them for information.
Video will always be good for passive entertainment - it's more or less one-dimensional (see my reply to the previous poster in this thread), so it's relaxing and undemanding to sit and be carried along at its set pace.
3D will also always be good for interactive entertainment - the spatial metaphor allows you to identify easily with your on-screen avatar, and as it provides the same number of dimensions as we're used to in everyday life we can easily become comfortable with it.
OTOH, I think text (and eventually hypertext) will be the gold standard for "general information" storage and accessing - hypertext is effectively as multi-dimensional as you want it to be, so unlike the other options it scales more or less forever as your information-processing capabilities increase.
I'd think of movies as more one-dimensional, like a ticker-tape - although the picture is two-dimensional, your eyes generally take in the screen with a single glance, at least as far as you're aware of it. You don't scan the screen left-right/top-bottom, you "just look" at it - there's no "navigational decision" component to the two-dimensional image you're shown - it's basically an atomic unit.
In addition, while the movie takes place "over time" you often can't choose where in time you go next - you can fast-forward, but that's just like reading a (one-dimensional) ticker-tape faster, not using another dimension (like, say, skipping down the page in books). DVDs and digital video files with chapters/skip-to-time are arguably two-(or multi-)dimensional. However, you're still restricted to absorbing the information at 1:1 speed, meaning time isn't really a variable when watching video.
This also explains why video still hasn't overtaken plain text - we've video technology for years, but while it's great as a passive entertainment medium people just find it annoyingly limited for browsing generic information - why haven't traditional information repositories (like encyclopedias) or modern ones (like websites) been replaced by video?
Again, it's because it's single-dimensional whereas we're used to multidimensional solutions like books and hypertext.
It's a weird way of thinking about media, but it does seem to explain some things...
Fair point - I did underplay the role of damage-dealing in boxing somewhat. Nevertheless, boxers unarguably spend much more time learning how (and conditioning themselves) to take damage than most (other?) martial artists.
"Kickboxing" (as the word is normally used) is a "softer" alternative to Muay Thai. Proper Muay Thai allows strikes with the hands, feet, shins, knees and elbows, whereas most kickboxing clubs/styles ban elbows, knee-strikes and kicks below the waist.
And you do get Muay Thai clubs in the west, it's just (understandably) not as popular as the (less brutal, more sport-oriented) "kickboxing" style.
Boxers are as hard as nails. Boxers train to take damage, and only incidentally to deal it. If life was an MMORPG they'd be the tanks.
Boxing is a poncy silly dance with all sorts of prissy rules and pointless jumping through hoops, certainly compared to Muay Thai (where the basic rule is "stop when you've torn their head off...").
The main problem is that the web isn't two-dimensional, paper is.
Ticker-tape: One-dimensional (you read along). Paper: Two-dimensional (read along, skip down/up) MMORPGs: Three-dimensional (move in three dimensions) Hypertext: non-linear - you can jump from the middle of one document to the middle of a completely different document.
Hypertext is effectively omni-dimensional, limited only by the number of links the author chooses to put in the document (and, increasingly, by the number of browser extensions, AJAX goodies, javascript favelets/bookmarklets, etc) that use the current clipboard selection or source of the page you're reading and offer you even more navigatioal options.
The web is multi-dimensional, not just two or three.
This is why everyone predicting "the death of the web" in favour of some "better" 3D option has always been wrong. Every time. (Anyone remember VRML?)
3D games won't kill hypertext, because a clunky "spatially-based" interface to a three dimensional world (bonus points: realised on a two-dimensional interface device!) is already worse than the effectively infinitely-dimensional system we're currently using.
I was using "left" and "right" in terms of "directions of bias", not literally as political metaphors.
I was trying to explain that if you aren't leaning in any particular direction, that's neutral... as opposed to "wherever I stand, that's the unbiased position", which seemed to be the parent's assumption.
First off, although it's called "Google Website Optimizer" it's about optimizing your website to get the highest number of orders ("conversions" in marketingspeak) from people who land on your site (eg, from an Adwords campaign), not about getting higher Google search rankings.
"If we look at why people creating websites usually want to get them to rank highly google the reasons are primarily monetary, which means that this tool is mainly giving advice to those who are trying to displace older (and possibly better sites)."
(-1 Baseless Overgeneralisation): Pretty much anyone who's running a website wants it to do well, and while many websites are run for-profit, not all (or even the majority) of them are.
I don't think I've ever heard a single webmaster turn around and say "y'know... we're getting too many damn visitors these days[1]. Oh how I pine for the days when we were ranked on the fourteenth page of results on Google and only got three visitors a week". Webmasters ideally want as many visitors as their servers and bandwidth-bill can handle. What's the point of shooting for less?
(-1 Complete Non-Sequiteur): Why should older sites be assumed to be better? And why shouldn't older sites also make use of Google Website Optimizer? Just because a domain has had a website on it for some time, that doesn't mean the site isn't constantly being redesigned, updated, streamlined and overhauled. Any webmaster who isn't constantly trying to improve his site frankly isn't doing his job.
GWO is basically a glorified A/B-Split Testing system, and we've had those for years.
"Say I have site A. which is dedicated to mountain biking news and has been running since 1997 with messageboards, news etc and hasn't been optimised for the best google rankings and we have Site B. which was created 3 months ago and uses RSS syndication to just serve up content from other sites and monetising it with something like adsense is the main point, then which should really rank higher in Google? I'm thinking A because it is more of a legitimate site."
Well, if Site A is inaccessible to mobile or disabled users, wastes bandwidth, uses tag-soup HTML, no CSS and is a complete bitch to navigate, then it's no surprise if a well-designed, navigable, accessible, optimised aggregation site overtakes it in the rankings.
If site A's webmaster has been sitting on his hands since 1997 then frankly he needs a kick up the arse to get his shit in gear and update the site to this century. Not everyone is a white, middle-class, fully-able and sitting in front of a desktop PC, and that's only going to get more true as time goes on.
HTML validation and the like aren't just shiny things to boast about on your homepage - they're supposed to be a measure of your professionalism as a webmaster. If you don't care about the things people use to assess your professionalism, don't complain when people assume you (or your site) are unprofessional.
In an ideal world Site A would still rank higher than Site B. However, in an idea world webmasters would do everything they could to ensure the site was modern, accessible and well-designed. And with code, navigation model and HTML/CSS validity all being equal, the site with the best content (Site A) will win every time.
In this less-than-ideal world, too many webmasters just sit on their arses and bitch instead of doing their jobs and keeping their sites well-designed and with fresh content.
"I think there is a point where trying to rank highly in Google is OK for wanting to growth in your site, but if Google continue to give out such tools then surely people will start producing sites that match exactly what it wants to see in order to get traffic."
You seem to be putting the cart before the horse.
Google doesn't decide what makes a good site, then a
Yeah - weird isn't it? It's almost like... allowing people to download music for free... leads to more music sales!
How strange - how "downloading free copyrighted music" doesn't lead to more music sales... but apparently "allowing people to download free copyrighted music" makes them buy more music from you.
Of course, we all know the central issue is one of consent - clearly when people download free copyrighted music that I don't want them to, that hurts my business, even if it leads to more sales. However, when people download free copyrighted music that I've allowed them to download, even when they don't know whether or not I want them to download it, that helps my business.
Clearly there's some magical "spooky action at a distance" going on that means when someone downloads my copyrighted music it only hurts my business if I didn't want them to download it - if I don't mind the downloading it actually helps my-
It is interesting, which is why they're reporting this in the mass-media, and saving all the scientific breakthroughs, theory corroborations and nitty-gritty stuff in trade journals you don't read.
"but when you consider time scales like this what kind of practical applications does this have?"
None... none at all that I can see. Of course, you're assuming that to find this out was the point of the research, which is probably a very, very, very stupid thing to assume.
Which is more likely:
"Hey, funding committee, can we have $MILLIONS to research whether our galaxy will ever hit another one before the end of the universe?... Oh, it will"
Or
"Hey, funding committee, can we have $MILLIONS for blue-sky astrophysics research, which might[1] not have any direct intended applications, but could just provide the breakthrough we need to eventually construct a hyperdrive, inter-dimensional travel, inertialess drive, or something truly world-changing like that?... Oh, and while we're still looking we've noticed our galaxy will hit Andromeda in 3 billion years' time."
[1] Who knows, maybe they already did have an aim in mind, but for the sake of argument let's not give them the benefit of the doubt.
And if you doubt the value of blue-sky research, remember blue-sky physics research gave us quantum mechanics (and hence the transistor), without which you'd be writing your post on paper and posting it on a noticeboard for about four other people to read.
"Can anyone explain what knowledge is gained from these pretty pictures?"
Very little. The pretty pictures are produced (from the actual useful data gathered) as a PR exercise for the uneducated, bum-scratching public so they feel they've got something tangible that they can understand for their tax money.
However, they also provide a handy mechanism for publically weeding out smartarses who aren't quite as clever as they think they are, right?
Globalisation can be a good or a bad thing - if you can hire from anywhere in the world, then everywhere in the world is competing for the same jobs.
Initially, thanks to the vast disparity in economies, engineers from the developing world can generally undercut their western equivalents. However, thanks to shared cultural values, better education, easier communication and easier contact/oversight western (well, in-country) engineers can generally offer better service and/or solutions.
Companies have to pay overseas contractors more than (say) local pig-herding does, or the well of third-world IT contractors will dry up. Eventually these increased wages will cause inflation in the local economy, prices will rise and eventually workers in the (previously-)third-world will expect similar wages, costs and lifestyle to westerners.
At this (idyllic) point it will cost the same to hire a village full of technonatives in the Ngoro Ngoro crater as it will be hire Ted and his consultancy team from down the road, everyone will compete solely on service and ability and command a comparable quality of life, and the cream will rise to the top.
However:
The less companies pay foreign workers the less effect their pay has on their local economy, so the slower the equalisation happens. This means the less companies pay their foreign contractors, the longer they carry on getting cheap service. Companies will therefore keep paying the bare minimum they have to, since it's in their best interests.
If companies fixate on price and ignore quality, western engineers may well find themselves effectively out of a job long before foreign workers are commanding comparable wages, or even (typically) offering comparable service. Amusingly enough, this also exports money from the western company's economy to the foreign worker's economy, meaning that the western companies are not only strangling western engineers, but also (mildly) the entire western country's economy.
If companies prioritise quality they'll (generally, currently) stay using western engineers, and will only start outsourcing when foreign engineers are trained to a similar pitch of education, service-giving and cultural understanding. This will slow the rate of money-loss to foreign economies, but will minimise disruption in the western country's economy.
Distressingly, any company with the usual PHB quotient seems to prioritise cost and pretty much ignore quality, so unless things change we can pretty much draw the line from here to the point where it's financially difficult to be a "western" engineer working in a western country. You already see this trend with the number of western engineers moving to India where they can get paid less but still make (comparatively) much more due to the lower costs.
The only hope for the western engineer is that the (currently, generally) worse service of foreign consultants influences western companies back away from outsourcing. Again, there are hints this could happen, for example with some UK banks and corporations very publically getting rid of their third-world call-centres and replacing them with domestic native speakers.
Which way could it go? Either way.
Which way will it go? You pays yer money and takes yer choice.
What should you think of outsourcing? Well, it depends whether you prioritise cost or quality, whether you're a western or foreign engineer, and whether you value gentle evolution towards equality or whether you're an "as fast as possible, screw the fallout" type of person.
The ultimate result of equalising affluence and quality-of-life between the west and the developing world is a noble and good one, and to any good engineer the idea of competing solely on merits should be attractive.
The trick is to get there without financially fucking western engineers, without causing too many meltdowns due to poor IT services, and without the problems souring companies on outsourcing forever.
Richer people got cable TV first, but everyone has it by now. The increase in autism in kids closely tracks the spread of TV over time, not just the current distribution[1].
TV has spread, so has autism, "affluence" hasn't.
If TV ownership was (1) rarer and (2) static over time and (3) was correlated with a high incidence of autism then I could see your reasoning - rich people would have TV, poor people wouldn't, if something about being rich contributed towards autism then areas with high TV penetration would have more autism, making it look like like TV was causing it.
However, (and sorry to harp on about it, but...) from TFA it's pretty clear that the correlation is true of all areas, irrespective of affluence. As soon as TV becomes common in a region, so does autism - it has nothing to do with "who got TV first", only with "who's got TV at any given point".
Unless you're implying that it's still only the rich who have cable TV?
In general, any system which seeks to avoid discouraging slower kids will automatically discourage smarter kids.
If you avoid streamlining classes into "ability bands" you have to teach the genius kids the same material as the less-gifted. Either you choose to teach to the lowest common denominator (and alienate all the bored smart kids), or you teach to the highest standard (and discourage the slower kids). Or alternatively you teach pitched roughly to the middle of the group, and piss off both ends of the spectrum at once.
Even allowing kids to learn at their own rate (eg, to read ahead on the subject if they finish early) ends up discouraging slower kids. Kids define themselves relative to other kids, so even if there's no overt competition going on, the mere presence of a smart kid smashing through sums and reading chapters ahead is going to make the slower kid realise he's slower, and so become discouraged.
The only way to ensure slower kids don't get discouraged is to eliminate all differences between individuals. Teach to the lowest common denominator you can, prevent the smarter kids from excelling or even achieving their full potential, and you minimize the disparity between what the smartest and slowest kids can achieve, and hence the "discouragement" of the slowest child.
Of course, nobody worries what this frustration and wasted potential is doing to the smart kid, but hey - perceived "overdogs" aren't Worthy and Important to defend in our society.
Cases abound, even from my (ability-banded by subject) school days:
Gold stars not given for attainment, but for improvement. Kids quickly work out you can't improve on "always correct", and so either start deliberately getting the odd sum wrong, or dismiss the whole exercise as "retard labelling", and start to take the piss out of kids who get gold stars. (This is genius - something intended to encourage the slowest kids ends up being used to belittle them by smart kids who understand they're artificially barred from succeeding... at something which has a bearing on their school grades).
We had ability-streamlined "sets" (classes), with pupils levels chosen by-subject (eg, Johnny might be Set A in Maths, but Set C in English). The brilliant thing was, while pupils with good performance went "up" into "a higher set" at the end of every term or year, poorly-performing pupils only ever went "sideways" into "another" set. Kids aren't stupid, and this kind of obvious doublespeak just ensured that anyone who went "sideways" was due a lot of piss-taking... more than they would otherwise have got.
Kids who are slow are going to realise it sooner or later... when they leave school and have to compete on a more level playing-field at the very latest.
Surely, instead of futilely trying to pretend everyone's the same and failing or having those efforts turned around and used to emphasise differences, isn't it more sensible to just admit that people have skills in different areas, and encourage kids to specialise in what they excel in? Or at least confront and come to terms with the fact that they simply aren't very good at certain things?
I never remember the weedy kids in Physical Education getting special dispensation to only run half-way around the track, or to play football but have everyone else banned from tackling them. Why is it different for those disadvantaged in an intellectual field?
I also tend to notice a strong correlation between IQ and something... since calling it "intelligence" is liable to get me flamed to oblivion.
Let me be clear: I've known a few people who, while useless on progressive matrices/problem-solving/whatever tests still come across as very "intelligent" in other ways.
However: The overwhelming majority of people I know who are "recognisably" very intelligent, almost without exception have had high IQs when tested.
I don't know if IQ measures "intelligence", or even precisely what intelligence means in this context.
However, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't noticed a link between high IQ and creativity, increased problem solving/constraint-satisfaction, general knowledge and "generally being quick on the uptake".
Not, of course, that in these enlightened politically-correct times it's remotely acceptable to suggest some people might simply be "better" in any way than another person. God forbid.
Are you a thief? No? Then stop locking your doors.
But seriously... Funny thing - I've had conversations in the last week with three people who:
1. Work on PCs all day, every day 2. Didn't know that "Windows" was separable from the "PC"
It's only anecdotal evidence, but it's pretty indicative.
You're a geek. You read Slashdot, FFS. You != average.
Most people out there can't even program their fucking VCR clock. I know this for a fact, or friends/family wouldn't keep asking me to do it. And, remember, these are the friends and family of several technical people.
Can anyone learn computing, with enough motivation? Yes.
Do normal people (aside from geeks and those already interested) already know the difference between Windows and Linux? No.
Slashdot Mirror
I've spent several years reading up on this topic (New Scientist, journals, web), and I've never, once, ever seen an article that showed evidence for a physiological cannabis dependency that wasn't subsequently trashed (for poor experimental procedure) or that wasn't unsupported by follow-up studies.
I'm not saying you're provably wrong here, but the mainstream medical opinion of health professionals around the world is that cannabis is physiologically totally non-addictive.
I think the parent is "Score:4, Sarcastic", not "Score 4, Interesting".
Sorry, I think you mis-spelled "anti-Microsoft Web Development crowd".
St's not just Slashdot, it's almost every web developer who knows what they're doing.
(The clueless ones just tend to code to IE then spend their time cussing out every other browser in the world for all getting it "wrong" in almost exactly the same way.)
Really? All the boxing styles I've been exposed to emphasise frequent, full-contact sparring as a vital part of the development process.
In contrast, not many martial arts styles do this - there are some (Muay Thai, Full-Contact Karate, etc), but they're massively outweighed by the majority that either don't spar or practice non- or semi-contact sparring. Good styles will try to edge people into this (eg, by always holding contact pads against your body, to condition you to taking blows), but many don't.
Boxing is a very good style of self-defence in that it makes you hard to hurt... and if you can hit the other guy quickly and accurately[1] you may well lay him out with a single punch. However, from a technical point of view it's more or less a complicated dance.
Practice boxing to build up your stamina and resistance to impact, then learn something quick and brutal like Ju-Jitsu, Wing Chun or Krav Maga for actual fighting.
Someone who was technically perfect at boxing but trained like a martial artist ("weak" repetition, semi-contact, etc) would be slit up a treat by someone who trained normally at their chosen martial arts discipline, since most martial arts have strikes and techniques that boxing simply has no answer to.
A martial artist who trained and built themselves up like a boxer would still kick a boxer's arse, since boxing is such a fundamentally limited "martial art", in terms of strikes, blocks, throws, locks, gouges, groundfighting and the like.
Boxing trains you to fight with above-the-waist, padded, hands-only combat. In a real fight you can be hit anywhere from the top of your head to having your instep stamped on. While boxers are scary motherfuckers because of the way they train, boxing as a martial art is technically very poor.
[1] Harder than it looks in a real fight. Much harder.
To quote a standup comedian: "This War On Terror's a great idea - remember when they had a War On Drugs... and you couldn't buy drugs any more?".
The high-profile cash-black-hole that is TWoD is a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars, and quoting a page of misleading, strawman or unsupported arguments from the very people tasked with propagating it won't do a lot to convince anyone.
"Legalization proponents claim, absurdly, that making illegal drugs legal would not cause more of these substances to be consumed, nor would addiction increase."
I don't know of anyone who claims that legalising drugs wouldn't (at least potentially) increase their use, but the whole point of drug leagalisation is the recognition that such drugs may be used safely without being abused.
Increasing drug use and increasing drug addiction (say, "drug use" and "drug abuse") are two completely separate things. It's been empirically proven time and again that it's "It's clear from history that periods of lax controls are accompanied by more drug abuse and that periods of tight controls are accompanied by less drug abuse."
Again, use of the "mixing of drug use and drug addiction" straw-man. And it's also silent on how the periods of tight controls are accompanied by increased crime, ballooning prison populations, increased power to organised crime syndicates providing the illegal drugs, increased medical risk to users from impure and badly-produced drugs and the criminalization of entire sections (predominently the young and/or ethnic minorities) of the population.
"During the 19th Century, morphine was legally refined from opium and hailed as a miracle drug. Many soldiers on both sides of the Civil War who were given morphine for their wounds became addicted to it, and this increased level of addiction continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal -- and, like some drugs today, seen as benign medicine not requiring a doctor's care and oversight. Addiction skyrocketed. There were over 400,000 opium addicts in the U.S. That is twice as many per capita as there are today."
This is an argument for greater education, not against the drugs. Anyone who thinks an addictive substance is harmless and beneficial under all circumstances needs setting right - it doesn't autmoatically mean we should ban the substance, along with all its beneficial properties.
And frankly, if they went from "opium and cocaine are good for you, and you should take them daily in horse-doctors' quantities" to "opium and cocaine are the devil's candy, and one line or pipe will make your head explode" and only got a 50% reduction in addicts, there are probably waaaaay better ways to spend the WoD propaganda money - like, say, researching treatments or caring strategies for addiction, or funding educational (as opposed to scare-tactics propaganda) campaigns.
Note also that this is again talking about "addicts", not "users". Sure enough, if something's suspected to be beneficial by the bucketload and then they discover it's addictive, I'd expect people who took it to be a little more careful and sparing with it, and hence avoid addiction more successfully. Hell, at least they know now it's addictive at all, and that alone is going to help avoid accidental addictions (as opposed to addictions caused by over-prescription or user-apathy).
And that's just the first three paragraphs - there are problems, straw-men and faulty reasoning galore throughout the page.
The first link is basically about how if you're encoding quantum states onto photons and sending them down the line, then someone could theoretically scramble or block the communication by inserting a logic gate or polariser somewhere along that line.
How is this news? You can scramble regular classical communication by cutting the wires or "inserting a logic gate" into the communication process. Hell you can scramble semaphore by inserting a barn in the wrong place.
What, did the author think because it was all quantum-y it was going to be magically immune to something that amounts to cutting the wires between the two communicators?
There's nothing interesting, clever or new about stopping or scrambling encrypted communication. Now, if you can decrypt or decrypt-modify-reencrypt, then you're on to something.
Oh, and:
"In Wu and Lidar's anti-malware protocol, all the network members share a secret sequence of timings that tell them when the network is live, meaning they can operate their machines and share qubits between them, and when it is idle."
Right, so it basically slaps a "shared private key" system (with all the problems that brings with it) on top of a quantum-encrypted link. Again, what's all that new here?
It's not really irony, it's just a bad pun.
;-).
;-)
Plus, it's deliberately screwing up the article classification system. Articles are grouped into classes because that allows people to easily weed out articles they don't want to see.
If I decide I want to read about the Enlightenment WM and don't give two shits about some cartoonist's voice coming back[1], then by "humerously" mis-filing articles you're breaking useful functionality for (arguably) not a very funny joke.
And yes, I am a stickler for correct classification of data - what's the point in having a classification system if you're not going to use it? (Grump
[1] Actually, his troll-blog aside I like Scott Adams a lot and I'm very happy for him. However, that's not the point.
Correction: Weed is not physiologically addictive, only psychologically.
Plenty of things are physiologically addictive (caffeine, heroin, cocaine, etc). Weed is not.
Psychological addiction is "real" addiction, but:
1. It's normally not as physically/medically dangerous as physiological addiction, because it's only your behaviour and attitudes which change, not your body-chemistry. Psychological addiction won't damage your body - the worst it'll do is make you carry on doing things that might.
2. There's no guarantee that anyone will ever get psychologically addicted to anything. Take heroin regularly for more than a few months and (barring genetic freaks) it's more or less certain you'll get addicted. Play WoW for ten years, and it's entirely likely at the end of it you'll be able to put it down at the end of it and never touch it again.
3. If something's "only" psychologically addictive, we historically don't tend to ban it. Shopping, chocolate, sex and gambling are all psychologically addictive, so banning everything which may cause pysychological addiction is clearly a non-starter.
Because it's "only mental" this tend to be where we draw the line between "banning dangerous activites" and "not being a nanny-state" - ultimately psychological addiction is merely a question of discipline, determination or strength of character, and most people believe they shouldn't be banned from their hobby activity simply because some people aren't adult enough to know their own limits.
You raise an interesting point when you say "the number of dimensions doesn't depend on the content, it depends on the presentation".
Perhaps we should clarify:
"Text" is one-dimensional - you read along the line (left-right in English, other ways in other languages), and that's it. You can read faster or slower, but the medium still has only one dimension (eg, think a printout from a ticker-tape machine).
"A page" is a two-dimensional medium - you read along lines, but can skip down whole lines (importantly, not just "reading the same content faster" as with plain "text", above) to jump to later content.
"A book" is a two-(or arguably three-)dimensional medium - you read along the line, can "random access" down the page, or can "random access" to various depths of the book. I'm not sure, though, that the fact that sequential chunks of information on the same subject are artificially divided up into pages really qualifies books to be a three-dimensional medium (it's basically exactly the same mechanism, just the presentation of the book forces a different physical action to get the same effect).
Video is one-dimensional - you don't scan each frame left-right/top-bottom, at least as far as you're normally aware you "just look" at the screen. Time also isn't a dimension any more in video than it is for ticker-tape text, as it's presented to you in a strict sequence at a strict speed. Innovations like "chapters" on DVDs and the progress bar on digital media players provide an extra dimension to navigate (whihc is why they can be so useful) - they allow you to move straight to a specific point rather than just moving in the same dimension a bit faster (eg, as FFwd with a VHS does).
MMORPGs are oviously three-dimensional - they simulate the real world's three dimensions. Other computer graphics systems may be up to four-dimensional, if they allow you to move freely back and forth in time.
Hypertext is multi-dimensional - you see a 2D text page, but from there you can navigate to a potentially unlimited number of other pages by clicking links (and clicking a link is navigating along another conceptual axis). More importantly, you couldn't ever get to these other pages by continuing to read the item you're reading - it's not like a ticker-tape or FFwd on a video where the content has a strict order and you can only choose to see it faster - you're moving on a completely different axis, to unrelated bits of information with no order or sequence.
True, "web pages" are 2D, but "hypertext" as a medium is multi-dimensional.
I don't think we do have to switch - we have different media for different jobs.
Reference material and information repositories will always be mostly text, and this will likely eventually all turn into hypertext. These are two-(or multi-)dimensional media, which makes it easier to search them for information.
Video will always be good for passive entertainment - it's more or less one-dimensional (see my reply to the previous poster in this thread), so it's relaxing and undemanding to sit and be carried along at its set pace.
3D will also always be good for interactive entertainment - the spatial metaphor allows you to identify easily with your on-screen avatar, and as it provides the same number of dimensions as we're used to in everyday life we can easily become comfortable with it.
OTOH, I think text (and eventually hypertext) will be the gold standard for "general information" storage and accessing - hypertext is effectively as multi-dimensional as you want it to be, so unlike the other options it scales more or less forever as your information-processing capabilities increase.
I'd think of movies as more one-dimensional, like a ticker-tape - although the picture is two-dimensional, your eyes generally take in the screen with a single glance, at least as far as you're aware of it. You don't scan the screen left-right/top-bottom, you "just look" at it - there's no "navigational decision" component to the two-dimensional image you're shown - it's basically an atomic unit.
In addition, while the movie takes place "over time" you often can't choose where in time you go next - you can fast-forward, but that's just like reading a (one-dimensional) ticker-tape faster, not using another dimension (like, say, skipping down the page in books). DVDs and digital video files with chapters/skip-to-time are arguably two-(or multi-)dimensional. However, you're still restricted to absorbing the information at 1:1 speed, meaning time isn't really a variable when watching video.
This also explains why video still hasn't overtaken plain text - we've video technology for years, but while it's great as a passive entertainment medium people just find it annoyingly limited for browsing generic information - why haven't traditional information repositories (like encyclopedias) or modern ones (like websites) been replaced by video?
Again, it's because it's single-dimensional whereas we're used to multidimensional solutions like books and hypertext.
It's a weird way of thinking about media, but it does seem to explain some things...
Fair point - I did underplay the role of damage-dealing in boxing somewhat. Nevertheless, boxers unarguably spend much more time learning how (and conditioning themselves) to take damage than most (other?) martial artists.
"Kickboxing" (as the word is normally used) is a "softer" alternative to Muay Thai. Proper Muay Thai allows strikes with the hands, feet, shins, knees and elbows, whereas most kickboxing clubs/styles ban elbows, knee-strikes and kicks below the waist.
And you do get Muay Thai clubs in the west, it's just (understandably) not as popular as the (less brutal, more sport-oriented) "kickboxing" style.
Boxers are as hard as nails. Boxers train to take damage, and only incidentally to deal it. If life was an MMORPG they'd be the tanks.
Boxing is a poncy silly dance with all sorts of prissy rules and pointless jumping through hoops, certainly compared to Muay Thai (where the basic rule is "stop when you've torn their head off...").
The main problem is that the web isn't two-dimensional, paper is.
Ticker-tape: One-dimensional (you read along).
Paper: Two-dimensional (read along, skip down/up)
MMORPGs: Three-dimensional (move in three dimensions)
Hypertext: non-linear - you can jump from the middle of one document to the middle of a completely different document.
Hypertext is effectively omni-dimensional, limited only by the number of links the author chooses to put in the document (and, increasingly, by the number of browser extensions, AJAX goodies, javascript favelets/bookmarklets, etc) that use the current clipboard selection or source of the page you're reading and offer you even more navigatioal options.
The web is multi-dimensional, not just two or three.
This is why everyone predicting "the death of the web" in favour of some "better" 3D option has always been wrong. Every time. (Anyone remember VRML?)
3D games won't kill hypertext, because a clunky "spatially-based" interface to a three dimensional world (bonus points: realised on a two-dimensional interface device!) is already worse than the effectively infinitely-dimensional system we're currently using.
I was using "left" and "right" in terms of "directions of bias", not literally as political metaphors.
;-)
I was trying to explain that if you aren't leaning in any particular direction, that's neutral... as opposed to "wherever I stand, that's the unbiased position", which seemed to be the parent's assumption.
But have ten pedant-points anyway.
How did this get rated "+5, Insightful"?
First off, although it's called "Google Website Optimizer" it's about optimizing your website to get the highest number of orders ("conversions" in marketingspeak) from people who land on your site (eg, from an Adwords campaign), not about getting higher Google search rankings.
"If we look at why people creating websites usually want to get them to rank highly google the reasons are primarily monetary, which means that this tool is mainly giving advice to those who are trying to displace older (and possibly better sites)."
(-1 Baseless Overgeneralisation): Pretty much anyone who's running a website wants it to do well, and while many websites are run for-profit, not all (or even the majority) of them are.
I don't think I've ever heard a single webmaster turn around and say "y'know... we're getting too many damn visitors these days[1]. Oh how I pine for the days when we were ranked on the fourteenth page of results on Google and only got three visitors a week". Webmasters ideally want as many visitors as their servers and bandwidth-bill can handle. What's the point of shooting for less?
(-1 Complete Non-Sequiteur): Why should older sites be assumed to be better? And why shouldn't older sites also make use of Google Website Optimizer? Just because a domain has had a website on it for some time, that doesn't mean the site isn't constantly being redesigned, updated, streamlined and overhauled. Any webmaster who isn't constantly trying to improve his site frankly isn't doing his job.
GWO is basically a glorified A/B-Split Testing system, and we've had those for years.
Footnote:
[1] Slashdotting/Digging/Farking/Wanging aside, obviously.
"Say I have site A. which is dedicated to mountain biking news and has been running since 1997 with messageboards, news etc and hasn't been optimised for the best google rankings and we have Site B. which was created 3 months ago and uses RSS syndication to just serve up content from other sites and monetising it with something like adsense is the main point, then which should really rank higher in Google? I'm thinking A because it is more of a legitimate site."
Well, if Site A is inaccessible to mobile or disabled users, wastes bandwidth, uses tag-soup HTML, no CSS and is a complete bitch to navigate, then it's no surprise if a well-designed, navigable, accessible, optimised aggregation site overtakes it in the rankings.
If site A's webmaster has been sitting on his hands since 1997 then frankly he needs a kick up the arse to get his shit in gear and update the site to this century. Not everyone is a white, middle-class, fully-able and sitting in front of a desktop PC, and that's only going to get more true as time goes on.
HTML validation and the like aren't just shiny things to boast about on your homepage - they're supposed to be a measure of your professionalism as a webmaster. If you don't care about the things people use to assess your professionalism, don't complain when people assume you (or your site) are unprofessional.
In an ideal world Site A would still rank higher than Site B. However, in an idea world webmasters would do everything they could to ensure the site was modern, accessible and well-designed. And with code, navigation model and HTML/CSS validity all being equal, the site with the best content (Site A) will win every time.
In this less-than-ideal world, too many webmasters just sit on their arses and bitch instead of doing their jobs and keeping their sites well-designed and with fresh content.
"I think there is a point where trying to rank highly in Google is OK for wanting to growth in your site, but if Google continue to give out such tools then surely people will start producing sites that match exactly what it wants to see in order to get traffic."
You seem to be putting the cart before the horse.
Google doesn't decide what makes a good site, then a
Yeah - weird isn't it? It's almost like... allowing people to download music for free... leads to more music sales!
How strange - how "downloading free copyrighted music" doesn't lead to more music sales... but apparently "allowing people to download free copyrighted music" makes them buy more music from you.
Of course, we all know the central issue is one of consent - clearly when people download free copyrighted music that I don't want them to, that hurts my business, even if it leads to more sales. However, when people download free copyrighted music that I've allowed them to download, even when they don't know whether or not I want them to download it, that helps my business.
Clearly there's some magical "spooky action at a distance" going on that means when someone downloads my copyrighted music it only hurts my business if I didn't want them to download it - if I don't mind the downloading it actually helps my-
*head explodes*
Go tell that to Maxis.
"Intersting stuff.."
It is interesting, which is why they're reporting this in the mass-media, and saving all the scientific breakthroughs, theory corroborations and nitty-gritty stuff in trade journals you don't read.
"but when you consider time scales like this what kind of practical applications does this have?"
None... none at all that I can see. Of course, you're assuming that to find this out was the point of the research, which is probably a very, very, very stupid thing to assume.
Which is more likely:
"Hey, funding committee, can we have $MILLIONS to research whether our galaxy will ever hit another one before the end of the universe?... Oh, it will"
Or
"Hey, funding committee, can we have $MILLIONS for blue-sky astrophysics research, which might[1] not have any direct intended applications, but could just provide the breakthrough we need to eventually construct a hyperdrive, inter-dimensional travel, inertialess drive, or something truly world-changing like that?... Oh, and while we're still looking we've noticed our galaxy will hit Andromeda in 3 billion years' time."
[1] Who knows, maybe they already did have an aim in mind, but for the sake of argument let's not give them the benefit of the doubt.
And if you doubt the value of blue-sky research, remember blue-sky physics research gave us quantum mechanics (and hence the transistor), without which you'd be writing your post on paper and posting it on a noticeboard for about four other people to read.
"Can anyone explain what knowledge is gained from these pretty pictures?"
Very little. The pretty pictures are produced (from the actual useful data gathered) as a PR exercise for the uneducated, bum-scratching public so they feel they've got something tangible that they can understand for their tax money.
However, they also provide a handy mechanism for publically weeding out smartarses who aren't quite as clever as they think they are, right?
Welcome to globalisation.
Globalisation can be a good or a bad thing - if you can hire from anywhere in the world, then everywhere in the world is competing for the same jobs.
Initially, thanks to the vast disparity in economies, engineers from the developing world can generally undercut their western equivalents. However, thanks to shared cultural values, better education, easier communication and easier contact/oversight western (well, in-country) engineers can generally offer better service and/or solutions.
Companies have to pay overseas contractors more than (say) local pig-herding does, or the well of third-world IT contractors will dry up. Eventually these increased wages will cause inflation in the local economy, prices will rise and eventually workers in the (previously-)third-world will expect similar wages, costs and lifestyle to westerners.
At this (idyllic) point it will cost the same to hire a village full of technonatives in the Ngoro Ngoro crater as it will be hire Ted and his consultancy team from down the road, everyone will compete solely on service and ability and command a comparable quality of life, and the cream will rise to the top.
However:
The less companies pay foreign workers the less effect their pay has on their local economy, so the slower the equalisation happens. This means the less companies pay their foreign contractors, the longer they carry on getting cheap service. Companies will therefore keep paying the bare minimum they have to, since it's in their best interests.
If companies fixate on price and ignore quality, western engineers may well find themselves effectively out of a job long before foreign workers are commanding comparable wages, or even (typically) offering comparable service. Amusingly enough, this also exports money from the western company's economy to the foreign worker's economy, meaning that the western companies are not only strangling western engineers, but also (mildly) the entire western country's economy.
If companies prioritise quality they'll (generally, currently) stay using western engineers, and will only start outsourcing when foreign engineers are trained to a similar pitch of education, service-giving and cultural understanding. This will slow the rate of money-loss to foreign economies, but will minimise disruption in the western country's economy.
Distressingly, any company with the usual PHB quotient seems to prioritise cost and pretty much ignore quality, so unless things change we can pretty much draw the line from here to the point where it's financially difficult to be a "western" engineer working in a western country. You already see this trend with the number of western engineers moving to India where they can get paid less but still make (comparatively) much more due to the lower costs.
The only hope for the western engineer is that the (currently, generally) worse service of foreign consultants influences western companies back away from outsourcing. Again, there are hints this could happen, for example with some UK banks and corporations very publically getting rid of their third-world call-centres and replacing them with domestic native speakers.
Which way could it go? Either way.
Which way will it go? You pays yer money and takes yer choice.
What should you think of outsourcing? Well, it depends whether you prioritise cost or quality, whether you're a western or foreign engineer, and whether you value gentle evolution towards equality or whether you're an "as fast as possible, screw the fallout" type of person.
The ultimate result of equalising affluence and quality-of-life between the west and the developing world is a noble and good one, and to any good engineer the idea of competing solely on merits should be attractive.
The trick is to get there without financially fucking western engineers, without causing too many meltdowns due to poor IT services, and without the problems souring companies on outsourcing forever.
Overly-terse non-sequiteur.
Richer people got cable TV first, but everyone has it by now. The increase in autism in kids closely tracks the spread of TV over time, not just the current distribution[1].
TV has spread, so has autism, "affluence" hasn't.
If TV ownership was (1) rarer and (2) static over time and (3) was correlated with a high incidence of autism then I could see your reasoning - rich people would have TV, poor people wouldn't, if something about being rich contributed towards autism then areas with high TV penetration would have more autism, making it look like like TV was causing it.
However, (and sorry to harp on about it, but...) from TFA it's pretty clear that the correlation is true of all areas, irrespective of affluence. As soon as TV becomes common in a region, so does autism - it has nothing to do with "who got TV first", only with "who's got TV at any given point".
Unless you're implying that it's still only the rich who have cable TV?
So how did counties with autistic kids end up all getting cable TV first? That's a hell of a coincidence.
What, did the parents form up and march on the cable TV headquarters?
"We demand TV to occupy our silent, disturbed, rocking-back-and-forth kids!"
RTFA (hell, even RTFSummary).
Good point. My take:
In general, any system which seeks to avoid discouraging slower kids will automatically discourage smarter kids.
If you avoid streamlining classes into "ability bands" you have to teach the genius kids the same material as the less-gifted. Either you choose to teach to the lowest common denominator (and alienate all the bored smart kids), or you teach to the highest standard (and discourage the slower kids). Or alternatively you teach pitched roughly to the middle of the group, and piss off both ends of the spectrum at once.
Even allowing kids to learn at their own rate (eg, to read ahead on the subject if they finish early) ends up discouraging slower kids. Kids define themselves relative to other kids, so even if there's no overt competition going on, the mere presence of a smart kid smashing through sums and reading chapters ahead is going to make the slower kid realise he's slower, and so become discouraged.
The only way to ensure slower kids don't get discouraged is to eliminate all differences between individuals. Teach to the lowest common denominator you can, prevent the smarter kids from excelling or even achieving their full potential, and you minimize the disparity between what the smartest and slowest kids can achieve, and hence the "discouragement" of the slowest child.
Of course, nobody worries what this frustration and wasted potential is doing to the smart kid, but hey - perceived "overdogs" aren't Worthy and Important to defend in our society.
Cases abound, even from my (ability-banded by subject) school days:
Gold stars not given for attainment, but for improvement. Kids quickly work out you can't improve on "always correct", and so either start deliberately getting the odd sum wrong, or dismiss the whole exercise as "retard labelling", and start to take the piss out of kids who get gold stars. (This is genius - something intended to encourage the slowest kids ends up being used to belittle them by smart kids who understand they're artificially barred from succeeding... at something which has a bearing on their school grades).
We had ability-streamlined "sets" (classes), with pupils levels chosen by-subject (eg, Johnny might be Set A in Maths, but Set C in English). The brilliant thing was, while pupils with good performance went "up" into "a higher set" at the end of every term or year, poorly-performing pupils only ever went "sideways" into "another" set. Kids aren't stupid, and this kind of obvious doublespeak just ensured that anyone who went "sideways" was due a lot of piss-taking... more than they would otherwise have got.
Kids who are slow are going to realise it sooner or later... when they leave school and have to compete on a more level playing-field at the very latest.
Surely, instead of futilely trying to pretend everyone's the same and failing or having those efforts turned around and used to emphasise differences, isn't it more sensible to just admit that people have skills in different areas, and encourage kids to specialise in what they excel in? Or at least confront and come to terms with the fact that they simply aren't very good at certain things?
I never remember the weedy kids in Physical Education getting special dispensation to only run half-way around the track, or to play football but have everyone else banned from tackling them. Why is it different for those disadvantaged in an intellectual field?
I also tend to notice a strong correlation between IQ and something... since calling it "intelligence" is liable to get me flamed to oblivion.
Let me be clear: I've known a few people who, while useless on progressive matrices/problem-solving/whatever tests still come across as very "intelligent" in other ways.
However: The overwhelming majority of people I know who are "recognisably" very intelligent, almost without exception have had high IQs when tested.
I don't know if IQ measures "intelligence", or even precisely what intelligence means in this context.
However, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't noticed a link between high IQ and creativity, increased problem solving/constraint-satisfaction, general knowledge and "generally being quick on the uptake".
Not, of course, that in these enlightened politically-correct times it's remotely acceptable to suggest some people might simply be "better" in any way than another person. God forbid.
Are you a thief? No? Then stop locking your doors.
But seriously... Funny thing - I've had conversations in the last week with three people who:
1. Work on PCs all day, every day
2. Didn't know that "Windows" was separable from the "PC"
It's only anecdotal evidence, but it's pretty indicative.
You're a geek. You read Slashdot, FFS. You != average.
Most people out there can't even program their fucking VCR clock. I know this for a fact, or friends/family wouldn't keep asking me to do it. And, remember, these are the friends and family of several technical people.
Can anyone learn computing, with enough motivation? Yes.
Do normal people (aside from geeks and those already interested) already know the difference between Windows and Linux? No.