There is this really old couple that lives next to me. They appear to be completely oblivious to the fact that they get $500+ utility bills every month
Yes, but think of all the money they have saved over the years by diverting their sewage into your water line.
As much as police the whole camera surveillance thing creeps me out, I seem to recall that there were significant improvements in crime rates after the program began (causal or not I do not know). You can look at the Department's statistics for yourself: CPD Site (follow Reports & Statistics link on the left).
However, the reason I love OO.o is the formula part. It really makes my papers look great when the formulas are all typed in and display correctly, greek characters and everything. I am totally hooked on that.
I started typesetting mathematical formulae with OOMath and absolutely loved it - until I tried LaTeX. For my needs, I've found LaTeX to be more powerful and versatile - the typeset formulae are nothing short of beautiful. Perhaps you've tried both and find OOMath to better suit your needs, but if you haven't tried LaTeX, I highly recommend it.
I was contradicting the assertion that biology isn't the end of the story.
Oh great, now let me contradict the assertion that I was contradicting the assertion that biology isn't the end of the story. (I dropped a double-negative in there.) I was arguing that biology isn't the sole cause.
Though it was awkwardly worded, I was trying to argue that it the cause wasn't solely biological (as some implied). Undoubtedly, both social and biological factors play a role. I look forward to progress in understanding the biological influences. I simply resist the idea of using biology as an excuse to do nothing about the things we, as society, can change.
Every study I've seen has shown that there is a statistical correlation between the levels of estrogen in the body, and the interest in math & science.
Correlation == causation? While I make absolutely no claim that my experiences are representative or scientific, nothing about an estrogen/math-interest correlation contradicts my musings.
Or do you believe that all human beings are born at full sexual maturity
Since you do not believe that the differences are biological (you said so in your first paragraph) what does this intellectual strength stem from?
Ah, this is the source of the scolding rebuttles. It was awkwardly worded, admittedly. I was contradicting the assertion that biology isn't the end of the story. I have no doubt that both play a role, unlike some of the other posters.
or is it the non-representative sample? or is it confirmation bias? or insufficiently large sample set?
All of the above: it was my anecdotal experience, and clearly labeled as such. I find value in hearing others experience, even if it doesn't generalize. You get the impression that many people here are spouting off without any grounding in experience. Since I have personal experience with the issue, I thought that I would share them. Can't harm anyone, can it?
And you've concluded that she is avoiding computers because someone has told her that girls+computers do not mix. Have you considered that the computers are simply not interesting to her and she uses this excuse to take a break from them?
All signs pointed to the fact that she really enjoyed what she was doing, and that she felt a little guilty about the fact that she was enjoying such an unlady-like activity.
Certain types of work are going to be more appealing to the different genders.
Agreed, but the key question is "why?" Contrary to the majority of the responses I've read, which suggest that the root is biological (end of story), my experiences suggest otherwise.
I volunteer to teach programming/problem solving/computing skills to children, and I find that - at young enough ages - girls both enjoy and excel at these activities. Inevitably, however, interest tapers as they grow older. It is naive to think that there aren't a barrage of forces that discourage women from pursuing technical fields in these formative years. One girl, leaps and bounds above her male peers in ability, said flat out, "I'm not good at computers: I'm a girl." Similarly, another girl with amazing symbolic reasoning ability explained to me that she was bad at math because she struggled with arithmetic. Does this discouragement stem from biology? Hardly. What good does it do to have an open door to women in engineering if it is miles away from the path society pushes most girls onto?
I think that there is tremendous room to increase female participation in engineering - but we don't need to change engineering one bit. The real difference will occur only when we change the way we teach technical fields to girls, using an approach that makes use of the intellectual strengths of females (men and women are different, as many have pointed out). Just because many women may not currently want to pursue careers in engineering, it doesn't mean that women can't want to.
People like you hate chomsky because he has a history of critizing/exposing american foreign policy to the world.
Your accusation of trolling focuses entirely on Chomsky's political merits whereas the GP focused entirely on the merits of Chomsky's contributions to linguistics. Perhaps you know more about the GP than was present in the post, but I see absolutely no reason to believe that his criticisms were politically motivated.
I earned a Bachelors in Linguistics and - as the GP suggests - the belief that Chomsky's monopoly on syntax set the field back is not uncommon (one professor, after accidentally mentioning Chomksy, actually apologized for uttering his name).
Yeah wow with all that proof you've given how could anyone NOT be convinced?...Stop being so jealous of chomsky ok mr internet troll?
I'm sorry to say it, but your post is ten times the troll that the GP was.
In those kinds of situations I always politely decline with "I'm sorry: I don't do drugs." It either stuns them for long enough to get away or puts them in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain that they aren't offering me drugs.
I use my mouse all the time while coding, seeing as most applications these days are GUI driven.
I suppose that depends on which circles you run in. Most the code that I throw around is along the lines of scientific computation / data processing. You raise a valid point about testing GUI-based applications, though technically you still wouldn't need it when you are actually coding.
I can't recall the last time I coded for hours straight and then finally thought 'Hey I should compile and debug this application '
If you need a mouse to compile then you are doing something wrong. I compile/test my programs compulsively - it is as easy as entering:mak in vim (from there you can easily jump to the line of any syntax error). Debugging is equally easy with gdb. In the time that it takes to pull my hand off the keyboard and onto the mouse I'm already in the middle of debugging.
Regarding the "things code doesn't do in real life" list, am I the only one who spit out my coffee upon reading:
9. People who write code use mice
According to Hollywood most programmers haven't discovered how to use a mouse. Sure, we type fast, but a mouse is a very useful tool and there's no reason we'd abandon it.
I can code for hours without touching the mouse. What purpose does a mouse serve when writing code? What does it provide that a keyboard doesn't? This isn't photo-editing or game-playing we're talking about, it's coding.
The only benefit I could see would be for cut-and-paste purposes, but even then a couple quick keystrokes in a good editor will do the trick faster.
movl (%esp),%eax # Load NPX control word.
andl $0xfffff2ff,%eax # Set rounding mode to nearest.
orl $0x00000200,%eax # Set precision to 64 bits. (53-bit mantissa)
pushl %eax
fldcw (%esp) # Recover modes.
popl %eax
is not binary. Writing something that is easily translated to machine code is not the same as writing machine code.
If you say something even remotely positive about anything listed above, you are on the ast-track to being labeled a Troll or Flamebate
If I stepped into a southern Baptist church and started extolling the virtues of the pro-choice or gay rights movement I would be trolling - regardless of how meritous my arguments may be. Nonetheless, I have seen several pro-microsoft, pro-christian, pro-conservative posts get +5. It typically hinges on how childishly the poster taunts the majority. Let's analyze your post.
Slashdotters are notoriously/hilariously sheep-like as well.
It is called consensus. Yet you choose instead to insult the masses.
Gotta love those tolerant and open-minded liberals!
Now you are a) stereotyping and b) picking an offtopic fight.
If anyone would like to challenge the validity of anything I just wrote, please do so.
Success - you lured me out. Most know that they are being trolled and simply skip over such posts; the fact that you are ignored is far from a sign of victory.
I will continue to enjoy reading posts from those who make their arguments with maturity and reason - regardless of whether or not I ultimately agree with what they are saying. If you come back tomorrow, Mr Anonymous Coward, with such a post and I come back tomorrow with mod points, perhaps you'll find that your situation is different. However, if you continue with the insults and playground taunts, you'll have no one to blame but yourself for being down in the -1 ditch.
when I first gave Gentoo a try (back in 2004 i believe) all I got was abuse when I asked for help with some things.
For what it is worth, in my experience I have found the Gentoo community to be nothing but helpful. Anytime I've had a problem the answer has already been provided in the forums, or users quickly (and politely) responded to my posts. And I started learning Linux with Gentoo, so I most certainly was a "n00b." Because of my experience with the Gentoo community, forums.gentoo.org is usually my first stop when I encounter any Linux-related problem. Luckily, I have long since shed my "n00b"-skin, but I am grateful to have had access to the community during that early formative stage.
Read more about how "ugly" Democrats and Republicans are using Political Google Bombs at Wikipedia.
Wow, I didn't realize how popular google bombs were. I just searched for "Patriot" and some obscure act that reduces my civil liberties and privacy was the second result!
One time a rm -r in the wrong terminal erased nearly a month's worth of work. Obviously, entirely my fault (one several levels). Because I almost universally use ReiserFS, I was tremendously releived to find several stories of successful file recoveries (such as this one). Unfortunately, I soon realized I had used ext3 for this particular partition...
Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?
Actually, you can't! This is what one of the developers, Andreas Dilger, said about it:
In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas
ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks the inode as "deleted" and leaves the block pointers alone.
Your only hope is to "grep" for parts of your files that have been deleted and hope for the best.
Though I have a much better backup system now, I still avoid ext3 at all costs. As careful as I try to be, I know I'll slip up again sometime.
Transcribing spontaneous speech, however, takes enormous amounts of time.... So I don't see how a good speech recogniser can be produced without money.
Aha, that's what undergraduate RAs (+lots of funding) are for. But seriously, this is really what I was getting at in my post.
The best systems produced at the institution where I am studying are trained on about a thousand hours of speech.
An IFA Corpus trained system won't be state-of-the-art, admittedly. The key word here is "free" - beggars can't be choosers.
Conversly, if the number is correct, 95% wont reoffend,
clearly, we should keep them all locked up?
Until their sentence is complete, yes. Perhaps we'll do a dance of semantics, but if the crime is murder, a life sentence doesn't seem excessive to me. Manslaughter, accidental this or that, then no. I can understand a lot of frustration with the justice system, but since when has it become fashionable to be soft on murderers?
I am not sure what they need but if they just need a good voice reading something ill give it a try. I have been told that I should like the guy on movie phone.:)
Speech recognition performance on low-noise, read "proper" speech is actually impressively good. The forefront of speech recognition research is on noisy, spontaneous and conversational speech - i.e. real world speech. Any speech data is helpful, but the state-of-the-art would actually be better served by contributions of sub-optimal speech from a diverse group of speakers. Of course, I doubt this data will be manually transcribed. More likely this system uses automatic alignments, which won't fare as well on sub-optimal speech, and will ultimately produce less accurate training data.
Correct me if I'm wrong but GPL was made for code, not audio.
There is more to it than the poster mentions (I don't know if the site addresses this - it is Slashdotted). You don't just need audio - speech audio is abundant - you need annotated audio. In most cases, this annotation is phonetic (or phonemic) transcription, which labels segments of the audio according to the speech sound present in that audio segment. Most state-of-the-art speech systems use a machine learning approach: the system is "trained" on training data, with the hopes that the patterns learned generalize well on new data. This training is a supervised process: it requires the answers, and the answers are found in the annotation. It is this combination of audio and annotation that is valuable, and that is hard to come by. If their system prompts you to read phrases, it could use an existing recognition system to produce a roughly aligned phonetic transcription. It would be far from perfect, but useful nonetheless.
From TFA:
The reason for this is because there is no free Speech Corpora in a form that can readily be used to create Acoustic Models for Speech Recognition Engines.
What? The IFA Dutch "Open-Source" Corpus is a phonemically-annotated speech corpus released under the GNU GPL (read more - pdf). They even have an SQL interface. Did you mean English speech corpora?
Slashdot Mirror
As much as police the whole camera surveillance thing creeps me out, I seem to recall that there were significant improvements in crime rates after the program began (causal or not I do not know). You can look at the Department's statistics for yourself: CPD Site (follow Reports & Statistics link on the left).
Correlation == causation? While I make absolutely no claim that my experiences are representative or scientific, nothing about an estrogen/math-interest correlation contradicts my musings.
Yes. That is exactly what I thought.
=)
All of the above: it was my anecdotal experience, and clearly labeled as such. I find value in hearing others experience, even if it doesn't generalize. You get the impression that many people here are spouting off without any grounding in experience. Since I have personal experience with the issue, I thought that I would share them. Can't harm anyone, can it?
All signs pointed to the fact that she really enjoyed what she was doing, and that she felt a little guilty about the fact that she was enjoying such an unlady-like activity.
I volunteer to teach programming/problem solving/computing skills to children, and I find that - at young enough ages - girls both enjoy and excel at these activities. Inevitably, however, interest tapers as they grow older. It is naive to think that there aren't a barrage of forces that discourage women from pursuing technical fields in these formative years. One girl, leaps and bounds above her male peers in ability, said flat out, "I'm not good at computers: I'm a girl." Similarly, another girl with amazing symbolic reasoning ability explained to me that she was bad at math because she struggled with arithmetic. Does this discouragement stem from biology? Hardly. What good does it do to have an open door to women in engineering if it is miles away from the path society pushes most girls onto?
I think that there is tremendous room to increase female participation in engineering - but we don't need to change engineering one bit. The real difference will occur only when we change the way we teach technical fields to girls, using an approach that makes use of the intellectual strengths of females (men and women are different, as many have pointed out). Just because many women may not currently want to pursue careers in engineering, it doesn't mean that women can't want to.
If Iraqi militants can do it, so can we.
I earned a Bachelors in Linguistics and - as the GP suggests - the belief that Chomsky's monopoly on syntax set the field back is not uncommon (one professor, after accidentally mentioning Chomksy, actually apologized for uttering his name).
I'm sorry to say it, but your post is ten times the troll that the GP was.
In those kinds of situations I always politely decline with "I'm sorry: I don't do drugs." It either stuns them for long enough to get away or puts them in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain that they aren't offering me drugs.
If you need a mouse to compile then you are doing something wrong. I compile/test my programs compulsively - it is as easy as entering
I can code for hours without touching the mouse. What purpose does a mouse serve when writing code? What does it provide that a keyboard doesn't? This isn't photo-editing or game-playing we're talking about, it's coding.
The only benefit I could see would be for cut-and-paste purposes, but even then a couple quick keystrokes in a good editor will do the trick faster.
movl (%esp),%eax # Load NPX control word.
andl $0xfffff2ff,%eax # Set rounding mode to nearest.
orl $0x00000200,%eax # Set precision to 64 bits. (53-bit mantissa)
pushl %eax
fldcw (%esp) # Recover modes.
popl %eax
is not binary. Writing something that is easily translated to machine code is not the same as writing machine code.
It is called consensus. Yet you choose instead to insult the masses.
Now you are a) stereotyping and b) picking an offtopic fight.
Success - you lured me out. Most know that they are being trolled and simply skip over such posts; the fact that you are ignored is far from a sign of victory.
I will continue to enjoy reading posts from those who make their arguments with maturity and reason - regardless of whether or not I ultimately agree with what they are saying. If you come back tomorrow, Mr Anonymous Coward, with such a post and I come back tomorrow with mod points, perhaps you'll find that your situation is different. However, if you continue with the insults and playground taunts, you'll have no one to blame but yourself for being down in the -1 ditch.
Though I have a much better backup system now, I still avoid ext3 at all costs. As careful as I try to be, I know I'll slip up again sometime.
An IFA Corpus trained system won't be state-of-the-art, admittedly. The key word here is "free" - beggars can't be choosers.
From TFA: What? The IFA Dutch "Open-Source" Corpus is a phonemically-annotated speech corpus released under the GNU GPL (read more - pdf). They even have an SQL interface. Did you mean English speech corpora?