So, is aristocracy and feudalism - in which the first to grab something are "free" to create whatever rules they want, live however they want, without accountability to anyone, which frees them to kill, imprison and exploit peasants and serfs with impunity, restrict their travel, etc - freer than democracies, in which no one is "free" to casually restrict the freedoms of others? Like I say above: am I less "free" because I cannot enslave others, if the benefit of that is that no one can enslave me? I think that this restriction makes me freer.
One thing: I thought AT&T was Cingular: Cingular was the dominant partner in the merger, they just named themselves AT&T to cash in on the brand name. At least, that's how I remember it.
Not happy about T-Mobile getting bought by AT&T, though. Not happy at all.
Good grief. Did you not read my post at all? My point was that in my major, I was required to take other kind of mathematics that were not the useful kinds of mathematics.
Of course he didn't read your post. He's a CS student.
And, to be honest, the correlation between strong basic CS skills and programming just isn't there. Many people who grasped Big O notation brilliantly turn out to be crap programmers and worse software engineers.
We have reached a point where most software work is as "derivative" of theoretical computer science as psychology is of physics. Security and network optimization may be the main exceptions.
The problem is that there are many people who could make incredibly valuable contributions in those other fields - in HCI, AI, game design, application design - who are "weeded out" by the math-centric stuff. It doesn't just hurt them - it hurts those of us who could use their abilities.
My view is that most of the truly math-intensive, theoretical CS problems are now just a subset of math. CS as a field should probably disappear; degrees in math with emphasis on computation should suffice on one side; degrees in software engineering, HCI (perhaps co-taught within design and psychology departments) or AI (perhaps co-taught with psych/cog sci, robotics/ME/EE, linguistics, or physics) should take their place. Math-centric theoretical CS as an intellectual project is nearly depleted. Computers are important to us because they are the basis of culture and society, because we interact with them for reading, writing, making and hearing music games, and video; innovation and invention comes from developing new metaphors and implementing them, not solving P=NP, except for a rather small set of problems (cryptography, optimization, etc.)
If CS wants to survive - if CS *departments* want to survive - they need to understand this.
That's one of the points of a bachelors. It isn't a vocational degree.
It is now. Or, rather, it's the new HS Diploma. It no longer guarantees you entry into the middle class. Companies won't take a chance on you because they like you or think you'd "fit in" to their culture if you have a Bachelors. Once, this was, in fact, the case: a BA or BS gained you entry into the corporate world without any questions of specific skills: the employer would train you as needed.
That era is over. There are more college educated people than there are jobs we would consider providing the basis of a middle-class existence. The BA or BS is actually a little less than a vocational degree/
That is actually not true. The UK, Sweden and the Netherlands are all democracies, but are not republics (they're monarchies.) North Korea is a republic, but not a democracy.
Utah is claiming that we're more like North Korea than like Sweden.
Um, do you know how absolutely little money goes to the NEA? We could shave off one day of our occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan, and cover the "expense" of the NEA for years. And the money for the NEA goes into local US economies (giving money to artists who then buy materials in their neighborhoods, producing shows for people in US cities, etc.)
That you would single out the NEA of all things as an example of "waste" indicates you have a huge and irrational axe to grind.
And the voice acting and writing is bad, too. I mean, painful.
This is the time where the clever animators need to get on the phone and call all their friends who got degrees in English or theater, if they have any ambition at all.
You may have jinxed yourself a bit. Cultivating precocity in one dimension seems to delay and sometimes restrict development in others. Especially during the most plastic periods of brain development, when there is almost a "neural arms races" to recruit "real estate" for different fluencies, abilities etc. The best advice, if you want a well-rounded child, is simply to allow the process to go on naturally, prodding for extra effort to get over occasional hurdles. Having educated "cognitively engineered super-babies, I think one does a child few favors by pushing for precocity. In fact, there are signs that it can be counter-productive, when the natural momentum of the early start is exhausted and they have to start "working" at it again.
There is a difference between a case study and an anecdote. And, when dealing with humans, everything is an anecdote - because cultural, historical, generational and linguistic factors are not reproducible. Just being different people than our parents will make our children's experiences, skill acquisition, cognitive development, etc., different. The presence of different types of media technologies (and adults habituated to them) and so forth compounds that effect.
So, even if I had an amazing diverse data set for a study spanning 10 years of kids, it's still just a snapshot, an "anecdote" about acquisition in the age of the internet, iPhones, HDTV, etc, a condition that will probably not even exist for significant details soon after such a study was finished.
Considering how long humans have been around at, roughly, the same level of intelligence, what is really stupid is to design a system that is based on a level of human performance that a significant number of humans lack.
... or onto the network on which your bank account information is stored, or your email is stored, or that runs the system that provides water and electricity to your home...
To be more specific, too: engineers shouldn't work on solutions for problems (or desires) people don't have. Good marketing isn't just about promotion: it's also about the research in understanding the best place to focus your business's strengths, in a way that will make a profit.
To play with your sig: marketing people point out opportunities, engineers fulfill them.
The other criticism of authorial intention is that the author is "a product of their times" (and circumstances, and position in society, etc.)- it isn't just their unconscious at work, but all their interpretations of the world - and the practice of writing/making movies/painting and what that means, that they generally just inherit, that are at work. Calling it "historical context" isn't even adequate... more like radical subjectivity. So the author is only aware of the minute ways, more or less, that they fit within a range of possibilities that they can perceive.
There are really 3 positions: 1. what matters is what the author intended, and you see something to find out what it was, and if the author is good, you get it; 2. it doesn't matter what the author says, it's all in the text (the old "New Criticism" approach) and 3. the author's "intentions" are themselves "written" by his context, and the text is an outcome of that condition.
I'm really not so sure it's going to be that tidy. This whole field of research is still up in the air - what seem to be epiphenomena turn out not to be. Perhaps elements of consciousness itself are in brain dynamics that are considered epiphenomenal at this time. I'm not saying that it's a waste of time to get neural nets smarter: I've just been around to see the check of AI continue to be impossible to cash, and cognition and consciousness (not to mention plasticity) get surprisingly more complicated every couple of years, rather than simpler. Perhaps these electrical fields play a role in the binding problem in ways that would be difficult to work out by squeezing it back into a network. No one really knows at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
The squiggly red line under the word in your spell checker does *not* mean, "oh, this is a really good word! You should use it!"
So, is aristocracy and feudalism - in which the first to grab something are "free" to create whatever rules they want, live however they want, without accountability to anyone, which frees them to kill, imprison and exploit peasants and serfs with impunity, restrict their travel, etc - freer than democracies, in which no one is "free" to casually restrict the freedoms of others? Like I say above: am I less "free" because I cannot enslave others, if the benefit of that is that no one can enslave me? I think that this restriction makes me freer.
Does having a restriction against enslaving others make this a less free society?
The GPL creates an ecosystem of freedom.
One thing: I thought AT&T was Cingular: Cingular was the dominant partner in the merger, they just named themselves AT&T to cash in on the brand name. At least, that's how I remember it.
Not happy about T-Mobile getting bought by AT&T, though. Not happy at all.
Good grief. Did you not read my post at all? My point was that in my major, I was required to take other kind of mathematics that were not the useful kinds of mathematics.
Of course he didn't read your post. He's a CS student.
And, to be honest, the correlation between strong basic CS skills and programming just isn't there. Many people who grasped Big O notation brilliantly turn out to be crap programmers and worse software engineers.
We have reached a point where most software work is as "derivative" of theoretical computer science as psychology is of physics. Security and network optimization may be the main exceptions.
The problem is that there are many people who could make incredibly valuable contributions in those other fields - in HCI, AI, game design, application design - who are "weeded out" by the math-centric stuff. It doesn't just hurt them - it hurts those of us who could use their abilities.
To the extent that remains true, CS departments should be absorbed into math departments.
And that's why Soviet superiority in computer science helped them to win the Cold War!
That is disingenuous.
My view is that most of the truly math-intensive, theoretical CS problems are now just a subset of math. CS as a field should probably disappear; degrees in math with emphasis on computation should suffice on one side; degrees in software engineering, HCI (perhaps co-taught within design and psychology departments) or AI (perhaps co-taught with psych/cog sci, robotics/ME/EE, linguistics, or physics) should take their place. Math-centric theoretical CS as an intellectual project is nearly depleted. Computers are important to us because they are the basis of culture and society, because we interact with them for reading, writing, making and hearing music games, and video; innovation and invention comes from developing new metaphors and implementing them, not solving P=NP, except for a rather small set of problems (cryptography, optimization, etc.)
If CS wants to survive - if CS *departments* want to survive - they need to understand this.
That's one of the points of a bachelors. It isn't a vocational degree.
It is now. Or, rather, it's the new HS Diploma. It no longer guarantees you entry into the middle class. Companies won't take a chance on you because they like you or think you'd "fit in" to their culture if you have a Bachelors. Once, this was, in fact, the case: a BA or BS gained you entry into the corporate world without any questions of specific skills: the employer would train you as needed.
That era is over. There are more college educated people than there are jobs we would consider providing the basis of a middle-class existence. The BA or BS is actually a little less than a vocational degree/
That is actually not true. The UK, Sweden and the Netherlands are all democracies, but are not republics (they're monarchies.) North Korea is a republic, but not a democracy.
Utah is claiming that we're more like North Korea than like Sweden.
Um, do you know how absolutely little money goes to the NEA? We could shave off one day of our occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan, and cover the "expense" of the NEA for years. And the money for the NEA goes into local US economies (giving money to artists who then buy materials in their neighborhoods, producing shows for people in US cities, etc.)
That you would single out the NEA of all things as an example of "waste" indicates you have a huge and irrational axe to grind.
Thank you. I was about to type an almost identical post. Instead, I applaud from the sideline.
And the voice acting and writing is bad, too. I mean, painful.
This is the time where the clever animators need to get on the phone and call all their friends who got degrees in English or theater, if they have any ambition at all.
I am a big fan of the power of mindless pap as a pedagogical resource! Or, at least as a short-term baby-sitting tactic.
Now we just need to work on her math skills...
You may have jinxed yourself a bit. Cultivating precocity in one dimension seems to delay and sometimes restrict development in others. Especially during the most plastic periods of brain development, when there is almost a "neural arms races" to recruit "real estate" for different fluencies, abilities etc. The best advice, if you want a well-rounded child, is simply to allow the process to go on naturally, prodding for extra effort to get over occasional hurdles. Having educated "cognitively engineered super-babies, I think one does a child few favors by pushing for precocity. In fact, there are signs that it can be counter-productive, when the natural momentum of the early start is exhausted and they have to start "working" at it again.
There is a difference between a case study and an anecdote. And, when dealing with humans, everything is an anecdote - because cultural, historical, generational and linguistic factors are not reproducible. Just being different people than our parents will make our children's experiences, skill acquisition, cognitive development, etc., different. The presence of different types of media technologies (and adults habituated to them) and so forth compounds that effect.
So, even if I had an amazing diverse data set for a study spanning 10 years of kids, it's still just a snapshot, an "anecdote" about acquisition in the age of the internet, iPhones, HDTV, etc, a condition that will probably not even exist for significant details soon after such a study was finished.
... and cylon sextoys.
whoosh.
Considering how long humans have been around at, roughly, the same level of intelligence, what is really stupid is to design a system that is based on a level of human performance that a significant number of humans lack.
... or onto the network on which your bank account information is stored, or your email is stored, or that runs the system that provides water and electricity to your home...
To be more specific, too: engineers shouldn't work on solutions for problems (or desires) people don't have. Good marketing isn't just about promotion: it's also about the research in understanding the best place to focus your business's strengths, in a way that will make a profit.
To play with your sig: marketing people point out opportunities, engineers fulfill them.
The other criticism of authorial intention is that the author is "a product of their times" (and circumstances, and position in society, etc.)- it isn't just their unconscious at work, but all their interpretations of the world - and the practice of writing/making movies/painting and what that means, that they generally just inherit, that are at work. Calling it "historical context" isn't even adequate... more like radical subjectivity. So the author is only aware of the minute ways, more or less, that they fit within a range of possibilities that they can perceive.
There are really 3 positions: 1. what matters is what the author intended, and you see something to find out what it was, and if the author is good, you get it; 2. it doesn't matter what the author says, it's all in the text (the old "New Criticism" approach) and 3. the author's "intentions" are themselves "written" by his context, and the text is an outcome of that condition.
I'm really not so sure it's going to be that tidy. This whole field of research is still up in the air - what seem to be epiphenomena turn out not to be. Perhaps elements of consciousness itself are in brain dynamics that are considered epiphenomenal at this time. I'm not saying that it's a waste of time to get neural nets smarter: I've just been around to see the check of AI continue to be impossible to cash, and cognition and consciousness (not to mention plasticity) get surprisingly more complicated every couple of years, rather than simpler. Perhaps these electrical fields play a role in the binding problem in ways that would be difficult to work out by squeezing it back into a network. No one really knows at this point.