Why, in general, do we even need to resize windows? The answer, 90% of the time, is that the window is the wrong size or shape for its contents. That's what the green "optimize" button is for -- to resize the window automatically to the same size as its contents, and properly implemented, this does just what you want. With Safari, it makes my web browser just wide enough to view the current page without scrolling, and tall enough to show all or as much of the page as possible. With Pages, it resizes the document window to fit the exact size of the document at its current zoom level. I practically never need to resize these windows.
I disagree. For the record, I've used Macs since the Mac Plus, and I have no Windows habits to overcome. But I've also in the past used utilities that made all corners draggable on the Mac, and I find it a decided convenience. Yes, it's something I only used occasionally, but on those occasions, I really appreciated it. Yes, most of the time it is because an app isn't handling its windows properly, but that is beside the point. My preferred implementation would be to keep the windows looking as they do, but if I hold down the option key and hover the pointer over a window edge or corner, the pointer should turn to a resize icon, allowing me to resize the window from that point.
Just an anecdote, but I've spent far more on TV shows this year on iTunes than I ever did on music.
Me too. I see no point in buying DRM'd music when I can pick up a used CD for about the same price and rip it myself (and have a back up copy to re-rip at a higher bit rate once disk space gets cheaper).
But a TV show I'm going to delete anyway once I've watched, so I don't care about DRM. And for $2, it's worth it just to save the inconvenience of searching out a torrent.
TV shows compete with movies and other entertainments that advertise on TV.
But that is not the point. Every ad slot has a value, defined by what somebody else will pay to put an ad it it. If a network puts its own ads in that slot, they lose the money that slot would have delivered if sold to a 3rd party advertiser. The simplest way to manage this is simply for the network to assign itself a budget at the same rate that 3rd parties pay. Even though this is actually only moving money from one pocket to another, it provides a way for the network to keep track of and control what its own advertising is costing it.
Science has been wrong several times about climate change in the past few decades (The big chill never happened, and warming hasn't progressed nearly as quickly as was once predicted)
You need to be more careful whom you believe. There are a lot of lies being spread around, and these two statements are prime examples. There was never any scientific consensus predicting a "Big Chill" (the notion derives from an alarmist article in Newsweek, not the scientific literature). And the warming rate is well within the range of uncertainty of previous predictions.
Don't do science a disservice and proclaim an end to debate. One of the key tenets of science is that very few things are absolute, and our knowledge of climate certainly isn't one of them. As often as science has proved itself wrong in the past, to proclaim an end to debate over a subject like global climate change and declare once side to be fact is to spit in the face of science.
Science is always open to revision. It is quite clear that our knowledge of gravity is not absolute, and perhaps it never will be. But that doesn't mean that it is not irresponsible and dishonest to suggest to somebody that he shouldn't worry about the cliff edge that he is heading towards, because we have not reached "an end to debate" on the subject or gravity.
No, consensus is not proof. But when there is a scientific consensus, it means that you shouldn't reject that conclusion unless you have taken the time and trouble to master the scientific literature on the subject at a level comparable to that of a professional scientist working in that field. It also means that anybody who tries to tell you that the conclusion is obviously wrong because of some basic error or overlooked bit of data is almost certainly trying to pull a fast one on you.
Controversial because it implies that species may be able to subconsciously choose which feature is 'evolved' to be the dominant factor.
No, it implies no such thing. Behavior is a genetically regulated trait, just like leg length. So some anoles have genes that make them spend more time in the trees, while others make them spend more time lower down. Selection by predation alters the proportion of the genes.
What is more interesting about the article is that the long-legged phenotype first increased, then decreased. It might be that tree climbing required two genetic differences: short legs and a behavioral preference for trees, and that the population with both traits was smaller than the population with long legs. So initially, the long-legged variants predominated, because they did better than the short-legged non-tree preferring phenotype. But with a round of reproduction, the greater advantage of the short-limbed, tree preferring phenotype enabled them to overtake the long-legged anoles.
So if you were Condi, what would your have done differently? And on what information would you have acted that might of saved us from 9/11?
Immediately convened the first of a series of weekly high level meetings with the President, Richard Clarke, and the heads of both the CIA and FBI to review intelligence and discuss coordination of information gathering and surveillance of terrorist suspects. Followed through on the recommendations of Clarke to continue the efforts to strike bin Laden and al Qaeda assets begun during the Clinton administration.
Einstein's theory of General Relativity gave a straightforward calculation that agreed very well with what the astronomers had measured. This was a "retrodiction", but it was still evidence in favor of GR, because it is an unambiguous result.
Certainly, a theory has to be consistent with what is already known, and explaining something that was previously unexplained increases interest in a theory--if it is a theory with a modest number of degrees of freedom. But even with General Relativity, it was tests of the theory's predictions that really convinced people that it was on the right track.
The common result of String Theory models is a totally untestable prediction - that there are an infinite number of 'parellel' universes besides our own.* The only to avoid this prediction is to claim that the fundamental constants are all non-randomly selected **. ID makes only one untestable prediction, one God (OK, so some advanced forms of ID predict a few thousand gods with various numbers of arms and three aspects of an Uber-God at the top, or one God, his kid, a ghost, and X number of angels of seven different types assisting, but even these elaborations make a finite number of predictions). Applying Occam's Razor, any finite number of untestable predictions is greatly to be preferred over an infinite number of untestable predictions, and applying My Razor, we should throw out the theory that makes an infinite number of untestable predictions first, way before we reject any of the others (Artifakt's Razor - nothing makes a situation more absurd, more quickly than dragging unnecessary infinites into it).
This is sheer nonsense. Every scientific theory makes a huge number of untestable predictions. For example, atomic theory predicts that every bit of matter, everywhere in the universe, is made of atoms. Almost of that matter is inaccessible, and untestable. Gravitational theory predict that all the motion of all masses everywhere in the universe, is described by the same mathematical law. Again, almost all of them (an infinite number if the universe is infinite) are inaccessible and untestable. So comparing the "count" of untestable predictions is nonsensical, and has nothing to do with Occam's Razor, which relates, not to the number of untestable predictions, but to the number of degrees of freedom (i.e. adjustable parameters) that a theory offers. So an infinitely powerful supernatural being has an infinite number of degrees of freedom, because there are no constraints whatsoever on what it could do, and Occam's Razor will always lead us to prefer a hypothesis with a finite number of degrees of freedom over completely unconstrained "supernatural" hypotheses. The less constrained a hypothesis is, the harder it is to find testable predictions, and a completely unconstrained hypothesis makes no testable predictions at all.
The disappointment with string theory is that it seems to have a huge number of degrees of freedom, so many that nobody has managed to come up with testable predictions. So technically, it is still mathematics rather than a mature scientific theory. Of course, many theories go through such a stage, but eventually ways are found to derive predictions. But of course, string theory may just turn out to be a "dry hole," with too many degrees of freedom to be of any use.
The bad news is that they are the same predictions that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics make, many of which we've already tested, and is thus indistinguishable from them.
The good news is that String theory makes the same predictions as GR and QM while still being only one theory.
It is the non-compatability of GR and QM that creates the need for something like ST. If ST doesn't make a single unique prediction, but is able to explain both the quantum and relativistic worlds, then not only is that a theory, it's a great theory.
If a theory tells you what you already know to be true, then it is a retrodiction, not a prediction. There is a good reason why scientists demand that theories make predictions: A theory with a sufficient number of degrees of freedom can be made to fit any data set. For example, a polynomial of degree n can always be made to exactly fit n + 1 data points, yet may be completely unable to predict what happens between those data points.
The 25% who cheat are devaluing the efforts of the 75% who do not. Moreover, a school that fails to exercise due diligence against its students is cheating those students who cheat and get away from it. An important mission of college and high school is to teach students that the consequences of plagiarism are catastrophic. It is important that they learn this while they are in school where the worst that can happen is usually a failing grade. In the professional world the consequences of plagiarism are often the end of a career and permanent damage to one's reputation
I don't know if Shadow of the Colossus is comparable to Leaves of Grass or Citizen Kane, but I'd certainly put PacMan on the same level with a Warhol soup can.
Yet these companies squash the project. If I were in their positions, I would be flattered that people enjoyed their product so much they decided to make a tribute to it.
You aren't thinking like a corporate lawyer:
"It's our IP. If somebody wants to use it, they should pay us for a license. A lot. If we let somebody use our IP for free, then why should anybody pay us for it? Maybe somebody, someday, would have wanted to pay us to do this, but they won't because we let somebody else do it for free! Or maybe we might want to do it ourselves, but nobody will buy it because it's already been done (probably not, but why risk it when we aren't getting paid?)"
Generally, in university classes, attendance is not required. Students by this time are presumed to be adults, and are expected to be responsible enough to manage their own learning. Lectures are a service provided to them to aid in their learning, a service that they are paying for. If a student is able to learn the material well enough to pass the exam without coming to my lecture, that's fine with me.
There are some exceptions, such as seminar classes in which the student is expected to contribute to the learning environment, but for a large, lecture-hall style lecture, I'd say distribute the podcasts as soon as possible, and don't worry about it if the students choose to watch the podcast instead of coming to class. If a student is allowed to skip lectures and just read the textbook, why should a podcast be treated any differently than a text?
I love it, but in many ways it perpetuates a misleading notion of the way the nanoscale machinery of a cell behaves. For example, it looks as if the growing microtubule is actually attracting tubulin monomers, when the reality is that they are bouncing around randomly until they happen to encounter the growing end of the microtubule. I can certainly understand why they've chosen to do this; if they were to display tubulin molecules at a realistic concentration and moving at a realistic speed relative to the rate of growth of the microfilament, it would probably look like you were in the middle of a swarm of angry bees, and you wouldn't be able to see what was going on. Still, it would be nice to see an occasional tubulin monomer bind and then dissociate, for example. And of course, all of the protein molecules look too rigid. If you've ever seen a molecular dynamics simulation of a protein, you know that they should be wiggling like they're made of jello. The robotic-looking movement of the kinesin molecule, resembling one of the animated brooms from Fantasia, is particularly misleading. It's unfortunate to see the the two-steps-forward-one-step-back Brownian nature of molecular interactions sacrificed, because one of the most remarkable things about biochemistry is the yin-yang way that apparently purposive behavior emerges out of randomness, two things that many people mistakenly imagine to be in opposition.
The "lowest" creatures on Earth have just as long an evolutionary history as ours
Not true if you measure length of evolutionary history by the only evolutionarily relevant scale--number of generations. By that scale, microorganisms are many, many orders of magnitude older than we are.
They are certainly more highly evolved. Many bacteria have a generation time of under an hour, so they evolve fast. Probably every vertebrate protein family was originally invented by some short generation organism, with just minor tweaks since them.
So we vertebrates are running Genome v. 3.5432, while bacteria are running Genome v. 453256.124
Let me admit that I'm actually having a good time playing N3. While at the outset you can plow through hordes of enemies by random button mashing, some attention becomes necessary at later levels as power ups get scarce. Some combos work better than others in certain situations, and most have a window of vulnerability.
What I really miss is the strategic element of the Dynasty Warriors series. In Dynasty Warriors, you have to decide whether to go after the enemy generals, close the enemy reinforcement gates, attack the enemy leader, defend your generals, or defend your leader. N3 is almost completely linear, with few choice points. Plow through grunts, fight a boss, do it again. And no save points, so if you fall to the last boss, it's repeat the whole mess. That can get old fast.
Still, the game is undeniably beautiful. There are none of the fog or draw-in problems of the Dynasty Warriors series on XBox or PS2 (I understand that there's an XBox 360 DW title, but it's not really next generation, with only modest improvements). It's great to see 2 or 3 dozen enemies and friends on the screen at once, each apparently acting independently (although the game takes care to space them out a bit to limit what it has to deal with). Still, there are some wild melees. Perhaps fortunately, you can't hit your allies; you can charge through a crowd of friends, staff swinging wildly, and nobody but the bad guys will get a bump on the noggin. Characters are beautiful, and whereas every battle in DW seems to take place on a blasted plain, some of the N3 battles occur in lush forrest settings (although curiously "dead"--as you charge through the forest, weapon flailing, not a leaf or frond stirs in response to your passing). However, while the levels are big, and often with long sightlines, you are still constrained to well defined paths, and frequently you are unaccountably barred from going in a direction that appears passable.
The game succeeds mostly on flash. It is one of the first 360 titles that really screams "next generation." For now, it's fun--in 6 months, the sharp graphics and high character count will be old hat, and nobody will be interested in playing such a crude beat-em-up
I believe the authorities involved might very easily have started on a slippery slope. Who knows where it will lead? How much do we value due process? How much do we value freedom? How much do we value results, irregardless of how they were gotten?
It's not as if this is something new. The police have always been able to use information obtained from private citizens that would not have been legal for them to acquire themselves. If no catastrophic consequences have arisen from slipping down that "slippery slope" by now, maybe it's not really all that slippery.
Or, if he had that much control over the computer, what's to say he's not working from Turkey cause problems for people, yet be immune to prosecution in the US? With that control, what's to keep him from planting photos, or causing his computer to obtain child porn and create logs at the ISP? How reliable is this evidence now? Has there been any "standards of evidence" maintained to ensure that the data found on the computer was NOT planted?
Since the hacker clearly had access to the computer, the only chance the police will have of getting a conviction is developing evidence that is not derived from that computer.
That's true for pseudoscience or faith. For instance, Einstein stated conditions that would either prove or disprove his theories.
In science, the word "proof" is used in its older sense of "test," as in "proving ground," not in the mathematical sense of absolute proof. A scientific theory can be proved to be wrong, but it can never be proved to be true. It is always possible that some future observation will crop up that is inconsistent with a theory. Moreover, there is always an infinite number of more complex theories that is equally compatible with any set of observations. Science follows the procedure of "Occam's Razor," accepting the simplest scientific theory (the one with fewest degrees of freedom) that is consistent with a body of observations until such time as additional evidence requires that theory be discarded in favor of a more complex theory.
Numerous examples of speciation--that's the whole list of proof?!
Hardly. Evolutionary theory is perhaps the most thoroughly proved (in the scientific, not the mathematical sense) theory in all of science, and certainly in biology. There is a huge mass of evidence supporting the theory, which is increasing at an exponential rate now that it has become possible to do large-scale genome sequencing. Every time DNA from another species is sequenced, it is an additional test of the theory. So all of the proof of evolutionary theory would run to hundreds of thousands of pages. Here is a summary that barely scratches the surface
Evolution defenders have moved the goalpost by using variation within species as proving the entire theory. Where's the proof showing The Origin of Species?
No, the goalposts of science are in the same place they've always been. In science, there is no such thing as absolute proof. Rather, predictions are derived from the theory and then tested by experiment or observation. Theory testing is an ongoing process. Species being the smallest phylogenetic distinction, it was indeed predicted from the theory that it should be possible to occasionally observe speciation in the wild. And indeed, this turned out to be correct. There are now numerous examples of speciation
As another Harvard PhD (Harvard Medical School in my case), I'm with Stanton.
I think that there are some fairly serious problems with this entire field of videogame violence studies, which has been characterized by some of the sloppiest, most overinterpreted "science" that I have ever seen. Dr. Thompson is far from the worst offender. The main problem with her work is that it utilizes an arbitrary, unvalidated definition of "violence." If she wishes to relate here work to the studies that purport to detect harmful effects of videogame violence, then she certainly needs to establish in some rigorous way that what she calls "violence" is in some sense comparable to what these studies are examining. (those studies are mostly pretty bad, too, but that is another issue).
Stanton's point that Thompson's classification system yields high violence scores for games that most people, and most parents, would not consider to be particularly violent is a perfectly valid criticism, and her defense, which was essentially "we aren't using it for those games" simply dodges the issue. Given that her criteria are clearly misleading for some games, how does she decide which games it can validly be applied to. I think that it is highly irresponsible for her to report her %violence measures to Congress without properly explaining the criteria she used for classification (saying that it's in her papers is hardly adequate here, considering that her audience is most certainly not going to be reading those papers). Frankly, it seems highly questionable to me whether Dr. Thompson's studies have any value at all. I thought that her defense of classifying Pac-Man as violent was particularly revealing:
I'm sure that as a young child you probably were not frightened of ghosts trying to kill you, but the concept is one that does frighten many young children.
What I find notable here is that she seems to have made no effort to actually determine whether many--or indeed, any--young children actually interpret Winky, Blinky, et al. in Pac-Man as "ghosts trying to kill you" or are actually frightened by the game. This kind of uncritical thinking seems representative of her approach.
I should note, however, that her actual recommendations to Congress seem fairly reasonable. She suggests, for example, that ESRB members should actually play the games, hardly a radical suggestion. And somewhat ironically, she suggests that they should do what she failed to do herself in her testimony--"make its rating process and the terms that it uses in its ratings more transparent."
The creationist argument isn't that we've never seen a species evolve into another species, because, as you say, that is easy to debunk by the simple fact that we've seen it happen many times in e.g. bacteria. The argument they use now is that we've never seen a species evolve into a completely different and vastly more complex species.
You are correct that the Creationist/ID gang has now moved the goal posts--and moved them to an indeterminate point at that. This way, no matter how big a change scientists observe, they can come back with, "That's not completely different enough, we mean bigger than that." Since extreme evolutionary change takes thousands if not millions of years, they are now safe from all challenges. From the point of view of propaganda, this is a clever move. Of course, from the point of view of science, it further discredits Creationism/ID. Indeed, "Intelligent Design" is much less scientific that classical Creationism. The original Creationists were sincere and confident enough in their beliefs to actually make predictions. Unfortunately, most of them turned out to be wrong. So ID has been cast in the vaguest possible terms, "Some intelligent entity (we can't say what) at some time (we can't say when) contributed some degree of design (we can't say how or why) to life." While the original Creationism made predictions, the only thing ID can say is "evolution is wrong." This is why Intelligent Design is dismissed as a joke by virtually the entire scientific community.
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I disagree. For the record, I've used Macs since the Mac Plus, and I have no Windows habits to overcome. But I've also in the past used utilities that made all corners draggable on the Mac, and I find it a decided convenience. Yes, it's something I only used occasionally, but on those occasions, I really appreciated it. Yes, most of the time it is because an app isn't handling its windows properly, but that is beside the point. My preferred implementation would be to keep the windows looking as they do, but if I hold down the option key and hover the pointer over a window edge or corner, the pointer should turn to a resize icon, allowing me to resize the window from that point.
Just an anecdote, but I've spent far more on TV shows this year on iTunes than I ever did on music.
Me too. I see no point in buying DRM'd music when I can pick up a used CD for about the same price and rip it myself (and have a back up copy to re-rip at a higher bit rate once disk space gets cheaper).
But a TV show I'm going to delete anyway once I've watched, so I don't care about DRM. And for $2, it's worth it just to save the inconvenience of searching out a torrent.
Right. That would be as crazy as giving iTunes the ability to rip DRM-free music from CDs.
TV shows compete with movies and other entertainments that advertise on TV.
But that is not the point. Every ad slot has a value, defined by what somebody else will pay to put an ad it it. If a network puts its own ads in that slot, they lose the money that slot would have delivered if sold to a 3rd party advertiser. The simplest way to manage this is simply for the network to assign itself a budget at the same rate that 3rd parties pay. Even though this is actually only moving money from one pocket to another, it provides a way for the network to keep track of and control what its own advertising is costing it.
Science has been wrong several times about climate change in the past few decades (The big chill never happened, and warming hasn't progressed nearly as quickly as was once predicted)
You need to be more careful whom you believe. There are a lot of lies being spread around, and these two statements are prime examples. There was never any scientific consensus predicting a "Big Chill" (the notion derives from an alarmist article in Newsweek, not the scientific literature). And the warming rate is well within the range of uncertainty of previous predictions.
Don't do science a disservice and proclaim an end to debate. One of the key tenets of science is that very few things are absolute, and our knowledge of climate certainly isn't one of them. As often as science has proved itself wrong in the past, to proclaim an end to debate over a subject like global climate change and declare once side to be fact is to spit in the face of science.
Science is always open to revision. It is quite clear that our knowledge of gravity is not absolute, and perhaps it never will be. But that doesn't mean that it is not irresponsible and dishonest to suggest to somebody that he shouldn't worry about the cliff edge that he is heading towards, because we have not reached "an end to debate" on the subject or gravity.
No, consensus is not proof. But when there is a scientific consensus, it means that you shouldn't reject that conclusion unless you have taken the time and trouble to master the scientific literature on the subject at a level comparable to that of a professional scientist working in that field. It also means that anybody who tries to tell you that the conclusion is obviously wrong because of some basic error or overlooked bit of data is almost certainly trying to pull a fast one on you.
Controversial because it implies that species may be able to subconsciously choose which feature is 'evolved' to be the dominant factor.
No, it implies no such thing. Behavior is a genetically regulated trait, just like leg length. So some anoles have genes that make them spend more time in the trees, while others make them spend more time lower down. Selection by predation alters the proportion of the genes.
What is more interesting about the article is that the long-legged phenotype first increased, then decreased. It might be that tree climbing required two genetic differences: short legs and a behavioral preference for trees, and that the population with both traits was smaller than the population with long legs. So initially, the long-legged variants predominated, because they did better than the short-legged non-tree preferring phenotype. But with a round of reproduction, the greater advantage of the short-limbed, tree preferring phenotype enabled them to overtake the long-legged anoles.
Immediately convened the first of a series of weekly high level meetings with the President, Richard Clarke, and the heads of both the CIA and FBI to review intelligence and discuss coordination of information gathering and surveillance of terrorist suspects. Followed through on the recommendations of Clarke to continue the efforts to strike bin Laden and al Qaeda assets begun during the Clinton administration.
Hey, this isn't exactly rocket science.
Certainly, a theory has to be consistent with what is already known, and explaining something that was previously unexplained increases interest in a theory--if it is a theory with a modest number of degrees of freedom. But even with General Relativity, it was tests of the theory's predictions that really convinced people that it was on the right track.
This is sheer nonsense. Every scientific theory makes a huge number of untestable predictions. For example, atomic theory predicts that every bit of matter, everywhere in the universe, is made of atoms. Almost of that matter is inaccessible, and untestable. Gravitational theory predict that all the motion of all masses everywhere in the universe, is described by the same mathematical law. Again, almost all of them (an infinite number if the universe is infinite) are inaccessible and untestable. So comparing the "count" of untestable predictions is nonsensical, and has nothing to do with Occam's Razor, which relates, not to the number of untestable predictions, but to the number of degrees of freedom (i.e. adjustable parameters) that a theory offers. So an infinitely powerful supernatural being has an infinite number of degrees of freedom, because there are no constraints whatsoever on what it could do, and Occam's Razor will always lead us to prefer a hypothesis with a finite number of degrees of freedom over completely unconstrained "supernatural" hypotheses. The less constrained a hypothesis is, the harder it is to find testable predictions, and a completely unconstrained hypothesis makes no testable predictions at all.
The disappointment with string theory is that it seems to have a huge number of degrees of freedom, so many that nobody has managed to come up with testable predictions. So technically, it is still mathematics rather than a mature scientific theory. Of course, many theories go through such a stage, but eventually ways are found to derive predictions. But of course, string theory may just turn out to be a "dry hole," with too many degrees of freedom to be of any use.
If a theory tells you what you already know to be true, then it is a retrodiction, not a prediction. There is a good reason why scientists demand that theories make predictions: A theory with a sufficient number of degrees of freedom can be made to fit any data set. For example, a polynomial of degree n can always be made to exactly fit n + 1 data points, yet may be completely unable to predict what happens between those data points.
The 25% who cheat are devaluing the efforts of the 75% who do not. Moreover, a school that fails to exercise due diligence against its students is cheating those students who cheat and get away from it. An important mission of college and high school is to teach students that the consequences of plagiarism are catastrophic. It is important that they learn this while they are in school where the worst that can happen is usually a failing grade. In the professional world the consequences of plagiarism are often the end of a career and permanent damage to one's reputation
I don't know if Shadow of the Colossus is comparable to Leaves of Grass or Citizen Kane, but I'd certainly put PacMan on the same level with a Warhol soup can.
You aren't thinking like a corporate lawyer:
"It's our IP. If somebody wants to use it, they should pay us for a license. A lot. If we let somebody use our IP for free, then why should anybody pay us for it? Maybe somebody, someday, would have wanted to pay us to do this, but they won't because we let somebody else do it for free! Or maybe we might want to do it ourselves, but nobody will buy it because it's already been done (probably not, but why risk it when we aren't getting paid?)"
Generally, in university classes, attendance is not required. Students by this time are presumed to be adults, and are expected to be responsible enough to manage their own learning. Lectures are a service provided to them to aid in their learning, a service that they are paying for. If a student is able to learn the material well enough to pass the exam without coming to my lecture, that's fine with me.
There are some exceptions, such as seminar classes in which the student is expected to contribute to the learning environment, but for a large, lecture-hall style lecture, I'd say distribute the podcasts as soon as possible, and don't worry about it if the students choose to watch the podcast instead of coming to class. If a student is allowed to skip lectures and just read the textbook, why should a podcast be treated any differently than a text?
I love it, but in many ways it perpetuates a misleading notion of the way the nanoscale machinery of a cell behaves. For example, it looks as if the growing microtubule is actually attracting tubulin monomers, when the reality is that they are bouncing around randomly until they happen to encounter the growing end of the microtubule. I can certainly understand why they've chosen to do this; if they were to display tubulin molecules at a realistic concentration and moving at a realistic speed relative to the rate of growth of the microfilament, it would probably look like you were in the middle of a swarm of angry bees, and you wouldn't be able to see what was going on. Still, it would be nice to see an occasional tubulin monomer bind and then dissociate, for example. And of course, all of the protein molecules look too rigid. If you've ever seen a molecular dynamics simulation of a protein, you know that they should be wiggling like they're made of jello. The robotic-looking movement of the kinesin molecule, resembling one of the animated brooms from Fantasia, is particularly misleading. It's unfortunate to see the the two-steps-forward-one-step-back Brownian nature of molecular interactions sacrificed, because one of the most remarkable things about biochemistry is the yin-yang way that apparently purposive behavior emerges out of randomness, two things that many people mistakenly imagine to be in opposition.
Not true if you measure length of evolutionary history by the only evolutionarily relevant scale--number of generations. By that scale, microorganisms are many, many orders of magnitude older than we are.
They are certainly more highly evolved. Many bacteria have a generation time of under an hour, so they evolve fast. Probably every vertebrate protein family was originally invented by some short generation organism, with just minor tweaks since them.
So we vertebrates are running Genome v. 3.5432, while bacteria are running Genome v. 453256.124
Let me admit that I'm actually having a good time playing N3. While at the outset you can plow through hordes of enemies by random button mashing, some attention becomes necessary at later levels as power ups get scarce. Some combos work better than others in certain situations, and most have a window of vulnerability.
What I really miss is the strategic element of the Dynasty Warriors series. In Dynasty Warriors, you have to decide whether to go after the enemy generals, close the enemy reinforcement gates, attack the enemy leader, defend your generals, or defend your leader. N3 is almost completely linear, with few choice points. Plow through grunts, fight a boss, do it again. And no save points, so if you fall to the last boss, it's repeat the whole mess. That can get old fast.
Still, the game is undeniably beautiful. There are none of the fog or draw-in problems of the Dynasty Warriors series on XBox or PS2 (I understand that there's an XBox 360 DW title, but it's not really next generation, with only modest improvements). It's great to see 2 or 3 dozen enemies and friends on the screen at once, each apparently acting independently (although the game takes care to space them out a bit to limit what it has to deal with). Still, there are some wild melees. Perhaps fortunately, you can't hit your allies; you can charge through a crowd of friends, staff swinging wildly, and nobody but the bad guys will get a bump on the noggin. Characters are beautiful, and whereas every battle in DW seems to take place on a blasted plain, some of the N3 battles occur in lush forrest settings (although curiously "dead"--as you charge through the forest, weapon flailing, not a leaf or frond stirs in response to your passing). However, while the levels are big, and often with long sightlines, you are still constrained to well defined paths, and frequently you are unaccountably barred from going in a direction that appears passable.
The game succeeds mostly on flash. It is one of the first 360 titles that really screams "next generation." For now, it's fun--in 6 months, the sharp graphics and high character count will be old hat, and nobody will be interested in playing such a crude beat-em-up
It's not as if this is something new. The police have always been able to use information obtained from private citizens that would not have been legal for them to acquire themselves. If no catastrophic consequences have arisen from slipping down that "slippery slope" by now, maybe it's not really all that slippery.
Since the hacker clearly had access to the computer, the only chance the police will have of getting a conviction is developing evidence that is not derived from that computer.
In science, the word "proof" is used in its older sense of "test," as in "proving ground," not in the mathematical sense of absolute proof. A scientific theory can be proved to be wrong, but it can never be proved to be true. It is always possible that some future observation will crop up that is inconsistent with a theory. Moreover, there is always an infinite number of more complex theories that is equally compatible with any set of observations. Science follows the procedure of "Occam's Razor," accepting the simplest scientific theory (the one with fewest degrees of freedom) that is consistent with a body of observations until such time as additional evidence requires that theory be discarded in favor of a more complex theory.
Hardly. Evolutionary theory is perhaps the most thoroughly proved (in the scientific, not the mathematical sense) theory in all of science, and certainly in biology. There is a huge mass of evidence supporting the theory, which is increasing at an exponential rate now that it has become possible to do large-scale genome sequencing. Every time DNA from another species is sequenced, it is an additional test of the theory. So all of the proof of evolutionary theory would run to hundreds of thousands of pages. Here is a summary that barely scratches the surface
No, the goalposts of science are in the same place they've always been. In science, there is no such thing as absolute proof. Rather, predictions are derived from the theory and then tested by experiment or observation. Theory testing is an ongoing process. Species being the smallest phylogenetic distinction, it was indeed predicted from the theory that it should be possible to occasionally observe speciation in the wild. And indeed, this turned out to be correct. There are now numerous examples of speciation
I think that there are some fairly serious problems with this entire field of videogame violence studies, which has been characterized by some of the sloppiest, most overinterpreted "science" that I have ever seen. Dr. Thompson is far from the worst offender. The main problem with her work is that it utilizes an arbitrary, unvalidated definition of "violence." If she wishes to relate here work to the studies that purport to detect harmful effects of videogame violence, then she certainly needs to establish in some rigorous way that what she calls "violence" is in some sense comparable to what these studies are examining. (those studies are mostly pretty bad, too, but that is another issue).
Stanton's point that Thompson's classification system yields high violence scores for games that most people, and most parents, would not consider to be particularly violent is a perfectly valid criticism, and her defense, which was essentially "we aren't using it for those games" simply dodges the issue. Given that her criteria are clearly misleading for some games, how does she decide which games it can validly be applied to. I think that it is highly irresponsible for her to report her %violence measures to Congress without properly explaining the criteria she used for classification (saying that it's in her papers is hardly adequate here, considering that her audience is most certainly not going to be reading those papers). Frankly, it seems highly questionable to me whether Dr. Thompson's studies have any value at all. I thought that her defense of classifying Pac-Man as violent was particularly revealing:
What I find notable here is that she seems to have made no effort to actually determine whether many--or indeed, any--young children actually interpret Winky, Blinky, et al. in Pac-Man as "ghosts trying to kill you" or are actually frightened by the game. This kind of uncritical thinking seems representative of her approach.
I should note, however, that her actual recommendations to Congress seem fairly reasonable. She suggests, for example, that ESRB members should actually play the games, hardly a radical suggestion. And somewhat ironically, she suggests that they should do what she failed to do herself in her testimony--"make its rating process and the terms that it uses in its ratings more
transparent."
You are correct that the Creationist/ID gang has now moved the goal posts--and moved them to an indeterminate point at that. This way, no matter how big a change scientists observe, they can come back with, "That's not completely different enough, we mean bigger than that." Since extreme evolutionary change takes thousands if not millions of years, they are now safe from all challenges. From the point of view of propaganda, this is a clever move. Of course, from the point of view of science, it further discredits Creationism/ID. Indeed, "Intelligent Design" is much less scientific that classical Creationism. The original Creationists were sincere and confident enough in their beliefs to actually make predictions. Unfortunately, most of them turned out to be wrong. So ID has been cast in the vaguest possible terms, "Some intelligent entity (we can't say what) at some time (we can't say when) contributed some degree of design (we can't say how or why) to life." While the original Creationism made predictions, the only thing ID can say is "evolution is wrong." This is why Intelligent Design is dismissed as a joke by virtually the entire scientific community.