When you get a paper accepted into a journal, you have to sign a copyright transfer form (if you're the first author; you do this on behalf of ALL the authors). This implies that you have ownership of the copyright, right?
So if they try and argue that they *own* your work, find papers written by lotsa big cheeses in your university / college, then say "well how did these guys transfer copyright to the journal?" - it must have been done since its published in the jounral.
You might be failing to distinguish between
1) the university owning your work
2) The university taking the right to a non-exclusive, perpetual license to your work, with no restrictions on subsequent sale and sub-licensing.
Certainly Cambridge University asserts the second right, and requires you to grant them such a license as a condition of study. They can legitimately claim to be doing this to secure dissemination rights into the public domain, while maintaining the legal ability to persue plagiarisers and unlicensed commercial exploiters. Of course, this also means they can syndicate to subscription services, as I know many US colleges do. Whether you think this is right is another issue.
But - if they are asserting the second right, there's nothing to stop you GPL-ing your work for public use, and forking the code yourself by making enhancements after that date that leaves the uni marooned. But as it stands they can still sell the original to M$FT. Remember though - so can you.
Digital would never have done this on their own, but now they're orphans in Compaq fighting for survival in the big bad consumer co, all the DEC unix boys are getting all open on us.
Remember OpenVMS still lives, barely. Lotsa big bad science people use 'cause its stable - when beamtime costs you millions an hour, you kinda want a stable OS. So (I beleive) being bought by Compaq has brought the Tru64 unix boys out of the closet. They can make suggestions and decisions now, in a way the old DEC culture never allowed them to.
Remember they have those nice testdrive accounts... some pretty nify machines. Real handy if you need some CPU cycles for free, say for inverting huge matrices (FEM-type stuff).
So, oddly, Campaq buying DEC is turning into a good thing (TM). Eventually Tru64 may merge into the Linux or FreeBSD kernels, the same way IRIX and Solaris are slowly going.
One comment is that (we) in the scientific community have been very slow to collaborate on bits of software. For example simple things often get re-implemented (badly) by students and postdocs all the time, whereas if people in each subject area actually made of concerted architechting effort, then everybody could hang their latest scheme off of the OO core that did (for example) the i/o and all that stuff. Also academics often get hung up over distributing source and so on, because they compete. As a community, we need to learn from the work we've done on OS in the last two decades.
Also can I make a plea: Bob von Dreele: release GSAS source please! Somebody release NASTRAN source! John Goldak et al, please release your codes so somebody might actualy use them one day!
Grad student accommodation. Most U of Camb-owned student accomodation have ethernet connections coming out of their ears.
Being a grad student in the UK may suck dick in many ways, but there are fringe benefits in Cambridge like cheap accomodation, cheap food and living close to town that make it bearable. And you get a great degree in a short space of time compared to the US or the rest of Europe. On the other hand the pay is terrible and you have to work like a dog.
first off - I submitted this about 26 hours ago. Why is it *more* relevant now that its old news? (Go on...moderate me down!)
However, if you go looking there are lots of problems.
1. Its vapour over much of the country until up to 2002. (I live in Cambridge, so I'm covered, but on the other hand I already have a nice ethernet connection to JANET in my flat)
2. You have to have a BT phone line. I don't know many people who have those - everybody has a mobile or a phone from the cable company. Make that ~600pounds + 17.5%VAT a year. Thats about 1000USD a year!
3. They want you to only use one computer. _laugh_, that takes all of an old 486 to sort out + your favourite OS and presto! Instant gateway hiding as many machines as you like. Ethernet routers aren't even expensive these days.
4. The whole WIN/Mac thing! Again, I'm sure that'll be easy to get around.
But still, better than nothing I guess. NB The chip off the old monolith has got one of the 5 3rd gen mobile phone licenses as of today. NB2 They seem to be under the delusion that people will use the portal they're putting together with it. And a POP3 email holder. And webspace. I can get all these for free!
What I really want to know is... do we have linux drivers for whatever USB ethernet box they're using????????
Love the book! Coffee table book idea definitely rocks.
You do a nice job of extolling the virtues of your ACS, especially since there is now an unencumbered version. Excluding things like the hosting offer you make in the book, would you like to discuss the relative merits of ACS vs slashcode?
Unencumbered version of ACS, ACS itself. Also you say (in the book) that you mirror to above.net, but it doesn't look that way from tracerouting photo.net - do you still do that? Finally, as a UK-type person, love the stand on tuition fees at MIT, not many people have the moral courage.
This long-running case may be overturned on appeal anyway. However, the governement's falling over itself to be nice to ISPs, so it'll probably legislate to protect them if the precedent is set by the courts. ----------------- Also, Tim, get a grip on your English / British distinctions. The British Broadcasting Corporation, which is state-run, covers news in the separate legal jurisdications of Scotland and "England & Wales". The British parliament in London has recently set up subsidiary parliaments in Scotland and Wales, but there is no English subsidiary. Its not terribly important, just irritating.:-)
What! Why did I even read this? Who is this person. Why has this been posted? Its a terrible thing to put up. This has been addressed, done to death, its one of the BIG FEARs about adoption of an open source program. Eric Raymond, www.tuxedo.org. Richard Stallman, www.fsf.org Bruce Perens et al., www.opensource.org
Its just wasting all of our time to hash over this again in a no-cluebie forum.
If all the copyright holders (i.e. ALL the authors) get together, then they can decide to make a non-free version of the program, since it's their property, under ANY license.
But as the number of authors tends to infinity, the difficulty of doing this, even if the others are willing to re-code the "non-content's" work, becomes too great to be practical. Some fraction of the authors will object. So sendmail, the linux kernel, etc. are probably safe.
On the other hand, Mozilla intentionally isn't safe, neither is anything done under Sun's "Community License", or anything under the old X license. This is because those licenses intentionally allow the license writer to allow or make closed binaries that may be derivative works.
The idea in Mozilla's case is that Netscape/AOL/Time/Warner can make and fork their own proprietry browsers and sell them based on your improvements. On the other hand this is not such a bad deal, because by far the greatest part of the code is theirs anyway, and they're giving it to us to play with for free.
The BSD license is also slightly suspect this way, I think, but the real-world risk of it happening with any major project approaches zero (I hope).
However, the upside is that once an open source licensed piece of code is out there and mirrored widely, that version at least will always be there, propagating through the general population. So the effort to fork will only work if the proprietry system is *much* better, which is for well known reasons unlikely.
Go see ESR's work on this stuff at tuxedo.org. Its good and clear.
There is also a requirement for the copyright office to examine the impact of Section 1201(g) of the DMCA on "encrytion research" within one year of enaction.
Note comments must be in an acceptable format: PDF appears to be acceptable (and can be made from LaTeX, everybody's favourite wordprocessor, and other wordprocessors that everybody loves to hate).
I'd also strongly recommend reading the Act itself: DMCA
The Times was, a very long time ago, the paper of the elite in the UK. Then Murdoch bought it and took it downmarket in the search for sales after its traditional userbase migrated to the Telegraph / FT / Independent / Guardian.
Hence they're a bit clueless now. This story has been going for a few days in the UK, but no details are apparent, no arrests have been made, no evidence shown. I'm sure somebody has made some threats, but then there's always somebody out there who'll make threats.
Interestingly, the UK government has laws going through, as I'm sure everybody knows, that would allow law enforcement to demand encryption keys from anyone without the need for judicial oversight or reasonable grounds, and also to then require you not to tell anyone. I'm sure the promulgation of stories like this one is supported by the agencies that stand to benefit.
Basically the question we're asking is this: Which way works best, 1) do both the maths and the real world example (physics, signal conditioning, mechanics, psychophysics, whatever) at the same time, 2) do the maths then the physics, 3) do the physics, then the maths?
I agree that (2) is harder than (1), and duller if you don't have good teachers. The UK used to do (1), more or less. Now in schools it is doing (3), which is making teaching at universities horrible. I don't think (3) can work at all, it just seems insane.
Sometimes there does have to be a gap, though, of up to 6months (guess). Bedding-in the maths concept in order to make the physics concept easier to deal with is very valid. On the other hand I always found stats easier with a biomedical example.
The other comment I woudl have is that you can use a simple example in the maths class to bed down the idea, but still treat it as just maths. This means you don't have to deal with rearranging you're world view at the same time as building your mathematical toolkit. The toolkit's just a neat collection of methods for solving funky non-obivous problems quickly. You just nead an inspired and widely-read teacher with a few examples from different fields for each problem. Most teachers aren't inspired. That's the root issue. Matrices are a classic example of a concept where solving systems of linear equations by matrix inversion / mulitplication has sooo many real-world applications that could be used with kids. [Like: think of a linear series of springs of different stiffnesses connecting a series of points. Whats the force on the points? Its easy with matrices.] [Like: Chris Hillmans Brand switching in Economics demonstration of matrix linear systems, which also happen to be Markov Chains, see http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/PUB/mark ov.ps ] [Like: Fourier Transforms. Not easy to deal with on their own, but removing mains interference with a transform is a classic example of where it's useful that only requires a mV signal, an aerial, an oscilloscope, a PC and MathLab to demonstrate (about $2000 worth of equipment, all of it very useful in any school). Who am I kidding - schools are never going to teach integral transforms.]
I meant *in schools*, sorry for the confusion. In terms of method at UK universities, I have no real complaints. I was doing three things at once when I tpyed it, and it was late.
Getting back to the whinge - I just don't see that the current state of GCSE actually promotes public understanding of science. It kind of hero-worships these geeks-as-gods "scientists", somewhat unhelpfully I feel. I mean if you go look at the syllabuses (e.g. find UCLES via www.cam.ac.uk), you find that there's a lot about the morality of science, pseudo-science environmentalism and very little actual conceptual work, because it would be "too hard". I mean these guys are talking about having to explain inversion (1/x) graphically in the new AS level for gods' sake.
At the same time we have the media going ballistic over trivial risks, backed up by a government that refuses to tell it like it is. It may have been a media fiasco, but you had to admire John Major over the Brent Spar thing - he stood by the detailed scientific advice, got burned because of it but was in the end vindicated. People need to understand uncertainty and risk better. Telling them that "The men in white coats know everything and can solve everything, but they're on another planet and, by the way, they'd like to experiment with "frankenstein foods" and nuclear reactors in your back yard. Oh yeah and, whoops, they don't care about *your* safety." just doesn't seem very positive, and that's the message in the school curiculum now. If the scientific method (e.g. hypothesis testing) was properly taught together with a good understanding of probability, risk assessment and the value-free point of view about consequences of understanding, all of these problems would disappear over time.
I just wonder if it wouldn't be better just to forget the whole thing certainly until GCSE and teach more maths and the philosophy of science (ie the scientific method) instead. Trying to do phyiscal science without maths just seems horribly inefficient. Think of maths like a well-developed if quirky language for expressing relationships between variables and manipulating them. Doing it with graphs and hand-waving just intoduces potential confusion. As an example, the Egytians miscalculated the volume of a pyramid because of a geometric misconception that is quite subtle (Not that I'm disputing the power of a geometric analysis of certain types of problems, but my point is that having a notation that you understand to manipulate concepts makes life soo much easier).
You have to remember that basically we all do it for the fun of it. There's no reason not to have the same expenses expectation of a business, liike they give you a portable to help you do your work like an accountancy firm, consultancy or merchant bank.
Obviously raising money for one purpose and spending it on another is reprehensible, but I think that's unusual. In terms of course fees, It's also true that students are charged for an economic good, and if they think that service is worth the money, they'll pay. If you insist on having a commercial education system as a country, that's what you get.
On the other hand it is dubious to me about the way large facilities funding gets allocated (eg accelerators, telescopes etc). Basically famous professors x,y and z write a proposal saying "give me a new toy, it'll be great for this, that and the other reason". Then their mates in other universities, countries and companies write in and say "x,y and z are right, it'd be really cool". It costs their mates nothing, they have to make no committments to the project, so of course they'd say that. But on the other hand, how is the government supposed to evaluate the work? It has to rely on us to be honest, which we are, mostly.
We would be more honest if anybody actually gave a damn. Between indifference and the low quality of TV news it is so hard to educate legislators and the public at large as to *why* project A would be useful we sometimes give up and just play the system the way everybody else does.
Its not really my field, but there are those who argue that the normal calculus we all learn at school and college / university is highly non-intuitive when applied to many physics problems, esp. General Relativity, forming the Schrodinger wavefunciton and electromagnetic field equations.
It is advocated that that people might be re-taught to use Clifford Algebras (e.g. Geometric Algebra) when they get to university. People would find it hard at first, but then it would make everything after that easier, or at least so it is alleged.
To find out more go to: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~clifford/ or get the general paper "Imaginary Numbers are Not Real" by Gull, Lasenby and Doran. http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~clifford/publication/ ps/imag_numbs.ps.gz
It might, especially at the "special schools" mentioned in the article, be worth teaching this in schools. I'm not even sure its worth teaching phyiscs in the traditional sense at schools - and looking at US Physics 101 textbooks I'm not sure that much is taught. A philosophy and implications of science course might be better. The scientific method is appallingly taught, at least in the UK (IMHO).
While I'm here I might as well mention that I don't agree with Lederman - as someone who's probably about to leave science research I *do* believe there are problems in science, epecially in the UK, because it is underpaid and underrespected. In the US you get much better facilities and about 2-3 times the pay in real terms. This means you'd have to have a bullet in the head not to either go to the US to do your research or move to Finance / Wall St.
Cambridge University (UK) started this in around 1994, and completed in 1997. I've been living with this since 1996. However, the "loss of life" hasn't really happened, possibly apart from Quake.
We also don't really have the heavy-handed sysadmin issues a lot of US colleges seem to have, although our Computing Service are in theory pretty draconian. Maybe people here just accept the AUP's, at least as far as they relate to bandwidth hogging, spamming and central systems.
The filter of grads into places like BT and Cambridge-area tech businesses has hastened ADSL and always-on fixed fee type arrangements by the telcos, which are *finally* coming to the UK now.
If you check around the contrib files you find there are a lot of Cambridge people working on OSS projects like Debian, probably because of the access they get.
The thing is that in general the lusers now coming in don't get beyond M$ cluelessness in their knowledge and ability. A few years ago, if you wanted to email, you *had* to learn a little *nix, so even arts students knew some. A lot of people aren't progressing beyond the GUI now. This is an underplayed issue, I think - the day is coming where you really will need a computer science or computer engineering (shudder) degree to learn how systems work. Do people think this fear is correct?
Uhhh... I just read a link to the RHS rulebook, and its like, really extreme. Is this really normal??? Dress codes specifying shorts with inches abovethe knee??? In the UK they gave up with this kind of stuff in the 80's, by and large, because the teachers could never keep up with the kids (including me).
Now of course, the UK is at the forefront of american-isation (anglo-saxon imperialism, laissez faire, whatever..), and I would applaud French ideals in this area (lets not forget where the idea of civil rights came from), but even Tony Blair wouldn't dare go this far for police powers, let alone those of teachers.
Everybody wearing a barcode with their SSN... ohmygod. Even working for the nuclear company wasn't that bad, and they had good cause. In Europe you can walk into most nuclear facilities with less security, and I'm talking neutron beams here! Other posters may comment about swedes and their person numbers, but the thing is, the idea hat someone might abuse them is a *lot* less credbile in Sweden, I mean these guys are just ludicrously polite. This kind of attitude, at a school, is tantamount to child abuse. It just minimises peoples expectations of their fellow man, and impoverishes society at large.
In European institutions that try to implement something scary out of administrative convenience, they would not have the efficiency to be really scary (I'm thinking especially of universities here).
But seriously, we need to effect a CULTURAL CHANGE here. That's the social engineering project, but the question is, how do we do it?
Some ideas: 1) Be cool to eachother 2) Live with the inexcusable, on the understanding that, in the end, you'll get everything that's coming to you, and so will everybody else. 3) Express incredulity at this kind of behaviour, not acceptance, make your views known, and then POLITELY switch to an alternative if available, or create one if not. (ie cost them face) 4) Live your ideals, and encourage others in them and to follow them (without evangelising).
Anyvody else got any positive ideas for "liberalising" the situation?
What's the likelihood of StarOffice (or KOffice) ever getting as far as XML, in anybody's opinion? could be nice if it did. Anybody close to the development team out there?
Might it do TeX/LaTeX conversion as well as M$Word, which would be really nifty? (for a start I could save a bunch of time on reformatting stuff other people give me).
Is the spreadsheet up to scratch yet? I'm not talking about all the graphics and macros stuff, just a good symoblic maths spreadsheet for manipulating data before feeding into gnuplot.
Last time I looked (admittedly a few years ago) it was pretty terrible, and I vowed never to go near it again. Also, it keeps popping up on different OSes as the M$Office killer, and always kinda fades.... so before I go install it and forsake xemacs can anybody tell me if its good and stable and nice?
(e.g. embedded graphics boxes and playing nice with them, cross references, indexing and numbering)(and lets keep on topic and not tell me about other software we all already know about but don't use)
Slashdot Mirror
Flag: IANAL & from UK.
When you get a paper accepted into a journal, you have to sign a copyright transfer form (if you're the first author; you do this on behalf of ALL the authors). This implies that you have ownership of the copyright, right?
So if they try and argue that they *own* your work, find papers written by lotsa big cheeses in your university / college, then say "well how did these guys transfer copyright to the journal?" - it must have been done since its published in the jounral.
You might be failing to distinguish between
1) the university owning your work
2) The university taking the right to a non-exclusive, perpetual license to your work, with no restrictions on subsequent sale and sub-licensing.
Certainly Cambridge University asserts the second right, and requires you to grant them such a license as a condition of study. They can legitimately claim to be doing this to secure dissemination rights into the public domain, while maintaining the legal ability to persue plagiarisers and unlicensed commercial exploiters. Of course, this also means they can syndicate to subscription services, as I know many US colleges do. Whether you think this is right is another issue.
But - if they are asserting the second right, there's nothing to stop you GPL-ing your work for public use, and forking the code yourself by making enhancements after that date that leaves the uni marooned. But as it stands they can still sell the original to M$FT. Remember though - so can you.
Dave (waiting for thesis viva-man)
Digital would never have done this on their own, but now they're orphans in Compaq fighting for survival in the big bad consumer co, all the DEC unix boys are getting all open on us.
... some pretty nify machines. Real handy if you need some CPU cycles for free, say for inverting huge matrices (FEM-type stuff).
Remember OpenVMS still lives, barely. Lotsa big bad science people use 'cause its stable - when beamtime costs you millions an hour, you kinda want a stable OS. So (I beleive) being bought by Compaq has brought the Tru64 unix boys out of the closet. They can make suggestions and decisions now, in a way the old DEC culture never allowed them to.
Remember they have those nice testdrive accounts
So, oddly, Campaq buying DEC is turning into a good thing (TM). Eventually Tru64 may merge into the Linux or FreeBSD kernels, the same way IRIX and Solaris are slowly going.
Go Compaq Go!
One comment is that (we) in the scientific community have been very slow to collaborate on bits of software. For example simple things often get re-implemented (badly) by students and postdocs all the time, whereas if people in each subject area actually made of concerted architechting effort, then everybody could hang their latest scheme off of the OO core that did (for example) the i/o and all that stuff. Also academics often get hung up over distributing source and so on, because they compete. As a community, we need to learn from the work we've done on OS in the last two decades.
Also can I make a plea: Bob von Dreele: release GSAS source please! Somebody release NASTRAN source! John Goldak et al, please release your codes so somebody might actualy use them one day!
No: Oxford did not do the right thing. A reasonable interpretation of the Janet Acceptable Use Policy should not be subject to executive fiat.
No: students do pay for their access, via tuition fees and connection charge (or haven't you been awake for the last 5 years).
Go read the Janet AUP. Go learn about freedom of speech, expression and academic discourse. Get with the program!
Being a grad student in the UK may suck dick in many ways, but there are fringe benefits in Cambridge like cheap accomodation, cheap food and living close to town that make it bearable. And you get a great degree in a short space of time compared to the US or the rest of Europe. On the other hand the pay is terrible and you have to work like a dog.
However, if you go looking there are lots of problems.
1. Its vapour over much of the country until up to 2002. (I live in Cambridge, so I'm covered, but on the other hand I already have a nice ethernet connection to JANET in my flat)
2. You have to have a BT phone line. I don't know many people who have those - everybody has a mobile or a phone from the cable company. Make that ~600pounds + 17.5%VAT a year. Thats about 1000USD a year!
3. They want you to only use one computer. _laugh_, that takes all of an old 486 to sort out + your favourite OS and presto! Instant gateway hiding as many machines as you like. Ethernet routers aren't even expensive these days.
4. The whole WIN/Mac thing! Again, I'm sure that'll be easy to get around.
But still, better than nothing I guess. NB The chip off the old monolith has got one of the 5 3rd gen mobile phone licenses as of today. NB2 They seem to be under the delusion that people will use the portal they're putting together with it. And a POP3 email holder. And webspace. I can get all these for free!
What I really want to know is... do we have linux drivers for whatever USB ethernet box they're using????????
Love the book! Coffee table book idea definitely rocks.
You do a nice job of extolling the virtues of your ACS, especially since there is now an unencumbered version. Excluding things like the hosting offer you make in the book, would you like to discuss the relative merits of ACS vs slashcode?
Unencumbered version of ACS, ACS itself. Also you say (in the book) that you mirror to above.net, but it doesn't look that way from tracerouting photo.net - do you still do that? Finally, as a UK-type person, love the stand on tuition fees at MIT, not many people have the moral courage.
This long-running case may be overturned on appeal anyway. However, the governement's falling over itself to be nice to ISPs, so it'll probably legislate to protect them if the precedent is set by the courts. :-)
-----------------
Also, Tim, get a grip on your English / British distinctions. The British Broadcasting Corporation, which is state-run, covers news in the separate legal jurisdications of Scotland and "England & Wales". The British parliament in London has recently set up subsidiary parliaments in Scotland and Wales, but there is no English subsidiary. Its not terribly important, just irritating.
What! Why did I even read this? Who is this person. Why has this been posted? Its a terrible thing to put up. This has been addressed, done to death, its one of the BIG FEARs about adoption of an open source program.
:-)
Eric Raymond, www.tuxedo.org.
Richard Stallman, www.fsf.org
Bruce Perens et al., www.opensource.org
Its just wasting all of our time to hash over this again in a no-cluebie forum.
Go on, make my day, call this a troll.
If all the copyright holders (i.e. ALL the authors) get together, then they can decide to make a non-free version of the program, since it's their property, under ANY license.
But as the number of authors tends to infinity, the difficulty of doing this, even if the others are willing to re-code the "non-content's" work, becomes too great to be practical. Some fraction of the authors will object. So sendmail, the linux kernel, etc. are probably safe.
On the other hand, Mozilla intentionally isn't safe, neither is anything done under Sun's "Community License", or anything under the old X license. This is because those licenses intentionally allow the license writer to allow or make closed binaries that may be derivative works.
The idea in Mozilla's case is that Netscape/AOL/Time/Warner can make and fork their own proprietry browsers and sell them based on your improvements. On the other hand this is not such a bad deal, because by far the greatest part of the code is theirs anyway, and they're giving it to us to play with for free.
The BSD license is also slightly suspect this way, I think, but the real-world risk of it happening with any major project approaches zero (I hope).
However, the upside is that once an open source licensed piece of code is out there and mirrored widely, that version at least will always be there, propagating through the general population. So the effort to fork will only work if the proprietry system is *much* better, which is for well known reasons unlikely.
Go see ESR's work on this stuff at tuxedo.org. Its good and clear.
IANAL.
There is also a requirement for the copyright office to examine the impact of Section 1201(g) of the DMCA on "encrytion research" within one year of enaction.
They have a RFC here: US Patent Office Encryption Research RFC
Note comments must be in an acceptable format: PDF appears to be acceptable (and can be made from LaTeX, everybody's favourite wordprocessor, and other wordprocessors that everybody loves to hate).
I'd also strongly recommend reading the Act itself: DMCA
The Times was, a very long time ago, the paper of the elite in the UK. Then Murdoch bought it and took it downmarket in the search for sales after its traditional userbase migrated to the Telegraph / FT / Independent / Guardian.
Hence they're a bit clueless now. This story has been going for a few days in the UK, but no details are apparent, no arrests have been made, no evidence shown. I'm sure somebody has made some threats, but then there's always somebody out there who'll make threats.
Interestingly, the UK government has laws going through, as I'm sure everybody knows, that would allow law enforcement to demand encryption keys from anyone without the need for judicial oversight or reasonable grounds, and also to then require you not to tell anyone. I'm sure the promulgation of stories like this one is supported by the agencies that stand to benefit.
Basically the question we're asking is this:
k ov.ps
Which way works best,
1) do both the maths and the real world example (physics, signal conditioning, mechanics, psychophysics, whatever) at the same time,
2) do the maths then the physics,
3) do the physics, then the maths?
I agree that (2) is harder than (1), and duller if you don't have good teachers. The UK used to do (1), more or less. Now in schools it is doing (3), which is making teaching at universities horrible. I don't think (3) can work at all, it just seems insane.
Sometimes there does have to be a gap, though, of up to 6months (guess). Bedding-in the maths concept in order to make the physics concept easier to deal with is very valid. On the other hand I always found stats easier with a biomedical example.
The other comment I woudl have is that you can use a simple example in the maths class to bed down the idea, but still treat it as just maths. This means you don't have to deal with rearranging you're world view at the same time as building your mathematical toolkit. The toolkit's just a neat collection of methods for solving funky non-obivous problems quickly. You just nead an inspired and widely-read teacher with a few examples from different fields for each problem. Most teachers aren't inspired. That's the root issue. Matrices are a classic example of a concept where solving systems of linear equations by matrix inversion / mulitplication has sooo many real-world applications that could be used with kids.
[Like: think of a linear series of springs of different stiffnesses connecting a series of points. Whats the force on the points? Its easy with matrices.]
[Like: Chris Hillmans Brand switching in Economics demonstration of matrix linear systems, which also happen to be Markov Chains, see
http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/PUB/mar
]
[Like: Fourier Transforms. Not easy to deal with on their own, but removing mains interference with a transform is a classic example of where it's useful that only requires a mV signal, an aerial, an oscilloscope, a PC and MathLab to demonstrate (about $2000 worth of equipment, all of it very useful in any school). Who am I kidding - schools are never going to teach integral transforms.]
I meant *in schools*, sorry for the confusion. In terms of method at UK universities, I have no real complaints. I was doing three things at once when I tpyed it, and it was late.
Getting back to the whinge - I just don't see that the current state of GCSE actually promotes public understanding of science. It kind of hero-worships these geeks-as-gods "scientists", somewhat unhelpfully I feel. I mean if you go look at the syllabuses (e.g. find UCLES via www.cam.ac.uk), you find that there's a lot about the morality of science, pseudo-science environmentalism and very little actual conceptual work, because it would be "too hard". I mean these guys are talking about having to explain inversion (1/x) graphically in the new AS level for gods' sake.
At the same time we have the media going ballistic over trivial risks, backed up by a government that refuses to tell it like it is. It may have been a media fiasco, but you had to admire John Major over the Brent Spar thing - he stood by the detailed scientific advice, got burned because of it but was in the end vindicated. People need to understand uncertainty and risk better. Telling them that
"The men in white coats know everything and can solve everything, but they're on another planet and, by the way, they'd like to experiment with "frankenstein foods" and nuclear reactors in your back yard. Oh yeah and, whoops, they don't care about *your* safety."
just doesn't seem very positive, and that's the message in the school curiculum now. If the scientific method (e.g. hypothesis testing) was properly taught together with a good understanding of probability, risk assessment and the value-free point of view about consequences of understanding, all of these problems would disappear over time.
I just wonder if it wouldn't be better just to forget the whole thing certainly until GCSE and teach more maths and the philosophy of science (ie the scientific method) instead. Trying to do phyiscal science without maths just seems horribly inefficient. Think of maths like a well-developed if quirky language for expressing relationships between variables and manipulating them. Doing it with graphs and hand-waving just intoduces potential confusion. As an example, the Egytians miscalculated the volume of a pyramid because of a geometric misconception that is quite subtle (Not that I'm disputing the power of a geometric analysis of certain types of problems, but my point is that having a notation that you understand to manipulate concepts makes life soo much easier).
You have to remember that basically we all do it for the fun of it. There's no reason not to have the same expenses expectation of a business, liike they give you a portable to help you do your work like an accountancy firm, consultancy or merchant bank.
Obviously raising money for one purpose and spending it on another is reprehensible, but I think that's unusual. In terms of course fees, It's also true that students are charged for an economic good, and if they think that service is worth the money, they'll pay. If you insist on having a commercial education system as a country, that's what you get.
On the other hand it is dubious to me about the way large facilities funding gets allocated (eg accelerators, telescopes etc). Basically famous professors x,y and z write a proposal saying "give me a new toy, it'll be great for this, that and the other reason". Then their mates in other universities, countries and companies write in and say "x,y and z are right, it'd be really cool". It costs their mates nothing, they have to make no committments to the project, so of course they'd say that. But on the other hand, how is the government supposed to evaluate the work? It has to rely on us to be honest, which we are, mostly.
We would be more honest if anybody actually gave a damn. Between indifference and the low quality of TV news it is so hard to educate legislators and the public at large as to *why* project A would be useful we sometimes give up and just play the system the way everybody else does.
Its not really my field, but there are those who argue that the normal calculus we all learn at school and college / university is highly non-intuitive when applied to many physics problems, esp. General Relativity, forming the Schrodinger wavefunciton and electromagnetic field equations.
/ ps/imag_numbs.ps.gz
It is advocated that that people might be re-taught to use Clifford Algebras (e.g. Geometric Algebra) when they get to university. People would find it hard at first, but then it would make everything after that easier, or at least so it is alleged.
To find out more go to:
http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~clifford/
or get the general paper "Imaginary Numbers are Not Real" by Gull, Lasenby and Doran.
http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~clifford/publication
It might, especially at the "special schools" mentioned in the article, be worth teaching this in schools. I'm not even sure its worth teaching phyiscs in the traditional sense at schools - and looking at US Physics 101 textbooks I'm not sure that much is taught. A philosophy and implications of science course might be better. The scientific method is appallingly taught, at least in the UK (IMHO).
While I'm here I might as well mention that I don't agree with Lederman - as someone who's probably about to leave science research I *do* believe there are problems in science, epecially in the UK, because it is underpaid and underrespected. In the US you get much better facilities and about 2-3 times the pay in real terms. This means you'd have to have a bullet in the head not to either go to the US to do your research or move to Finance / Wall St.
Cambridge University (UK) started this in around 1994, and completed in 1997. I've been living with this since 1996. However, the "loss of life" hasn't really happened, possibly apart from Quake.
We also don't really have the heavy-handed sysadmin issues a lot of US colleges seem to have, although our Computing Service are in theory pretty draconian. Maybe people here just accept the AUP's, at least as far as they relate to bandwidth hogging, spamming and central systems.
The filter of grads into places like BT and Cambridge-area tech businesses has hastened ADSL and always-on fixed fee type arrangements by the telcos, which are *finally* coming to the UK now.
If you check around the contrib files you find there are a lot of Cambridge people working on OSS projects like Debian, probably because of the access they get.
The thing is that in general the lusers now coming in don't get beyond M$ cluelessness in their knowledge and ability. A few years ago, if you wanted to email, you *had* to learn a little *nix, so even arts students knew some. A lot of people aren't progressing beyond the GUI now. This is an underplayed issue, I think - the day is coming where you really will need a computer science or computer engineering (shudder) degree to learn how systems work. Do people think this fear is correct?
Uhhh... I just read a link to the RHS rulebook, and its like, really extreme. Is this really normal??? Dress codes specifying shorts with inches abovethe knee??? In the UK they gave up with this kind of stuff in the 80's, by and large, because the teachers could never keep up with the kids (including me).
Now of course, the UK is at the forefront of american-isation (anglo-saxon imperialism, laissez faire, whatever..), and I would applaud French ideals in this area (lets not forget where the idea of civil rights came from), but even Tony Blair wouldn't dare go this far for police powers, let alone those of teachers.
Everybody wearing a barcode with their SSN... ohmygod. Even working for the nuclear company wasn't that bad, and they had good cause. In Europe you can walk into most nuclear facilities with less security, and I'm talking neutron beams here! Other posters may comment about swedes and their person numbers, but the thing is, the idea hat someone might abuse them is a *lot* less credbile in Sweden, I mean these guys are just ludicrously polite. This kind of attitude, at a school, is tantamount to child abuse. It just minimises peoples expectations of their fellow man, and impoverishes society at large.
In European institutions that try to implement something scary out of administrative convenience, they would not have the efficiency to be really scary (I'm thinking especially of universities here).
But seriously, we need to effect a CULTURAL CHANGE here. That's the social engineering project, but the question is, how do we do it?
Some ideas:
1) Be cool to eachother
2) Live with the inexcusable, on the understanding that, in the end, you'll get everything that's coming to you, and so will everybody else.
3) Express incredulity at this kind of behaviour, not acceptance, make your views known, and then POLITELY switch to an alternative if available, or create one if not. (ie cost them face)
4) Live your ideals, and encourage others in them and to follow them (without evangelising).
Anyvody else got any positive ideas for "liberalising" the situation?
What's the likelihood of StarOffice (or KOffice) ever getting as far as XML, in anybody's opinion? could be nice if it did. Anybody close to the development team out there?
Might it do TeX/LaTeX conversion as well as M$Word, which would be really nifty? (for a start I could save a bunch of time on reformatting stuff other people give me).
Is the spreadsheet up to scratch yet? I'm not talking about all the graphics and macros stuff, just a good symoblic maths spreadsheet for manipulating data before feeding into gnuplot.
Last time I looked (admittedly a few years ago) it was pretty terrible, and I vowed never to go near it again. Also, it keeps popping up on different OSes as the M$Office killer, and always kinda fades.... so before I go install it and forsake xemacs can anybody tell me if its good and stable and nice?
(e.g. embedded graphics boxes and playing nice with them, cross references, indexing and numbering)(and lets keep on topic and not tell me about other software we all already know about but don't use)