The age of marriage in some US states is as low as 12 years.
That seems a bit low. According to http://www.coolnurse.com/marriage_laws.htm , the minimum age (without parental consent) is at least 18 in all states. With parental consent does seem to be significantly lower, though many states seem to require court approval or similar for people under 16.
In the "about us" link you find that "LoJack for Laptops" is made by http://www.absolute.com/ and that "Absolute's Computrace software is embedded in the BIOS of computers by global leaders, including Dell, Lenovo, Gateway, HP and Fujitsu, and the Company has reselling partnerships with these OEMs and others, including Apple, Sony and Toshiba."
A friend of mine recently got a position with Absolute in Vancouver BC, and according to him, one of their biggest uses is in the business world to deactivate/sanitize computer systems rather than recover them. Basically the loss of the equipment for a company is not the biggest worry -- it is the possible compromising of their data. The installed software give some assurance that the stolen laptop has been wiped and that the company's liability for unauthorized access to private data has been minimized.
I suspect that the argument would be something along the line of "of you really did believe, then your actions would be thus...." So those who simply spout "John 14:6" (at least those who think about it a bit) are also expecting "believers" to follow various other "teachings of Christ", otherwise they don't really believe.
I did not think that "churches" got particularly favourable tax treatment, but rather that "charities" or "not-for-profits" did, and neither of those are required to be religious in nature. Your "elk's club" could get the appropriate paperwork filled out to get this status presumably.
State lotteries are nothing but a terrible (but shockingly effective) tax on people with poor math skills.
Unfortunately, they do not seem to be terribly effective, if one takes into account the costs associated with gamboling addiction that the state ends up paying, and the way that the "profits" from the state sponsored gamboling tend to be used in the budgeting process. States that spend those profits on specific items (such as education) no not seem to fund those items as well as states that use regular revenue for those items for example.
If by "effective" you mean "effective at extracting the money from the person", then they do seem to be doing that fairly well.
You don't have "pumps", you have parking spaces with chargers instead.
In very cold climates, it is common to have outlets in parking spaces to plug in the car battery/engine heaters - typically they are unmetered and provided by the employer - I've always thought that electric car owners could get an easy free ride using those.
A gas station? Is that like the thing in front of the parking space at the grocery store that charges up your car when you plug in the cable and swipe your frequent-shopper-card and then shows up on your receipt after you shop?
No, I think it is like the thing outside of city hall that my mom calls a "parking meter" that you plug your car into when you go shopping downtown. I heard that the city makes a lot of money off of the electricity they sell from that big windmill up on the hill.
Mostly the Canadians use non-metric stuff when working in fields dominated by interactions with the USA. We trade a lot of lumber across that boarder you know - regardless of any soft-wood protectionism in place.
But must they be returned? Probably not. In must places, unsolicited gifts cannot have strings attached. If someone sends you something in the mail, it is yours, even regardless of what is included in it. This is to prevent people from sending out "valuable" product unsolicited and then demanding payment. This means that if someone in the shipping room makes an error and send out actual valuable product to the wrong person, typically that wrong person is under no obligation to return it.
Each dot is going to be either cyan, magenta, yellow, or black. Laser and injket printers produce multicolour output by dithering, not by mixing inks, and the "dpi" rating of the printer refers to the dots used when dithering, not to the equivalent of screen pixels.
So instead of multiplying by 256, you have to multiply by 4. Result: about 140MB.
I think that in addition to CMYK when the pairs of inks overlap you also get Red, Green, and Blue (the CMY colour inks act as filters of the primary colours, pairs of inks then give you those primary colours - Cyan over yellow results in green) all without dithering. Thus rather than just four possiblities, you actually have: white (with no ink), cyan, magenta, yellow, black, red, green, or blue, giving a total of eight possibilities for the smallest picture element. I'm not too good with combinitorics - does this only raise the 140MB up to 280MB?
Quebec french is it's own little dialect of french, which is mangled french mixed with english.
I was under the impression that Quebec French was in may respects an offshoot of French French from the 1760's, with its own development since then - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French for example. It is only "mangled" if you also accept that American, Austrailian, and Canadian English are "mangled english" in some sense.
In many instances, QF has stayed more "pure" and FF - "le weekend" is generally unused in Quebec, while I have heard reports that talking about "le fin de la semaine" gets greeted with strange looks "back in the old country". QF speakers tend to be a bit more concerned about the "Anglification" of their language than I think FF speakers are.
I see no way at all that forcing people to use a dying language they don't want to makes anything better for anyone.
Well, since people voted for the crew that put in the laws, and have yet to vote for anyone who plans on removing them, clearly there were at least some people who did/do want to "force people to use it".
One interpretation of history is the the French speaking majority of the population, who for a very long time were relatively powerless compared to the English speaking minority, who controlled most of the ecconomic and political power in the province, managed to figure out that they could vote for people who would support their interests. They did, and we ended up with some "protectionist" laws.
There are some interesting similarities, and some significant differences, with the situation in some regions of the USA where Spanish speaking minorities are, through changing demographics, starting to gain significant political and economic power. Thus we have movements to "protect" English as being in danger of being supplanted.
It is a bit of a shame in some respects that Quebec didn't go with official bilingualism way back when like NB did - doing so might have driven Ontario do also do so. One could imagine a very different Canada, both politically and culturally if the French outside of Quebec had had a longer history of solid institutional support....
There is also the fact that coalition governments aren't as stable as majority ones, which means that there would be more elections, which most people probably don't see as a desired outcome.
I think that the data on stability of governments is not as clear-cut as you seem to think. I seem to recall that the BC-STV literature indicated that minority governments seemed to have similar stability. Canada's history with minority governents is not all bad - we got health care, CPP and a flag out of the 1960's minorities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_governments_ in_Canada
Hopefully BC and/or Ontario will soon (2008 referendum for BC I think) come up with an improved system - see http://www.fairvotecanada.org/
There's nothing wrong with an interviewer watching you carefully to try and determine if you are telling the truth. This is the same kind of thing taken to another step.
Except there is little to no evidence that the polygraph actually adds anything of value to the system other than inaccuracy. Beating the polygraph is reportedly not difficult, and once beaten the fact that the polygraph test indicated trustworthiness, there is a tendency to relax other forms of vigilence. If we want to use a tool for something, we really should have some evidence that the tool is in fact able to do the thing we want it to do. Polygraphs have little evidence of that nature.
The doctors and scientists may be making progress in their knowledge - but they should clue the fucking HMO spreadsheet jockeys in.
Well, that isn't the fault of the science, it is a funding/political issue. Maybe the USA should try moving from a "private" system to something a bit more like a "single payer" system? And while we are moving into the century of the fruit bat, maybe we can go metric?
I seem to recall the Canadian diamon producers flogging some sort of "brand identification" with a little etched polar bear or something like that - DeBeers, at least in theory, is not necessarily the only brand that can exist in the market.
I've seen adds in Scientific America or Discover Magazine recently for manufactured jewlery diamonds - so this isn't exactly beaking news.
No, but in my real 'good old days' they were not the majority.
Yeah, things change, eh? Bummer. What have we been telling the record companies, phone companies, SCO, etc. about the changing business world they inhabit? Something like "adapt or die"?
Many of the large scale bans I have seen have been based on employee safety issues, at least in small part. I suppose one could mandate resperators for all the people working at the bar, but it is certainly easier to just ban the use of dangerous materials.
However, the recitation instructors are merely TAs, undergrads or grad students that report to the professor. They are not "experts" in any sense, other than having passed the course with a good grade and having trained to be TAs.
Interestingly, I note that Dr. Sadoway's CV shows no training in either the theory or practice of teaching or student learning. I wonder if MIT has any formal system for professor instruction in such skills? Many universities do not (and do very little in the way of TA training either for that matter). As far as I can tell, UToronto has no formal requirements of teaching education for any of the degrees that he received from them.
It may sound like I am "picking" on this particular instructor - such is not my intent. Rather I am being critical of the whole system which does a very poor job of encouraging "best practices" in the area of student learning. If university faculty were to conduct their research the way they conduct their instruction, they would probably never get published. Just as metallurgy have moved on from the days of a blacksmith pounding at a forge, knowledge of how people learn and how to best help them do so has moved on from the lecture days of Plato - unfortunately while the knowledge of the subject has progressed, there has been much less progression in the practice at most institutions. I find it particularly gauling that even in the sciences, where evidence is supposed to be king, that people make decisions on how to run and teach programs based on anicdote and gut feelings. While experiments in the field of teaching are challenging, and it is difficult to get reliable data - the same can be said for high energy physics.
My point is that straight lectures demonstratably do a very very very poor job of increasing student learning. They feel good, people like doing them, they are used to attending them, and they are fun to do well, but they just do not work well. At best they provide some small benifit, at worst they actually dectract from learning - various studies in physics education repeatedly show that compared to more active forms of student involvement, "traditional" lecture based instruction is aweful - see "A Comparison of Pre- and Post-FCI Results for Innovative and Traditional Introductory Calculus-Based Physics Classes" by Jeffery M. Saul, Richard N. Steinberg and Edward F. Redish, AAPT meeting, Lincoln, NE, August, 1998 referenced here for instance.
I would suggest perhaps that the "recitation instructor" as you described it is more important to student learning than the lecturer, and that one is wasting very valuable (or at least very expensive) "expert" time in having the lectures at all - particularly since there is no student interaction. Video tape them once and revise as needed if you think they are actually providing any benifit and you would at the very least save some instructor time that could be better spent in the lab if that is what is wanted.
You are correct that most "big" universities hire and promote based largely on "reaserch ability", however virtually all institutions claim that they desire their students to learn lots of stuff, and that the a major purpose of the institution is to help the students do so. There is a lot of evidence however that their instructional practices are not as effective as they could be. In most cases, student learning comes in spite of these instructional practices rather than because of them.
In answer to the original question of "should we post the podcasts" I would suggest that they should post them, and then TRACK attendance, podcast use, and student outcomes and base future decisions something a bit more objective then opinions of a bunch of yahoos like us.:-) Heck, someone might get a few papers out of their efforts.
I was talking to Dr. Sadoway at MIT about exactly this the other day. If you raise your hand in lecture, he'll throw you out....
If you're talking about a class that's taught somewhat interactively, then this may not work. But if you're talking about a large one-way lecture, go ahead and post the lectures immediately. There's no harm to the learning process at all, if you're going to be sitting for an hour and watching the professor talk anyway.
I guess like someone feels like an idiot for giving that guy tenue, eh? They could have just video taped him once and used those tapes every year since, and saved a bunch of money.
Heck, hiring someone to run a video tape of the lecture and then pause it to encourage student discussions would probably have better learning outcomes than terrorizing people from asking questions.
Maybe he should familiarize himeself with the vast body of reasearch on how people learn most effectively - let me give you a hint - it is NOT by passively watching people try to teach them things.
The reason modern heating systems have the heaters under the window is to improve the overall comfort of people in the building. The placement attempts to combat cold drafts. Older systems often had the "cold air return" ducting under the windows to take advantage of convective circulation of the air as it "falls" down the window. Modern systems usually try to minimize these cold air currents. As you point out, making the warmest air hang out by the window may increase the amount of heat loss in the system compared to making the centre of the room the warmest, however we are usually looking for comfort first rather than efficiency first. If we were looking for efficiency first we would put on a sweater and turn off the heater...
Now, instead consider placing the heating elements in the middle of the room, near the ceiling. We all already know that warm air rises, so whether the heating element is close to the floor, or close to the ceiling matters little, as the warm air will end up near the ceiling anyway. What matters is that the heat from the light-bulb will remain in the room instead of being leaked through the window before it ever got a chance to heat the room up.
Usually the point is not to "keep the heat in the room" but rather "keep the people in the room comfortable". Having a nice tosty ceiling doesn't really do that. Having a heater near the ceiling also does not get any heat down to the room's thermostat, and thus does not impact the cycling of the "main" heating system, and thus does not decrease the cost of running that main heating system.
>and they cost real money to replace.
As opposed to CFLs that are free?
No, as opposed to the electric heaters you have already got spread around your home which typically do not burn out at least on the time frames we are talking about. Your electric heater I am guessing is going to last many many years, and is a purchase you have already made, and is designed to heat the home, putting the heat where is should be. Using short lifespan light bulbs as heat sources, at a minimum, increases your cost to heat by the recurring cost of replacing the light bulbs. At a maximum, using the light bulbs will have no effect on the cycling of your main heating system (due to the details of the thermostatic control of that system), so all expenses related to the bulbs will be increases costs compared to living in the dark:-)
If CFLs worked as well as advertized, they would actually be cheaper. However, in my experience, CFLs do not last as long as advertized. Instead of lasting 10 times longer than a normal bulb, they last 2-3 times longer. Instead of simply going out like a normal bulb, they often go out in puff of smoke and lightning, as well as a broken fuse. And instead of giving a warm pleasant light, they give a sharp unpleasant light. All of these limitations can be fixed by buying more expensive CFLs. But if they are more expensive, they do not save me money anymore.
Your experience differ from mine. I've never had a CFL go "up in smoke", just failed to light. The cheapest CFLs I have recently purchased had a pleasant colour, no buzz, and were instant on. Any early failure CFLs I have purchased have been replaced by the vendor. I do not deny such problem bulbs exist however, and clearly your experiences, if I had had them, would make me warry of investing my time in searching out CFLs that did not have these shortcomings.
There seems to be a wide variation among brands. What we did was decided to try some out for a few months in our bedroom before going "whole hog". This was a while back (2002?), so we eneded up spending $20+ for some "fat albert" globes to stick in the simple socket in our ceiling (which is much cheaper than putting in a $200 fixture I suppose). The ones we have (from Sylvania I think, but I have not been able to find any more) do take a while to warm up, but this has not been a problem - we kind of like the slow ramp up, especially for the bathroom in the middle of the night. Newer bulbs we have seem to be almost instant-on.
We also have white walls which makes a huge difference on overall room brightness - our one "cream" room is noticably dimmer.
Anyhow, the upshot is that after a month we decided that the bulbs were quite livable and have since pretty much installed them everywhere. The small sprials are very nice for desk lamps - they give lots of light but do not heat up the lamp itself.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems a bit low. According to http://www.coolnurse.com/marriage_laws.htm , the minimum age (without parental consent) is at least 18 in all states. With parental consent does seem to be significantly lower, though many states seem to require court approval or similar for people under 16.
I wonder how common such young marriages are?
A friend of mine recently got a position with Absolute in Vancouver BC, and according to him, one of their biggest uses is in the business world to deactivate/sanitize computer systems rather than recover them. Basically the loss of the equipment for a company is not the biggest worry -- it is the possible compromising of their data. The installed software give some assurance that the stolen laptop has been wiped and that the company's liability for unauthorized access to private data has been minimized.
I suspect that the argument would be something along the line of "of you really did believe, then your actions would be thus...." So those who simply spout "John 14:6" (at least those who think about it a bit) are also expecting "believers" to follow various other "teachings of Christ", otherwise they don't really believe.
I did not think that "churches" got particularly favourable tax treatment, but rather that "charities" or "not-for-profits" did, and neither of those are required to be religious in nature. Your "elk's club" could get the appropriate paperwork filled out to get this status presumably.
If by "effective" you mean "effective at extracting the money from the person", then they do seem to be doing that fairly well.
Mostly the Canadians use non-metric stuff when working in fields dominated by interactions with the USA. We trade a lot of lumber across that boarder you know - regardless of any soft-wood protectionism in place.
Yeah, like the call center person would notice the little ^2 at the end of the answer?
I was under the impression that Quebec French was in may respects an offshoot of French French from the 1760's, with its own development since then - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French for example. It is only "mangled" if you also accept that American, Austrailian, and Canadian English are "mangled english" in some sense.
In many instances, QF has stayed more "pure" and FF - "le weekend" is generally unused in Quebec, while I have heard reports that talking about "le fin de la semaine" gets greeted with strange looks "back in the old country". QF speakers tend to be a bit more concerned about the "Anglification" of their language than I think FF speakers are.
Well, since people voted for the crew that put in the laws, and have yet to vote for anyone who plans on removing them, clearly there were at least some people who did/do want to "force people to use it".
One interpretation of history is the the French speaking majority of the population, who for a very long time were relatively powerless compared to the English speaking minority, who controlled most of the ecconomic and political power in the province, managed to figure out that they could vote for people who would support their interests. They did, and we ended up with some "protectionist" laws.
There are some interesting similarities, and some significant differences, with the situation in some regions of the USA where Spanish speaking minorities are, through changing demographics, starting to gain significant political and economic power. Thus we have movements to "protect" English as being in danger of being supplanted.
It is a bit of a shame in some respects that Quebec didn't go with official bilingualism way back when like NB did - doing so might have driven Ontario do also do so. One could imagine a very different Canada, both politically and culturally if the French outside of Quebec had had a longer history of solid institutional support....
I think that the data on stability of governments is not as clear-cut as you seem to think. I seem to recall that the BC-STV literature indicated that minority governments seemed to have similar stability. Canada's history with minority governents is not all bad - we got health care, CPP and a flag out of the 1960's minorities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_governments_ in_Canada
Hopefully BC and/or Ontario will soon (2008 referendum for BC I think) come up with an improved system - see http://www.fairvotecanada.org/
Except there is little to no evidence that the polygraph actually adds anything of value to the system other than inaccuracy. Beating the polygraph is reportedly not difficult, and once beaten the fact that the polygraph test indicated trustworthiness, there is a tendency to relax other forms of vigilence. If we want to use a tool for something, we really should have some evidence that the tool is in fact able to do the thing we want it to do. Polygraphs have little evidence of that nature.
Well, that isn't the fault of the science, it is a funding/political issue. Maybe the USA should try moving from a "private" system to something a bit more like a "single payer" system? And while we are moving into the century of the fruit bat, maybe we can go metric?
I seem to recall the Canadian diamon producers flogging some sort of "brand identification" with a little etched polar bear or something like that - DeBeers, at least in theory, is not necessarily the only brand that can exist in the market. I've seen adds in Scientific America or Discover Magazine recently for manufactured jewlery diamonds - so this isn't exactly beaking news.
Yeah, things change, eh? Bummer. What have we been telling the record companies, phone companies, SCO, etc. about the changing business world they inhabit? Something like "adapt or die"?
Many of the large scale bans I have seen have been based on employee safety issues, at least in small part. I suppose one could mandate resperators for all the people working at the bar, but it is certainly easier to just ban the use of dangerous materials.
Interestingly, I note that Dr. Sadoway's CV shows no training in either the theory or practice of teaching or student learning. I wonder if MIT has any formal system for professor instruction in such skills? Many universities do not (and do very little in the way of TA training either for that matter). As far as I can tell, UToronto has no formal requirements of teaching education for any of the degrees that he received from them.
It may sound like I am "picking" on this particular instructor - such is not my intent. Rather I am being critical of the whole system which does a very poor job of encouraging "best practices" in the area of student learning. If university faculty were to conduct their research the way they conduct their instruction, they would probably never get published. Just as metallurgy have moved on from the days of a blacksmith pounding at a forge, knowledge of how people learn and how to best help them do so has moved on from the lecture days of Plato - unfortunately while the knowledge of the subject has progressed, there has been much less progression in the practice at most institutions. I find it particularly gauling that even in the sciences, where evidence is supposed to be king, that people make decisions on how to run and teach programs based on anicdote and gut feelings. While experiments in the field of teaching are challenging, and it is difficult to get reliable data - the same can be said for high energy physics.
I would suggest perhaps that the "recitation instructor" as you described it is more important to student learning than the lecturer, and that one is wasting very valuable (or at least very expensive) "expert" time in having the lectures at all - particularly since there is no student interaction. Video tape them once and revise as needed if you think they are actually providing any benifit and you would at the very least save some instructor time that could be better spent in the lab if that is what is wanted.
You are correct that most "big" universities hire and promote based largely on "reaserch ability", however virtually all institutions claim that they desire their students to learn lots of stuff, and that the a major purpose of the institution is to help the students do so. There is a lot of evidence however that their instructional practices are not as effective as they could be. In most cases, student learning comes in spite of these instructional practices rather than because of them.
In answer to the original question of "should we post the podcasts" I would suggest that they should post them, and then TRACK attendance, podcast use, and student outcomes and base future decisions something a bit more objective then opinions of a bunch of yahoos like us. :-) Heck, someone might get a few papers out of their efforts.
If you're talking about a class that's taught somewhat interactively, then this may not work. But if you're talking about a large one-way lecture, go ahead and post the lectures immediately. There's no harm to the learning process at all, if you're going to be sitting for an hour and watching the professor talk anyway.
I guess like someone feels like an idiot for giving that guy tenue, eh? They could have just video taped him once and used those tapes every year since, and saved a bunch of money.
Heck, hiring someone to run a video tape of the lecture and then pause it to encourage student discussions would probably have better learning outcomes than terrorizing people from asking questions.
Maybe he should familiarize himeself with the vast body of reasearch on how people learn most effectively - let me give you a hint - it is NOT by passively watching people try to teach them things.
The reason modern heating systems have the heaters under the window is to improve the overall comfort of people in the building. The placement attempts to combat cold drafts. Older systems often had the "cold air return" ducting under the windows to take advantage of convective circulation of the air as it "falls" down the window. Modern systems usually try to minimize these cold air currents. As you point out, making the warmest air hang out by the window may increase the amount of heat loss in the system compared to making the centre of the room the warmest, however we are usually looking for comfort first rather than efficiency first. If we were looking for efficiency first we would put on a sweater and turn off the heater...
:-)
Now, instead consider placing the heating elements in the middle of the room, near the ceiling. We all already know that warm air rises, so whether the heating element is close to the floor, or close to the ceiling matters little, as the warm air will end up near the ceiling anyway. What matters is that the heat from the light-bulb will remain in the room instead of being leaked through the window before it ever got a chance to heat the room up.
Usually the point is not to "keep the heat in the room" but rather "keep the people in the room comfortable". Having a nice tosty ceiling doesn't really do that. Having a heater near the ceiling also does not get any heat down to the room's thermostat, and thus does not impact the cycling of the "main" heating system, and thus does not decrease the cost of running that main heating system.
>and they cost real money to replace.
As opposed to CFLs that are free?
No, as opposed to the electric heaters you have already got spread around your home which typically do not burn out at least on the time frames we are talking about. Your electric heater I am guessing is going to last many many years, and is a purchase you have already made, and is designed to heat the home, putting the heat where is should be. Using short lifespan light bulbs as heat sources, at a minimum, increases your cost to heat by the recurring cost of replacing the light bulbs. At a maximum, using the light bulbs will have no effect on the cycling of your main heating system (due to the details of the thermostatic control of that system), so all expenses related to the bulbs will be increases costs compared to living in the dark
If CFLs worked as well as advertized, they would actually be cheaper. However, in my experience, CFLs do not last as long as advertized. Instead of lasting 10 times longer than a normal bulb, they last 2-3 times longer. Instead of simply going out like a normal bulb, they often go out in puff of smoke and lightning, as well as a broken fuse. And instead of giving a warm pleasant light, they give a sharp unpleasant light. All of these limitations can be fixed by buying more expensive CFLs. But if they are more expensive, they do not save me money anymore.
Your experience differ from mine. I've never had a CFL go "up in smoke", just failed to light. The cheapest CFLs I have recently purchased had a pleasant colour, no buzz, and were instant on. Any early failure CFLs I have purchased have been replaced by the vendor. I do not deny such problem bulbs exist however, and clearly your experiences, if I had had them, would make me warry of investing my time in searching out CFLs that did not have these shortcomings.
We also have white walls which makes a huge difference on overall room brightness - our one "cream" room is noticably dimmer.
Anyhow, the upshot is that after a month we decided that the bulbs were quite livable and have since pretty much installed them everywhere. The small sprials are very nice for desk lamps - they give lots of light but do not heat up the lamp itself.