Thank-you for being patronising. I did not say that I waste hours every day editing Wikipedia.
In fact, 'outreach', telling the public about your field, is an increasingly important part of what academics are supposed to do. Sometimes that will mean arguing with uneducated people. The aim is to educate them, at least a little bit. And contributing to one of the world's most frequently read websites isn't really what I'd call "low impact".
As for defending content: in most fields, it's not that big a problem. How many 15 year olds care about the poisonous chemicals in tomato plants, or surface catalysis, or the particles of the standard model? Only a few fields (climate change, evolution, etc.) are likely to attract the sort of controversy that requires constant vigilance, and I'm sure there are enough people already guarding those against unwanted changes.
I'm sorry if I offended you. But as a/. poster, you are certainly in the minority of academics. And I think this is more a cultural than a technical difference: younger people are so much more used to using the internet. An anecdotal example: my supervisor (who is only 40ish, and has made a simple website for the lab) wanted a chi-squared table today. So he stuck his head out of his office, and asked if we knew where his copy of a particular stats textbook was. Only when he couldn't find it did he think of doing what I'd have done straight away: put "chi squared table" into Google. I think my generation see the web as a much more important way to get information, so we'll care more about making that information right.
About the deletions or edits: on the articles I've edited, it's not a huge problem. If you write coherently, and remember to cite sources, it generally sticks (at least in my field; YMMV). The worst I usually see is a proliferation of "In language X, this species is called...", which is distracting but not really destructive.
This is a repeating theme in/. discussions of Wikipedia. But it doesn't fit with my experience. I've been editing for a few years now, and for the most part it's perfectly civil. I've had one or two arguments, but even those were fairly mild (no swearing or ALL CAPS). Admittedly I generally pick uncontroversial topics, but I think most topics in an encyclopaedia are quite uncontroversial. So why do other people's experiences differ? Is it just a few complaints getting amplified? Are the people who're complaining unwittingly being jerks themselves? Are technological articles more likely to get over-protective custodians?
Academics can contribute plenty of general subject knowledge that isn't original research. And they're unlikely to want to contribute original research, because they'd rather get it published in a journal, where it counts for boosting their career. Once it's published there, it can be cited, so it's fair game for Wikipedia.
A much more plausible explanation is simply that academia moves slowly and ponderously, and won't really change to accommodate anything new until long after it's established in society at large. The generation that has grown up with the internet are still mostly undergrads and PhD students (like me). Come back in a decade or two, and I think there'll be a lot more experts contributing to Wikipedia.
Besides the control group, they compared the left and right hips of each subject. And the description used in the abstract of the paper is that the treatment group "carried the phone close to the right hip", which probably includes pockets.
Yes, that would clearly be a better control. If you want to recruit people to carry around a mobile phone turned off for a year, please do so. Oh, and to do it properly, you should also make sure that the subject is not aware whether their phone is on or off.
Scientists have to work in the real world, and can't do every experiment to perfection. This isn't conclusive, but that doesn't mean it's wrong, or not worth publishing. Lots of science suggests something without proving it.
The daily mail is probably the trashiest of British journalism: sensationalist, scaremongering, simplistic, and not above straightforward making stuff up. See also this song.
Rule 12 of the internet: citing the daily fail as your only source causes you to lose the argument.
Well, there's an important difference. An oil company would bribe dictators to let them make more money by extracting the country's resources. A non-profit organisation producing educational equipment takes their money and supplies educational equipment. I suppose it's possible that the dictator hands out the laptops only to his supporters, but it's hard to really see OLPC as somehow propping up a dictator.
While gnome panel will still be available, the plan is apparently to have a simplified version of Unity, dubbed "Unity 2D" for machines which can't handle the necessary graphics acceleration.
Well, they're pushing the software centre as the main one for users, so I think it will work well enough. Apart from the command line package managers, there's only synaptic, which is hidden away in system -> administration for advanced users. And although I count myself as a power user, I generally use the software centre if I just want to install some application.
Well, in my applications menu, it's called "Ubuntu Software Centre". Technically, it's an an apt/packagekit GUI, separate from synaptic (which can still be found in the administration menu), which also uses some non-apt-standard bits (like ratings) on top. The Ubuntu repositories can still be accessed via standard apt without the extensions, of course.
There are already plenty of lists saying "MS Office -> Libreoffice" and "Photoshop -> GIMP" and so on. It tends to lead to people getting annoyed because they don't feel that the promoted replacement is as good as what they had before (whether or not they're right, they still feel that way).
Also, apart from geeks, people don't really care about openness in their software. If you can't program, the right to change the source code is meaningless. If you want to replace proprietary software, you do it by providing something people prefer. Like Firefox: only a few people choose it because it's open source; most have chosen it simply because it's better than IE. For something like an office suite, the job should be even easier if what you're offering is free (as in beer).
Dialling phone numbers is much less common than it used to be, thanks to electronic address books, skype, and so on. The risks of the internet are better solved by making systems easy to use, not by sitting around and wishing that users were better educated.
The car analogy is just stupid. We make people take a driving test because half a ton of steel at 70 mph can kill a lot of people very quickly without you doing anything obviously stupid. That's not a risk on the internet. My mother doesn't understand a URL, but the internet is still hugely useful to her (email, skype, online shopping, weather forecasts...). It's not your internet, and we're not kicking out 90% of the world when they're using it very productively.
And no, URLs are not "easy to understand". You start at the beginning, then jump into the middle and go backwards for a while, then jump back to the middle and read forwards. The obvious way to read them is left to right, so everything is a subdomain of www. They often contain odd codes ("sid=2004418"?). To properly explain it, you have to talk about servers (for many people, websites aren't on a server, they're just somehow "on the internet"), and static versus dynamic content. And now you can have internationalised domain names in various alphabets. To be fair, some browsers are now making it easier by highlighting the domain name in the URL bar (that is, improving the usability, not berating people for their ignorance).
Yes, Google make money. They provide a service that people use. That's capitalism for you. Wikia tried to make a non-profit search engine, but it didn't work out. I don't particularly like the idea of one company profiting from running such a key function of the web, but I don't think I could do it better...
Why do you think that people should type in URLs? If you accidentally type in paypall.com instead of paypal.com, you could end up getting your money stolen (in fact, it's a domain squatter - but the risk is there). If you type paypall into Google, you get pointed to paypal. Like IP addresses, URLs are becoming a technical detail that users don't generally think about (except perhaps for sharing links). It's not the end of the world.
There is a form that tells them to really delete it. They don't draw attention to it, and it's separate from the "deactivate account" option, but a search in the help centre does bring it up.
Well, if you have a smartphone, you could install the key generator app, which, since it doesn't require a signal, presumably doesn't report your phone number to Google. If you want to check that, you could always look at the source (for Android & Blackberry, at least).
I very much doubt they'll ever make it compulsory. It's just too much hassle for most people. If they really want to push it, they might show a banner ("Find out how to make your account more secure..."), but I bet it'll just sit on the settings page, only to be used by those who know they want it.
Do we really have nothing better to do than complain? It's an entirely optional way to add some security, and they do seem to have given it at least a modicum of thought (several methods to get the tokens, limited backup tokens if you lose your device...). What else should they provide? Free ponies?
I read it before it was/.ed. It wasn't obviously libel: he more or less approved of the atmosphere, said two dishes were alright, nothing great, then laid into them on the quality of a couple more dishes. Of course, I have no way of knowing if he was telling the truth, or being paid by a competitor, but it read like a negative review, not a hate-filled diatribe.
You miss his point. If you understand what's going on, you can happily switch over to LibreOffice and carry on without worrying. When you're management, and you don't follow open source software in your spare time, you hear "Most of the developers are jumping ship, and attempting to create a separate codebase in competition with the company that owns OpenOffice", and you think "that's not something we want to rely on for now. Let's just upgrade to the next version of Office. Maybe we'll give it another look in a few years." If you've got a particularly non-techy manager, they might even be wondering if this "forking" is entirely legal.
There's a lot in a name, and Microsoft know that. That's why they still release Windows and Office, even when they undergo a real change as dramatic as Office 2007. Libreoffice is a new name, so it will be considered as a new thing. And in a sense it is: the codebase isn't new, and many of the developers aren't new, but the process of writing it and releasing it is.
... a full blown Linux distribution that does not require children to learn a new UI...
You know, I think any computer UI is likely to be a new one for many of the children they're targetting. They've got a rare chance to design an interface for people who don't already have expectations of how to use a computer. I know I'd take that opportunity to see if I could work out a better model.
Well, I have. And I've had pretty much no problems, no hoops to jump through. The worst response I've got was an 'unreferenced' message put on a new page I created. Which was quite accurate. I added one reference, and the page has seen no further problems.
Of course, the fact that it's still working pretty well isn't nearly as interesting as complaining about idiots reverting your changes, so carry on.
Actually, I prefer it. Extra space to display pages. I'm not necessarily sure that their solution to show URLs is better than the pop-up bar in Google Chrome, but I prefer either to the fixed status bar.
In other words (I see someone else agrees), you're just blindly assuming that everyone agrees with you. Has it escaped you that Mozilla might actually have done some UI testing? Or that people can have legitimate opinions that aren't yours?
I thought they fed back results, so that after an unclear word was 'confirmed' by enough users, it was reused as the known word. Which would still leave you trying to OCR words that hadn't been OCRed before.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank-you for being patronising. I did not say that I waste hours every day editing Wikipedia.
In fact, 'outreach', telling the public about your field, is an increasingly important part of what academics are supposed to do. Sometimes that will mean arguing with uneducated people. The aim is to educate them, at least a little bit. And contributing to one of the world's most frequently read websites isn't really what I'd call "low impact".
As for defending content: in most fields, it's not that big a problem. How many 15 year olds care about the poisonous chemicals in tomato plants, or surface catalysis, or the particles of the standard model? Only a few fields (climate change, evolution, etc.) are likely to attract the sort of controversy that requires constant vigilance, and I'm sure there are enough people already guarding those against unwanted changes.
I'm sorry if I offended you. But as a /. poster, you are certainly in the minority of academics. And I think this is more a cultural than a technical difference: younger people are so much more used to using the internet. An anecdotal example: my supervisor (who is only 40ish, and has made a simple website for the lab) wanted a chi-squared table today. So he stuck his head out of his office, and asked if we knew where his copy of a particular stats textbook was. Only when he couldn't find it did he think of doing what I'd have done straight away: put "chi squared table" into Google. I think my generation see the web as a much more important way to get information, so we'll care more about making that information right.
About the deletions or edits: on the articles I've edited, it's not a huge problem. If you write coherently, and remember to cite sources, it generally sticks (at least in my field; YMMV). The worst I usually see is a proliferation of "In language X, this species is called ...", which is distracting but not really destructive.
This is a repeating theme in /. discussions of Wikipedia. But it doesn't fit with my experience. I've been editing for a few years now, and for the most part it's perfectly civil. I've had one or two arguments, but even those were fairly mild (no swearing or ALL CAPS). Admittedly I generally pick uncontroversial topics, but I think most topics in an encyclopaedia are quite uncontroversial. So why do other people's experiences differ? Is it just a few complaints getting amplified? Are the people who're complaining unwittingly being jerks themselves? Are technological articles more likely to get over-protective custodians?
Academics can contribute plenty of general subject knowledge that isn't original research. And they're unlikely to want to contribute original research, because they'd rather get it published in a journal, where it counts for boosting their career. Once it's published there, it can be cited, so it's fair game for Wikipedia.
A much more plausible explanation is simply that academia moves slowly and ponderously, and won't really change to accommodate anything new until long after it's established in society at large. The generation that has grown up with the internet are still mostly undergrads and PhD students (like me). Come back in a decade or two, and I think there'll be a lot more experts contributing to Wikipedia.
You don't have to. Hard drive space is cheap, so keep a copy locally as well as the online copy.
Besides the control group, they compared the left and right hips of each subject. And the description used in the abstract of the paper is that the treatment group "carried the phone close to the right hip", which probably includes pockets.
Yes, that would clearly be a better control. If you want to recruit people to carry around a mobile phone turned off for a year, please do so. Oh, and to do it properly, you should also make sure that the subject is not aware whether their phone is on or off.
Scientists have to work in the real world, and can't do every experiment to perfection. This isn't conclusive, but that doesn't mean it's wrong, or not worth publishing. Lots of science suggests something without proving it.
The daily mail is probably the trashiest of British journalism: sensationalist, scaremongering, simplistic, and not above straightforward making stuff up. See also this song.
Rule 12 of the internet: citing the daily fail as your only source causes you to lose the argument.
Well, there's an important difference. An oil company would bribe dictators to let them make more money by extracting the country's resources. A non-profit organisation producing educational equipment takes their money and supplies educational equipment. I suppose it's possible that the dictator hands out the laptops only to his supporters, but it's hard to really see OLPC as somehow propping up a dictator.
While gnome panel will still be available, the plan is apparently to have a simplified version of Unity, dubbed "Unity 2D" for machines which can't handle the necessary graphics acceleration.
Well, they're pushing the software centre as the main one for users, so I think it will work well enough. Apart from the command line package managers, there's only synaptic, which is hidden away in system -> administration for advanced users. And although I count myself as a power user, I generally use the software centre if I just want to install some application.
Well, in my applications menu, it's called "Ubuntu Software Centre". Technically, it's an an apt/packagekit GUI, separate from synaptic (which can still be found in the administration menu), which also uses some non-apt-standard bits (like ratings) on top. The Ubuntu repositories can still be accessed via standard apt without the extensions, of course.
I fail to see how this is in any way a problem.
There are already plenty of lists saying "MS Office -> Libreoffice" and "Photoshop -> GIMP" and so on. It tends to lead to people getting annoyed because they don't feel that the promoted replacement is as good as what they had before (whether or not they're right, they still feel that way).
Also, apart from geeks, people don't really care about openness in their software. If you can't program, the right to change the source code is meaningless. If you want to replace proprietary software, you do it by providing something people prefer. Like Firefox: only a few people choose it because it's open source; most have chosen it simply because it's better than IE. For something like an office suite, the job should be even easier if what you're offering is free (as in beer).
Apparently the next version of Ubuntu will have ratings and reviews in the software centre.
Dialling phone numbers is much less common than it used to be, thanks to electronic address books, skype, and so on. The risks of the internet are better solved by making systems easy to use, not by sitting around and wishing that users were better educated.
The car analogy is just stupid. We make people take a driving test because half a ton of steel at 70 mph can kill a lot of people very quickly without you doing anything obviously stupid. That's not a risk on the internet. My mother doesn't understand a URL, but the internet is still hugely useful to her (email, skype, online shopping, weather forecasts...). It's not your internet, and we're not kicking out 90% of the world when they're using it very productively.
And no, URLs are not "easy to understand". You start at the beginning, then jump into the middle and go backwards for a while, then jump back to the middle and read forwards. The obvious way to read them is left to right, so everything is a subdomain of www. They often contain odd codes ("sid=2004418"?). To properly explain it, you have to talk about servers (for many people, websites aren't on a server, they're just somehow "on the internet"), and static versus dynamic content. And now you can have internationalised domain names in various alphabets. To be fair, some browsers are now making it easier by highlighting the domain name in the URL bar (that is, improving the usability, not berating people for their ignorance).
Yes, Google make money. They provide a service that people use. That's capitalism for you. Wikia tried to make a non-profit search engine, but it didn't work out. I don't particularly like the idea of one company profiting from running such a key function of the web, but I don't think I could do it better...
Why do you think that people should type in URLs? If you accidentally type in paypall.com instead of paypal.com, you could end up getting your money stolen (in fact, it's a domain squatter - but the risk is there). If you type paypall into Google, you get pointed to paypal. Like IP addresses, URLs are becoming a technical detail that users don't generally think about (except perhaps for sharing links). It's not the end of the world.
There is a form that tells them to really delete it. They don't draw attention to it, and it's separate from the "deactivate account" option, but a search in the help centre does bring it up.
Well, if you have a smartphone, you could install the key generator app, which, since it doesn't require a signal, presumably doesn't report your phone number to Google. If you want to check that, you could always look at the source (for Android & Blackberry, at least).
I very much doubt they'll ever make it compulsory. It's just too much hassle for most people. If they really want to push it, they might show a banner ("Find out how to make your account more secure..."), but I bet it'll just sit on the settings page, only to be used by those who know they want it.
Do we really have nothing better to do than complain? It's an entirely optional way to add some security, and they do seem to have given it at least a modicum of thought (several methods to get the tokens, limited backup tokens if you lose your device...). What else should they provide? Free ponies?
I read it before it was /.ed. It wasn't obviously libel: he more or less approved of the atmosphere, said two dishes were alright, nothing great, then laid into them on the quality of a couple more dishes. Of course, I have no way of knowing if he was telling the truth, or being paid by a competitor, but it read like a negative review, not a hate-filled diatribe.
You miss his point. If you understand what's going on, you can happily switch over to LibreOffice and carry on without worrying. When you're management, and you don't follow open source software in your spare time, you hear "Most of the developers are jumping ship, and attempting to create a separate codebase in competition with the company that owns OpenOffice", and you think "that's not something we want to rely on for now. Let's just upgrade to the next version of Office. Maybe we'll give it another look in a few years." If you've got a particularly non-techy manager, they might even be wondering if this "forking" is entirely legal.
There's a lot in a name, and Microsoft know that. That's why they still release Windows and Office, even when they undergo a real change as dramatic as Office 2007. Libreoffice is a new name, so it will be considered as a new thing. And in a sense it is: the codebase isn't new, and many of the developers aren't new, but the process of writing it and releasing it is.
... a full blown Linux distribution that does not require children to learn a new UI...
You know, I think any computer UI is likely to be a new one for many of the children they're targetting. They've got a rare chance to design an interface for people who don't already have expectations of how to use a computer. I know I'd take that opportunity to see if I could work out a better model.
Have you tried contributing lately?
Well, I have. And I've had pretty much no problems, no hoops to jump through. The worst response I've got was an 'unreferenced' message put on a new page I created. Which was quite accurate. I added one reference, and the page has seen no further problems.
Of course, the fact that it's still working pretty well isn't nearly as interesting as complaining about idiots reverting your changes, so carry on.
And other people like it. It's just that haters shout louder.
Actually, I prefer it. Extra space to display pages. I'm not necessarily sure that their solution to show URLs is better than the pop-up bar in Google Chrome, but I prefer either to the fixed status bar.
In other words (I see someone else agrees), you're just blindly assuming that everyone agrees with you. Has it escaped you that Mozilla might actually have done some UI testing? Or that people can have legitimate opinions that aren't yours?
I thought they fed back results, so that after an unclear word was 'confirmed' by enough users, it was reused as the known word. Which would still leave you trying to OCR words that hadn't been OCRed before.