The point of using symbols in maths texts is to convey clarity. The use of "()" does exactly the opposite here. For a lot of people the expression in the example evaluates to FALSE, or maybe SYNTAX ERROR, or if your eyesight isn't too good - or the teacher's writing is poor, the () could look like a zero, which would really screw up people's understanding.
The more I think about this topic, the more I see the fault as being in the way the problem is presented, not in any lack of understanding in the students.
Are they saying the quantity denoted by the braces () is an unknown and we should solve for it. Are they saying it's some sort of sub-total of evaluating the LHS of the expression?
from the rest of the text:
One cause of the problem might be the textbooks, the research shows.
Which sounds a lot like the true cause, not the students - who in my case has an honours degree in physics.
Re:He would be right at home on slashdot
on
The Great Typo Hunt
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· Score: 1
So the police asked if he'd been speeding as he had bragged. he admitted it. Where's the need for any evidence. The guy doesn't sound particularly bright (for oh, so many reasons) and I would guess that he wasn't too good at thinking up plausible excuses.
Better to jump than be pushed. Maybe it's time for Google to consider splitting into 2 companies: all the search stuff in one and all the other (FB, docs etc.) in the second. That way they get to control their own destiny rather than have outside interests decide it for them.
You never know, a bit of a break-up may even be good for them.
All Hawking is doing is trying to delay the inevitable.
Even if humanity does colonise other parts of the solar system, we're still dead when the Sun goes nova. Even if we do move out into the rest of the galaxy, it's bound to collide (catastrophically) with another one at some point. Even if we get as far as becoming transcendent beings and occupy the universe as a whole it'll still end in some sort of heat-death / thermodynamic fizzling - if gravity doesn't win out and it collapses back on itself.
So, ultimately we're all doomed anyway - what's the point in just prolonging it a few more decades / millennia / eons. By that time the beings we've evolved into won't be human any more and might just be bored out of their intergalactic skulls.
So far as software or processes you may create are concerned, any true sysadmin would have documented them as part of the original project. If you didn't, well that just speaks to your level of professionalism - whether you were explicitly asked to write stuff down or not.
While you could take a position that it's "the management's" duty to make sure all the supporting information they require is present, if they fail in this, that doesn't absolve you from not doing it. It just means that you work for idiots and should know better, yourself.
Instructables is a classic Web 2.0 invention where the responses and comments are far more important than the content of the article. They are meant to be a "look at me, see how clever I am" showcase of stuff that 1 person made, but no-one else is ever expected to be able (or want) to replicate. While they could be helpful articles presented in a way that explains the principles, provides clear information about how to make things and is actually useful, in practice it's all about the flashy and colourful presentation.
I fully expect that one of these days there will be an instructable article called "How we made a matchstick". First start off with a tree-trunk, then plane it down into 2 tons of sawdust and a piece of wood 2 inches long. Complete with videos of felling the tree, people playing in the pile of shavings and finally some spotty yoof holding a small sliver of wood. The article itself would then have hundreds of comments along the lines of "Dude, thatz sooooo coooool" and "Awesum"
someone may really appreciate you leaving a book of your reflections behind.
reading people's tweets would indicate otherwise. Unless you are a particularly talented writer, most personal reflections are the most turgid and self-indulgent nonsense imaginable.
...a semi truck falls off of an overpass and lands on top of one? - car won't drive under bridges ...a semi truck going 200mph the other direction crosses the median? - car accelerates to 201MPH, in reverse ...a semi truck going 200mph on the other road runs a red light? - see above ...that logging truck in front of you loses its cargo? - car grows wings, flies over obstruction ...that banana truck in front of you loses its cargo, and sends you through the guardrail? - ejector seat, you're no longer in the car if you die ...you run out of gas while crossing the train tracks? - ejector seat again ...some idiot leaves their kids in one with windows up for "just a couple minutes" during the middle of summer? - warranty only applies to owner ...someone decides to carjack you? - car only comes with pink paintwork, no-one would want to steal that.
The idiots will find new and more idiotic ways to kill themselves. Or worse, kill those around their volvo. I wonder if the zero-fatality car would have to include a way of measuring the driver's blood-alcohol level?
When I read the article, my brain interpreted it as
Thank you for looking out for me and my security. I realise you didn't have to go to all that trouble - both to help save me from myself and to actually send me email to keep me aware. I can see that you are definitely on top of your customer support processes, and I promise not to call you with stoopid questions that I could easily answer for myself if I just opened the manual,
In a way, yes. What I'm stumbling towards is some sort of realisation that there are some (how many? very few or a large proportion) of cellphone user who has little or no data usage. Maybe they just make voice calls if this is normal behaviour for the 42% of non-smartphone owners then it's significant. OTOH, we aren't told if there are also a small number of people on, or who have been on, unlimited tariffs who skew the average massively.
As a fellow non-statistician, this sounds to me like wanting to know the median usage. Or what I (as someone who doesn't feel the need to continually stream stuff) would expect to use if I felt the need for a smartphone.
The number in the OP includes all the power users and all the non (or minimal) users. A much more useful measurement would be to know how much data an average user uses. Depending on the proportion of power to non users, that could be more or less than this average for all users.
The reference to ISPs cherry picking customers comes from a single unnamed "insider". No information is provided to substantiate the claim and no ISPs were named, to allow for follow-up investigations.
So, ask yourself: in the dog-eat-dog world of extremely price sensitive internet provision, is it likely that some ISPs have so many potential customers queuing to sign up (with them) that they can afford to turn away those who may not get a good service?
Open source is not a finite resource. You can't buy *all* of it. You can only buy the ones that are successful today. If (to take an example) Oracle made offers of employment that they couldn't refuse to the main programmers on The Gimp, then anyone who didn;t like the "selling out" (possibly because they didn't get made an offer) could just fork the last non-commercial version and continue down their own particular road.
Because of that, it would be very difficult for Oracle to monetize their purchases. Certainly to the degree that made any sort of financial sense and maybe not to the satisfaction of the shareholders.
what you actually have is an organisation in a position of trust clandestinely checking up on the websites its users visit.
Whatever their intentions might be, they did this without asking and attempted (though not very effectively) to conceal their actions by passing the information to another part of the operation which did the follow-up accesses. If they were convinced their actions were on the side of right, they would have announced their programme and made their customers aware of what they were doind - and the reasons why it was a good thing.
As it is, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to discover that other organisations were doing the same sort of thing, either en-masse or as part of a surveillance operation against individuals "under suspicion". The problem with this sort of trawling is that you never can tell when the records from your innocent surfing can / will be used against you.
Using Google's advanced search to filter out old crap is a major advantage when searching for technical solutions. It means you only get recent fixes / hacks / workarounds / patches. Not all the old stuff that addressed problems with beta versions from 2005. This is one area where Google's search algorithm falls down - by ranking pages with more links, they promote old stuff over new stuff. While that is useful sometimes, I wish there was the option for a decay (or timeout) function into their page-rank algorithms to reward contemporary information.
Slashdot Mirror
The more I think about this topic, the more I see the fault as being in the way the problem is presented, not in any lack of understanding in the students.
One cause of the problem might be the textbooks, the research shows.
Which sounds a lot like the true cause, not the students - who in my case has an honours degree in physics.
You missed the full-stop.
In most places (well in the northern hemisphere) it's the summer break so there's not even the excuse of having to get up early for school.
So the police asked if he'd been speeding as he had bragged. he admitted it. Where's the need for any evidence. The guy doesn't sound particularly bright (for oh, so many reasons) and I would guess that he wasn't too good at thinking up plausible excuses.
You never know, a bit of a break-up may even be good for them.
Even if humanity does colonise other parts of the solar system, we're still dead when the Sun goes nova. Even if we do move out into the rest of the galaxy, it's bound to collide (catastrophically) with another one at some point. Even if we get as far as becoming transcendent beings and occupy the universe as a whole it'll still end in some sort of heat-death / thermodynamic fizzling - if gravity doesn't win out and it collapses back on itself.
So, ultimately we're all doomed anyway - what's the point in just prolonging it a few more decades / millennia / eons. By that time the beings we've evolved into won't be human any more and might just be bored out of their intergalactic skulls.
They probably could until the manager stuck his oar in and screwed it up
What about basic services that I created?
So far as software or processes you may create are concerned, any true sysadmin would have documented them as part of the original project. If you didn't, well that just speaks to your level of professionalism - whether you were explicitly asked to write stuff down or not.
While you could take a position that it's "the management's" duty to make sure all the supporting information they require is present, if they fail in this, that doesn't absolve you from not doing it. It just means that you work for idiots and should know better, yourself.
get off my lawn
don't you just hate the school holidays.
Instructables is a classic Web 2.0 invention where the responses and comments are far more important than the content of the article. They are meant to be a "look at me, see how clever I am" showcase of stuff that 1 person made, but no-one else is ever expected to be able (or want) to replicate. While they could be helpful articles presented in a way that explains the principles, provides clear information about how to make things and is actually useful, in practice it's all about the flashy and colourful presentation.
I fully expect that one of these days there will be an instructable article called "How we made a matchstick". First start off with a tree-trunk, then plane it down into 2 tons of sawdust and a piece of wood 2 inches long. Complete with videos of felling the tree, people playing in the pile of shavings and finally some spotty yoof holding a small sliver of wood. The article itself would then have hundreds of comments along the lines of "Dude, thatz sooooo coooool" and "Awesum"
I don't see what people could be doing that is so embarrassing anyway
Well, you could be hoping for some revenge from "beyond the grave" by spreading lies (or even truths) about family members you disliked.
someone may really appreciate you leaving a book of your reflections behind.
reading people's tweets would indicate otherwise. Unless you are a particularly talented writer, most personal reflections are the most turgid and self-indulgent nonsense imaginable.
How many volvos hit icebergs? Though if one did, I;m sure they'd make a film of it.
...a semi truck falls off of an overpass and lands on top of one? - car won't drive under bridges
...a semi truck going 200mph the other direction crosses the median? - car accelerates to 201MPH, in reverse
...a semi truck going 200mph on the other road runs a red light? - see above
...that logging truck in front of you loses its cargo? - car grows wings, flies over obstruction
...that banana truck in front of you loses its cargo, and sends you through the guardrail? - ejector seat, you're no longer in the car if you die
...you run out of gas while crossing the train tracks? - ejector seat again
...some idiot leaves their kids in one with windows up for "just a couple minutes" during the middle of summer? - warranty only applies to owner
...someone decides to carjack you? - car only comes with pink paintwork, no-one would want to steal that.
The idiots will find new and more idiotic ways to kill themselves. Or worse, kill those around their volvo. I wonder if the zero-fatality car would have to include a way of measuring the driver's blood-alcohol level?
Thank you for looking out for me and my security. I realise you didn't have to go to all that trouble - both to help save me from myself and to actually send me email to keep me aware. I can see that you are definitely on top of your customer support processes, and I promise not to call you with stoopid questions that I could easily answer for myself if I just opened the manual,
If not, and if it doesn't make the teachers' lives any easier, what's the point?
e-averaging the middle of the bell curve
In a way, yes. What I'm stumbling towards is some sort of realisation that there are some (how many? very few or a large proportion) of cellphone user who has little or no data usage. Maybe they just make voice calls if this is normal behaviour for the 42% of non-smartphone owners then it's significant. OTOH, we aren't told if there are also a small number of people on, or who have been on, unlimited tariffs who skew the average massively.
As a fellow non-statistician, this sounds to me like wanting to know the median usage. Or what I (as someone who doesn't feel the need to continually stream stuff) would expect to use if I felt the need for a smartphone.
The number in the OP includes all the power users and all the non (or minimal) users. A much more useful measurement would be to know how much data an average user uses. Depending on the proportion of power to non users, that could be more or less than this average for all users.
So, ask yourself: in the dog-eat-dog world of extremely price sensitive internet provision, is it likely that some ISPs have so many potential customers queuing to sign up (with them) that they can afford to turn away those who may not get a good service?
Because of that, it would be very difficult for Oracle to monetize their purchases. Certainly to the degree that made any sort of financial sense and maybe not to the satisfaction of the shareholders.
if you ignore the sensationalist headline
what you actually have is an organisation in a position of trust clandestinely checking up on the websites its users visit.
Whatever their intentions might be, they did this without asking and attempted (though not very effectively) to conceal their actions by passing the information to another part of the operation which did the follow-up accesses. If they were convinced their actions were on the side of right, they would have announced their programme and made their customers aware of what they were doind - and the reasons why it was a good thing.
As it is, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to discover that other organisations were doing the same sort of thing, either en-masse or as part of a surveillance operation against individuals "under suspicion". The problem with this sort of trawling is that you never can tell when the records from your innocent surfing can / will be used against you.
but changing your name is easy
Using Google's advanced search to filter out old crap is a major advantage when searching for technical solutions. It means you only get recent fixes / hacks / workarounds / patches. Not all the old stuff that addressed problems with beta versions from 2005. This is one area where Google's search algorithm falls down - by ranking pages with more links, they promote old stuff over new stuff. While that is useful sometimes, I wish there was the option for a decay (or timeout) function into their page-rank algorithms to reward contemporary information.
We've been on 2.6.X since 2003. Somebody needs to pull the cork out ...