As several people have pointed out, there's a lot of FUD in this advisory from Microsoft (big surprise). My question is, what can we do about it, besides rant on Slashdot? I'm sure much of the general public would believe Microsoft over Slashdot readers. Is there any way for people like us to counter the FUD?
I agree completely; these detectors can be useful, but they can also be misused. I was a TA for an introductory C course that used a similar cheat detector. The head TA demonstrated by showing us two past programs that had been flagged and which he felt were indeed an example of cheating. However, the examples of "cheating" which he pointed out included blocks of code such as this:
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
array[i] = 0;
}
There were many other similar examples. The point is, it is often true in an introductory class that there really is one "best" way to do something. This quote from the article worries me in particular:
"But for the most part, the degree of similarity that this program is looking for - the commas are in the same place, the semicolons are in the same place, the spacing is the same, they've made the same mistakes"
In our class, we taught programming style, including things like where to put semicolons, how to indent, how to name variables, etc. So, I don't think it's at all unlikely for different students to put commas, semicolons, and spaces in exactly the same places. There are also several common mistakes that we see over and over (for instance, forgetting to allocate space for the terminating in a C string). So, while I agree that the things mentioned in the article can be warning flags, they are by no means proof of cheating. I hope that course staff who use these programs will use them wisely and not go overboard with the accusations of cheating.
Being a monopoly is legal. What is not legal is using monopoly power to gain a competitive advantage. So, while exclusive contracts are not a crime for other companies, they are for Microsoft because it wields monopoly power.
Re:Random bits that are in Pi somewhere
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 3
Why concentrate on just pi? If they show it's true for all trancendental numbers, they've got it for pi, e, etc.
My guess is as good as yours, but probably the reason they focus on pi is that pi is very old and very basic; it's one of those things that the ancient Greeks thought about. e, OTOH, is a little younger and arises from a more difficult problem.
Can pi appear in pi anywhere? I guess not, since that would mean that pi repeats.
Nope, pi can't appear directly; that is, pi can't look like 3.1415...31415...
Think about it like this: if pi contained a copy of pi starting at the n-th digit, then the (n + m)-th digit of pi would be the same as the m-th digit of pi for every m. And then pi would be the same as (first n - 1 digits) + 10^(-n) * pi. This gives pi * (1 - 10^(-n)) = first (n - 1) digits of pi, which in turn gives pi = [first (n - 1) digits] / (1 - 10^(-n)), which is a rational number.
I suppose pi could appear in pi in a slightly more complicated way though. For instance, it could be interleaved with other stuff, i.e.
pi =...3*1*4*1*5*... where the *'s are other digits.
Weird, mine look fine. My fixed width font did look crappy for a while, and then I realized that it was set on 13pt; when I went back to 12pt, it looked great again. Maybe your font size is funny?
I would have to say that calculators in education have not been a good thing. Let me relate a few things that happened in my high school classes to explain why.
Our teachers explained everything with calculators. One time, somebody finally asked a teacher if a problem could be solved without a calculator. And the response? "Oh, but it's so much easier with the calculator."
Another time, my friend got points taken off on a test because she (*gasp*) showed her work; she was instead supposed to just use the calculator to solve the problems.
Similarly, when I took calculus, I got points taken off on a test for answering e rather than 2.72. Why? Because the teacher did the problem with a calculator, got 2.72, and didn't realize the real answer was e.
Now, I'm in college, and I just finished tutoring a high school kid for his AP calculus test. His dependence on calculators is astounding. It's not just things like not knowing how to add fractions; it's also things like not being able to say what the graph of y = x^2 - 4 looks like without pulling out his graphing calculator.
So, what's the point? Maybe it doesn't even matter that kids can't solve these problems without calculators. But I think it does, because math is all about problem solving skills and thinking. When you reduce math to a sequence of key presses on the calculator, you don't teach any sort of problem solving. To me, that's making kids less intelligent.
This is not to say that calculators are evil; however, they seem to be horribly misused in school these days. Perhaps because teachers teach so that kids can pass some high stakes test, and it's easier to get students to remember "press this sequence of 5 buttons when you see this problem" than to learn how to think. Whatever the reason, I don't think calculators are doing much for education. And that's a shame because there's nothing inherently problematic about calculators; it's just the way they're being used.
As a math major, I love math. And I must say, I'm not fond of the stuff on this page. Why? This is not a good representation of what most mathematicians do. And I would guess that most people will find this stuff less attractive than other math.
For instance, consider their version of the pigeonhole principle, stated as
"A natural number is not equinumerous to a proper subset of itself" and written formally as a bunch of symbols. Along with a 75-step proof consisting entirely of symbols that gives very little intuititve idea of what's going on. Contrast this with the version that most mathematicians use -- "If you have n pigeonholes and n + 1 pigeons, some pigeonhole has more than 1 pigeon." I know which version I prefer!
What the Metamath page does is lay out proofs of logic and set theory. That's fine, but people should realize that these fields are not at all representative of most areas of math. These fields tend to be very concerned with absolute precision (hence all the symbols), whereas most math is concerned only with ideas (conveyed best through words). Unfortunately, I think this page gives people the idea that math is just an icky stream of symbols, which is definitely not true.
YAMM (Yet Another Microsoft Myth). It is just as difficult to get everything going on Winblows as it is under Linux.
"Upgrade this driver", "fiddle with this registry setting", etc etc. This myth persists only because the vast majority of
people do not need to install Windows: it comes on their PC. If Linux came on their PC, people would comment about
how easy *it* is to install.
Indeed this is true. But the point is that Linux is not going to come with most PC's until it gains acceptance as a viable desktop option. And, in order to gain that acceptance, it needs to be easy to use for the average user. Which means that it needs to be easy to install because they most likely will have to install it themselves if they want it.
> Linux is in an endless beta. There is always another patch. There is always a new chunk of code.
Duh. Welcome to Free Software, babe. That's the whole *point*. So much better than "gee, I hope they make a hotfix at
some point in the future to cure my woes"
Yup, this is great! But not for most people. The true Linux advocates today are those who are willing to spend the time to configure their systems, understand how Linux works, try lots of free software to find just the right program, etc. But the average user, at least in my experience, isn't like this. The average user doesn't want to download nightly builds of Mozilla; they want to download IE once and be able to use it for months. The average user doesn't want to have to maintain his computer; he just wants it to work.
Again, this person completely misses the entire point of Free Software.
I don't think she's trying to explain free software or its purpose; this article isn't about consumers having freedom of choice or anything like that. So, yes, she is perhaps missing the point of free software. But what she's trying to say is still true -- Linux distributions today just generally aren't ready for mainstream adoption by people or companies.
Well, I'm definitely a geek girl (math and computer science all the way!), and I don't know exactly why there are so few girls. Ever since I started going to math programs and such in high school, I've noticed that there are always a LOT more guys. Even at the gender-balanced programs, all the INTERESTED people are guys; there are girls, but they don't seem to be there out of any particular interest. Seems to me that the anti-geek tendency for girls starts much before high school, but I don't know why that is.
Logo was my first language. I started it in third grade, and boy did I love it. Although now that I think about it, I don't think I learned any programming structures from it. The only thing I ever did was make the turtle change colors and such. Pretty pictures, oooohh.
So when they say the new version of WebObjects will be "100% Java based," does that mean that you can no longer write WO apps in Objective-C? Seems like that was a popular feature with all those NeXT people...
Slashdot Mirror
As several people have pointed out, there's a lot of FUD in this advisory from Microsoft (big surprise). My question is, what can we do about it, besides rant on Slashdot? I'm sure much of the general public would believe Microsoft over Slashdot readers. Is there any way for people like us to counter the FUD?
I agree completely; these detectors can be useful, but they can also be misused. I was a TA for an introductory C course that used a similar cheat detector. The head TA demonstrated by showing us two past programs that had been flagged and which he felt were indeed an example of cheating. However, the examples of "cheating" which he pointed out included blocks of code such as this:
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
array[i] = 0;
}
There were many other similar examples. The point is, it is often true in an introductory class that there really is one "best" way to do something. This quote from the article worries me in particular:
"But for the most part, the degree of similarity that this program is looking for - the commas are in the same place, the semicolons are in the same place, the spacing is the same, they've made the same mistakes"
In our class, we taught programming style, including things like where to put semicolons, how to indent, how to name variables, etc. So, I don't think it's at all unlikely for different students to put commas, semicolons, and spaces in exactly the same places. There are also several common mistakes that we see over and over (for instance, forgetting to allocate space for the terminating in a C string). So, while I agree that the things mentioned in the article can be warning flags, they are by no means proof of cheating. I hope that course staff who use these programs will use them wisely and not go overboard with the accusations of cheating.
Being a monopoly is legal. What is not legal is using monopoly power to gain a competitive advantage. So, while exclusive contracts are not a crime for other companies, they are for Microsoft because it wields monopoly power.
My guess is as good as yours, but probably the reason they focus on pi is that pi is very old and very basic; it's one of those things that the ancient Greeks thought about. e, OTOH, is a little younger and arises from a more difficult problem.
Can pi appear in pi anywhere? I guess not, since that would mean that pi repeats.
Nope, pi can't appear directly; that is, pi can't look like 3.1415...31415... Think about it like this: if pi contained a copy of pi starting at the n-th digit, then the (n + m)-th digit of pi would be the same as the m-th digit of pi for every m. And then pi would be the same as (first n - 1 digits) + 10^(-n) * pi. This gives pi * (1 - 10^(-n)) = first (n - 1) digits of pi, which in turn gives pi = [first (n - 1) digits] / (1 - 10^(-n)), which is a rational number.
I suppose pi could appear in pi in a slightly more complicated way though. For instance, it could be interleaved with other stuff, i.e. pi = ...3*1*4*1*5*... where the *'s are other digits.
Weird, mine look fine. My fixed width font did look crappy for a while, and then I realized that it was set on 13pt; when I went back to 12pt, it looked great again. Maybe your font size is funny?
Our teachers explained everything with calculators. One time, somebody finally asked a teacher if a problem could be solved without a calculator. And the response? "Oh, but it's so much easier with the calculator."
Another time, my friend got points taken off on a test because she (*gasp*) showed her work; she was instead supposed to just use the calculator to solve the problems.
Similarly, when I took calculus, I got points taken off on a test for answering e rather than 2.72. Why? Because the teacher did the problem with a calculator, got 2.72, and didn't realize the real answer was e.
Now, I'm in college, and I just finished tutoring a high school kid for his AP calculus test. His dependence on calculators is astounding. It's not just things like not knowing how to add fractions; it's also things like not being able to say what the graph of y = x^2 - 4 looks like without pulling out his graphing calculator.
So, what's the point? Maybe it doesn't even matter that kids can't solve these problems without calculators. But I think it does, because math is all about problem solving skills and thinking. When you reduce math to a sequence of key presses on the calculator, you don't teach any sort of problem solving. To me, that's making kids less intelligent.
This is not to say that calculators are evil; however, they seem to be horribly misused in school these days. Perhaps because teachers teach so that kids can pass some high stakes test, and it's easier to get students to remember "press this sequence of 5 buttons when you see this problem" than to learn how to think. Whatever the reason, I don't think calculators are doing much for education. And that's a shame because there's nothing inherently problematic about calculators; it's just the way they're being used.
For instance, consider their version of the pigeonhole principle, stated as "A natural number is not equinumerous to a proper subset of itself" and written formally as a bunch of symbols. Along with a 75-step proof consisting entirely of symbols that gives very little intuititve idea of what's going on. Contrast this with the version that most mathematicians use -- "If you have n pigeonholes and n + 1 pigeons, some pigeonhole has more than 1 pigeon." I know which version I prefer!
What the Metamath page does is lay out proofs of logic and set theory. That's fine, but people should realize that these fields are not at all representative of most areas of math. These fields tend to be very concerned with absolute precision (hence all the symbols), whereas most math is concerned only with ideas (conveyed best through words). Unfortunately, I think this page gives people the idea that math is just an icky stream of symbols, which is definitely not true.
Well, I'm definitely a geek girl (math and computer science all the way!), and I don't know exactly why there are so few girls. Ever since I started going to math programs and such in high school, I've noticed that there are always a LOT more guys. Even at the gender-balanced programs, all the INTERESTED people are guys; there are girls, but they don't seem to be there out of any particular interest. Seems to me that the anti-geek tendency for girls starts much before high school, but I don't know why that is.
Logo was my first language. I started it in third grade, and boy did I love it. Although now that I think about it, I don't think I learned any programming structures from it. The only thing I ever did was make the turtle change colors and such. Pretty pictures, oooohh.
So when they say the new version of WebObjects will be "100% Java based," does that mean that you can no longer write WO apps in Objective-C? Seems like that was a popular feature with all those NeXT people...
Looks like it's pretty much just 3dfx cards now...