If the coursework / dissertation seems out of line with the student's "normal" performance.. hey, take five minutes (with the work in front of you, not in front of him), and ask him a few questions about it.
I had a similar situation while teaching an advanced algorithms course at the 400-level. There were two submitted homeworks that were spot on with the (supposedly unpublished) solution key. I called both students in separately to quiz them a bit. The first one turned out to be genuine -- the student not only flawlessly explained his reasoning, but could replicate it on a similar problem while raising interesting questions at the same time (he was a ph.d. student). The second one couldn't even begin to explain his tricky dynamic programming solutions, and subsequently got an F on the course.
The problem isn't with the ones that are clearly cheating or not. It's the ones in the middle -- the fairly competent students who pose the biggest question about plagiarism. And unfortuantely, most students lie in that big central hump in the distribution.
Video games can be engineered to be addictive in a way that no non-interactive media or experience can be.
That is a sad perspective, and certainly not true. I'm a rock climbing instructor part time, and people who don't climb find it difficult to understand the passion and sheer addictiveness of climbing. There are very large portions of the general populace who get no joy at all from video games, and that majority would find your claim...questionable. I won't even bother to go into more examples of experiences that are consistently enjoyable, non-chemical and still addictive.
they are specifically designed to hit our reward centers in consistent ways.
In other words, they are designed to be consistently enjoyable. I could say the same thing about sunny beaches, and yet not everyone goes giving up their lives to become beach bums.
'And when she's not at the computer she's like a lost soul. She just looks straight ahead and says nothing.'"
Correlation and causation, folks. Sigh. It's highly unlikely that WoW took a perfectly normal mother and converted her into a zombie like this. These symptoms are indicative of deeper psychological issues that manifest in an unhealthy obsession with WoW. So WoW not having an "ending" is hardly an issue -- people can get addicted to anything that offers escapism, and the fact that this mother is addicted to WoW is not a cause to point fingers at WoW. And I speak as someone who stopped playing warcraft after warcraft 2 back in the 90s.
Taking Pensacola's data as a baseline will offer skewed results. Pensacola has a large Navy population, so would have higher porn related searches then the rest of the communities in the area from the Navy personnel stationed there alone.
As a navy semen, I reject your pornosition that sex is always on our minds.
This is interesting. I wonder if I can legally "lend" or "give" a copy of an electronic file that I purchased (not licensed) and own to someone else by transmitting it and then deleting my sole copy of it. It could open up some very interesting paradigms in file sharing technology.
A+ for the parent post here! This flooding of our graduate level programs with people from other countries has obvious results. Of course the demand now will be to hire these other persons. In doing so US Government security will shall we say fall into the wrong hands.
I am the parent poster, and I'm a graduate student from another country. It seemed a little ironic because your comment isn't exactly flattering towards "my kind", i.e. assuming that we're all the "wrong hands".
maybe smart geeks are, well, not stupid, and don't want to get sent of to die in some other country?
Playing along with the "other country" theme, if you step into a graduate engineering department, you're likely to find a majority of non U.S. citizens comprising the graduate student workforce. These people are also ineligible for most U.S. Govt. fellowships and jobs that require a decent level of security clearance. Thus, DARPA might be having a tough time recruiting top-notch talent because most of the talent is ineligible to work for DARPA.
Very, very beautiful visualizations of algorithmic processes and complexity -- even if you're not into "art" per se, you really should check out this site. Plus the artist offers all the code open-source. And in the interest of full disclosure, I am not the artist and don't even know the artist, although I am a huge fan.
The Wii probably doesn't use more power in standby mode than in gameplay mode. And by probably, I mean definitely.
Re:Meanwhile, I still have issues with BT...
on
Comcast Invests in P2P
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· Score: 4, Informative
still takes over 30 minutes to get a consistent speed greater than 100kbps on a so-called High Speed network!
Slow down there, champ. The BitTorrent protocol uses an approximate tit-for-tat strategy -- more peers will upload to you if you upload to more peers. This can take a while, which is why BT speeds generally trend up slowly, although I'll admit 30 minutes is a bit much even in my experience (I used to have comcast, now have at&t -- they're both crap, in short). It's all explained in this very clear and easy to read paper by Bram Cohen (the original protocol author) : Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent (PDF link).
What happened to this man is despicable. However, we need to remember that Google is a company, not a judge in a court of law. It is not their place to decide if a court-issued subpoena is "worth" complying with or not, especially not in a democratic country (eat trolls, eat!). The big question is if they were responding to a court order in the first place, or the lean of some jackass in the government.
It would be interesting to see someone use a Third Amendment defense against this...
I doubt if you could use the Third Amendment against this -- it deals specifically with quartering 'soldiers', not military paraphernalia. Furthermore, it has an exception for times of war, which as we all know, is technically all the time thanks to the Wars Against Nouns. Given that it's so difficult to prosecute for spyware, I'd guess pursuing successful litigation against the military for a voluntarily downloaded botnet software would be next to impossible.
nice idea...but looks like its piggybacking on Akamai's database for geo/ip mappings. I wonder if Akamai's TOS is friendly to this sort of stuff. In any case, this sort of feature could be built into the BT protocol itself to achieve the same end if necessary.
It begs the question of if we need to consider a Prime Directive before exploring or sending signals too far into the depths of space.
You're absolutely right! We should definitely set hold back on all the space exploration we've been doing. Also, we should set physical limits for our transmissions to "expire" after a certain distance, so we don't send them "too far". In fact, that would be the only responsible thing to do for Masters of the Universe such as us.
italy Lopota, the president of the Energia space rocket corporation, said he believes space tourism is a forced measure compensating for insufficient financing of the Russian space program
And this is bad...why?? If space programs are languishing in funding for either development or research, why not charge rich suckers (with dreams just like us) huge amounts of money to fund it? If you have the infrastructure, it sounds lucrative. And I'd be willing to bet that the market would support even more ridiculous prices than $40 mil.
Scientists in the Netherlands, believe growing plants on ou...
Look, if anyone knows anything about growing plants under unfavorable conditions (soil if not legal), it would be the Dutch. Looking forward to new strains like "Even More Northern Lights", "Earthly Glow",...
Basically the message is that pirates were never customers and can therefore be ignored. I would take it one step further and say that piracy is a form of free advertising. More than once I've bought cd's based on mp3's I heard. The music and movie industry suits are a bunch of whining dinosaurs; all they need to do is make the disks worth buying by offering additional content liek posters, stickers, etc..
This seems to ignore the fact that it is VASTLY cheaper to download an mp3 or an album than it is to download a video game. For one, games can be 2GB+. Second, if you look at the size of the public that plays video games and those who LISTEN TO MUSIC, I'm sure you'll find that the latter is orders of magnitude greater than the former.
I'm never one to side with the RIAA, but when you buy a game, you're getting the nice box, instant gratification vs. hours on torrents, the manuals, a guaranteed crapware-free install, tech support, online play and possibly other benefits. When you download an album, you're getting the entire product. Winamp will even download the cover art for you. Want the lyrics? Google. Want posters? eBay, allposters.com and a thousand other sites that sell posters at decent prices. In other words, piracy would most likely never kill the games market, but mp3 downloading almost certainly *could* kill CD sales in 5-10 years.
all they need to do is make the disks worth buying by offering additional content liek posters
So an illegal practice is threatening their business, and they should react by enhancing their product at much more cost to themselves? Would you pay $25 for a CD if it included a poster that you could buy for $12 on eBay and download the mp3s for free? Would they bundle a $15 music CD with a $20+ poster instead of selling both in a store to poor idiots who don't know about torrents? I despise what the RIAA does, but your alternative doesn't make much business sense given that piracy is illegal, and the music business is just that -- a business.
They'd have absolutely no way of knowing if I actually DID view the ad or if the client just reported back to AOL that I did without my actually viewing it. It's a no-win situation for AOL since the clients are open source.
Yes, but do this on a large enough scale with a popular application, and eventually someone from AOL will download a copy and notice, and revoke your key or do whatever it takes to destroy your app because it doesn't follow their TOS.
Every public school teacher in the state's K-12 school system shall have the affirmative right and freedom to objectively present scientific information
Unfortunately, the majority of K-12 teachers might -- at best -- have an undergraduate degree in a science. This does not make them scientists, or qualified to judge/review/select scientific discourse as they see fit.
Some prophet ordered a woman killed, with her baby sleeping on her, because she said something wrong about him....Therefore violently supressing criticism has always been a central part of islam.
I was going to be more elaborate, but if you don't see the problem in your logic, you must have been a business major, or are a teenager. The Unabomber (a white man) sent bombs to a lot of faculty at universities...therefore suppressing education has always been a central part of the white man's way.
Silly question perhaps, but is optimized to use SSE, SSE2, SSE3, or any other instruction sets?
Gone are the days of hand-coding CPU specific optimizations as inline assembly. All we do now is set the appropriate compiler flags. The pre-built binaries probably aren't going to be SSEx optimized, but that's the beauty -- grab your own copy, fire up gcc (or the free msvc) and compile yourself a custom brew with all the optimizations you desire.
Now whether SSEx is actually going to improve performance in your web browser is another question...
What a great use of time. Hey! Check this out! I've got AJAX for Mathematica!....But I just spent all this time porting an application to the web!
The reason why this is more than just another stupid AJAX port of a desktop app is that it allows for things like very, very easy supercomputing capabilities to be built into Mathematica -- just upload your notebook and let Wolfram's cluster crunch it for you. No munging with parallelization, or setting up and maintaining the hardware. Some other benefits (depending on point of view) of the AJAX port:
Sell you a super-expensive license to use this super-charged, supercomputing version of Mathematica that runs on Wolfram's cluster. Trust me, a lot of computations in Mathematica take a very long time. If your computations are wearing down your laptop, simply pay $1000, upload your notebook and have your answer in no time.
No need to worry about grad students downloading pirated versions of Mathematica
Software updates are made seamlessly and instantly
Never worry about notebook backups, allows for collaboration a la Google docs
Slashdot Mirror
I had a similar situation while teaching an advanced algorithms course at the 400-level. There were two submitted homeworks that were spot on with the (supposedly unpublished) solution key. I called both students in separately to quiz them a bit. The first one turned out to be genuine -- the student not only flawlessly explained his reasoning, but could replicate it on a similar problem while raising interesting questions at the same time (he was a ph.d. student). The second one couldn't even begin to explain his tricky dynamic programming solutions, and subsequently got an F on the course.
The problem isn't with the ones that are clearly cheating or not. It's the ones in the middle -- the fairly competent students who pose the biggest question about plagiarism. And unfortuantely, most students lie in that big central hump in the distribution.
That is a sad perspective, and certainly not true. I'm a rock climbing instructor part time, and people who don't climb find it difficult to understand the passion and sheer addictiveness of climbing. There are very large portions of the general populace who get no joy at all from video games, and that majority would find your claim...questionable. I won't even bother to go into more examples of experiences that are consistently enjoyable, non-chemical and still addictive.
In other words, they are designed to be consistently enjoyable. I could say the same thing about sunny beaches, and yet not everyone goes giving up their lives to become beach bums.
Correlation and causation, folks. Sigh. It's highly unlikely that WoW took a perfectly normal mother and converted her into a zombie like this. These symptoms are indicative of deeper psychological issues that manifest in an unhealthy obsession with WoW. So WoW not having an "ending" is hardly an issue -- people can get addicted to anything that offers escapism, and the fact that this mother is addicted to WoW is not a cause to point fingers at WoW. And I speak as someone who stopped playing warcraft after warcraft 2 back in the 90s.
As a navy semen, I reject your pornosition that sex is always on our minds.
This is interesting. I wonder if I can legally "lend" or "give" a copy of an electronic file that I purchased (not licensed) and own to someone else by transmitting it and then deleting my sole copy of it. It could open up some very interesting paradigms in file sharing technology.
I am the parent poster, and I'm a graduate student from another country. It seemed a little ironic because your comment isn't exactly flattering towards "my kind", i.e. assuming that we're all the "wrong hands".
Playing along with the "other country" theme, if you step into a graduate engineering department, you're likely to find a majority of non U.S. citizens comprising the graduate student workforce. These people are also ineligible for most U.S. Govt. fellowships and jobs that require a decent level of security clearance. Thus, DARPA might be having a tough time recruiting top-notch talent because most of the talent is ineligible to work for DARPA.
Complexification
Very, very beautiful visualizations of algorithmic processes and complexity -- even if you're not into "art" per se, you really should check out this site. Plus the artist offers all the code open-source. And in the interest of full disclosure, I am not the artist and don't even know the artist, although I am a huge fan.
Don't you mean sqrt(2)U ?
That's a great first sentence to promote a cognition-enhancing drug.
Gameplay Power Usage
Wii: 18.51 kWh
360: 192.5 kWh
PS3: 201.3 kWh
Standby Power Usage
Wii: 73.88 kWh
360: 19.24 kWh
PS3: 14.62 kWh
The Wii probably doesn't use more power in standby mode than in gameplay mode. And by probably, I mean definitely.
Slow down there, champ. The BitTorrent protocol uses an approximate tit-for-tat strategy -- more peers will upload to you if you upload to more peers. This can take a while, which is why BT speeds generally trend up slowly, although I'll admit 30 minutes is a bit much even in my experience (I used to have comcast, now have at&t -- they're both crap, in short). It's all explained in this very clear and easy to read paper by Bram Cohen (the original protocol author) : Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent (PDF link).
What happened to this man is despicable. However, we need to remember that Google is a company, not a judge in a court of law. It is not their place to decide if a court-issued subpoena is "worth" complying with or not, especially not in a democratic country (eat trolls, eat!). The big question is if they were responding to a court order in the first place, or the lean of some jackass in the government.
I doubt if you could use the Third Amendment against this -- it deals specifically with quartering 'soldiers', not military paraphernalia. Furthermore, it has an exception for times of war, which as we all know, is technically all the time thanks to the Wars Against Nouns. Given that it's so difficult to prosecute for spyware, I'd guess pursuing successful litigation against the military for a voluntarily downloaded botnet software would be next to impossible.
nice idea...but looks like its piggybacking on Akamai's database for geo/ip mappings. I wonder if Akamai's TOS is friendly to this sort of stuff. In any case, this sort of feature could be built into the BT protocol itself to achieve the same end if necessary.
You're absolutely right! We should definitely set hold back on all the space exploration we've been doing. Also, we should set physical limits for our transmissions to "expire" after a certain distance, so we don't send them "too far". In fact, that would be the only responsible thing to do for Masters of the Universe such as us.
And this is bad...why?? If space programs are languishing in funding for either development or research, why not charge rich suckers (with dreams just like us) huge amounts of money to fund it? If you have the infrastructure, it sounds lucrative. And I'd be willing to bet that the market would support even more ridiculous prices than $40 mil.
Look, if anyone knows anything about growing plants under unfavorable conditions (soil if not legal), it would be the Dutch. Looking forward to new strains like "Even More Northern Lights", "Earthly Glow", ...
had to be said too.
This seems to ignore the fact that it is VASTLY cheaper to download an mp3 or an album than it is to download a video game. For one, games can be 2GB+. Second, if you look at the size of the public that plays video games and those who LISTEN TO MUSIC, I'm sure you'll find that the latter is orders of magnitude greater than the former. I'm never one to side with the RIAA, but when you buy a game, you're getting the nice box, instant gratification vs. hours on torrents, the manuals, a guaranteed crapware-free install, tech support, online play and possibly other benefits. When you download an album, you're getting the entire product. Winamp will even download the cover art for you. Want the lyrics? Google. Want posters? eBay, allposters.com and a thousand other sites that sell posters at decent prices. In other words, piracy would most likely never kill the games market, but mp3 downloading almost certainly *could* kill CD sales in 5-10 years.
So an illegal practice is threatening their business, and they should react by enhancing their product at much more cost to themselves? Would you pay $25 for a CD if it included a poster that you could buy for $12 on eBay and download the mp3s for free? Would they bundle a $15 music CD with a $20+ poster instead of selling both in a store to poor idiots who don't know about torrents? I despise what the RIAA does, but your alternative doesn't make much business sense given that piracy is illegal, and the music business is just that -- a business.
Yes, but do this on a large enough scale with a popular application, and eventually someone from AOL will download a copy and notice, and revoke your key or do whatever it takes to destroy your app because it doesn't follow their TOS.
Unfortunately, the majority of K-12 teachers might -- at best -- have an undergraduate degree in a science. This does not make them scientists, or qualified to judge/review/select scientific discourse as they see fit.
I was going to be more elaborate, but if you don't see the problem in your logic, you must have been a business major, or are a teenager. The Unabomber (a white man) sent bombs to a lot of faculty at universities...therefore suppressing education has always been a central part of the white man's way.
Gone are the days of hand-coding CPU specific optimizations as inline assembly. All we do now is set the appropriate compiler flags. The pre-built binaries probably aren't going to be SSEx optimized, but that's the beauty -- grab your own copy, fire up gcc (or the free msvc) and compile yourself a custom brew with all the optimizations you desire.
Now whether SSEx is actually going to improve performance in your web browser is another question...
The reason why this is more than just another stupid AJAX port of a desktop app is that it allows for things like very, very easy supercomputing capabilities to be built into Mathematica -- just upload your notebook and let Wolfram's cluster crunch it for you. No munging with parallelization, or setting up and maintaining the hardware. Some other benefits (depending on point of view) of the AJAX port: