Unfortunately for Apple, the iPhone4 hasn't really killed Android as everyone was predicting, so iAd is not likely going to hurt google very much in the long term.
Little too early to say that the iPhone 4 won't take a chunk of Android's market share, when it's only been out what, 3 weeks, wouldn't you say champ?
That's like saying "Unfortunately for Google, Android 2.2 hasn't killed iOS as everyone was predicting." FFS, the technology has just been released, give it 6 months and see how things look.
I am a subscriber; could I replace it with equivalent "free" alternatives? Probably... but - having one service to handle the calendar syncing (and syncing to my iphone), the contact syncing, bookmark syncing, as well as the easy web mail interface, plus the easy online storage & gallery functionality - I prefer that to having to find ways to integrate flickr/picasa, delicious (or another bookmark sync service), gmail, google calendar, together.
Plus, for me one of the killer apps here is the ability to sync system settings between my laptop & desktop. It requires a little management to make it work, but in general, it's wonderful to be able to rebuild my laptop (I've had to do this 2 times over the past 3 years, once with a hard drive failure, and once with a rebuild to free up a fair amount of space for a new bootcamp partition) and know that the first mobileme sync will put my system settings back the way I want them, plus the "find my iphone" feature, which I've used a couple times.
There are certainly other ways to get the functionality of mobileme, but for me it's more the 'one-stop shopping' and the fact that most of these things are built right into the apps & os that make me pay for it. I prefer the simplicity and integration to rolling my own.
You've never worked for a division/company/department that has a "mission statement" or "vision statement" before?
This is typical bureaucratic jargon, I read it and thought for a second - "Hey I worked at that place before!" And then I realized that they didn't also claim they were going to "synergize... [their] product offerings while remaining the provider of choice for world-class enterprise solutions."
I'll quote once more from the post you're responding to, since you seem to want to ignore this part:
Are they releasing suggested detailed steps for working around and mitigating the solution for normal users? I saw no mention of that in the article, just that they were releasing a 0-day with proof of concept code.
Releasing a statement saying "this exists" is very different from releasing a statement saying "this exists, and here's how to take advantage of it for the black-hats out there."
Are they releasing suggested detailed steps for working around and mitigating the solution for normal users? I saw no mention of that in the article, just that they were releasing a 0-day with proof of concept code.
That announcement does NOTHING to make me secure, any more than Microsoft saying "We won't do anything about this for a year" makes me more secure.
You'll have to excuse me if I don't enjoy the prospect of having my computer and my data being in the middle of a pissing contest between Microsoft and MSFT's "spurned" researchers.
Water has this amazing property, in that it can become a vapor - say, maybe, in the sunny outdoors - and work its way into the darnedest places - say, maybe, a dark cool space between insulation and drywall - where it condenses or simply is absorbed out of the air, and provides paper (food) and moisture (water). So... cool, dark, moist, and a food source = mold & mildew growth.
This is why your house has moisture barriers to prevent moisture from building up where it shouldn't.
You don't play hardball with someone with nothing to lose.
Nor is it particularly wise to play fast and loose with a company with billions of dollars to burn and a corporate legal team that makes prison-yard thugs look like old ladies in muumuus.
Neither response makes me more secure, so why should I be thanking Microsoft, or their jilted lovers?
Because "proper understanding" and "comprehensive understanding of the totality of human knowledge regarding a subject, as well as current research directions and their promising leads," are very different things.
I don't need to know the biochemistry behind the function of an antibiotic to know that when I have a strep throat, they're going to help. I don't need to have a degree in nuclear physics to understand that radiation is dangerous, but there are ways to control it safely. A good teacher knows that over-simplification with the warning that, "well, there are some exceptions, but we'll come back to those later," is often a better approach than saying, "This is the case. Except when any of these 200 exceptions occur, so let's begin listing all the exceptions that will confuse you and muddy your understanding of the subject."
As I said before - you crawl before you walk, and you walk before you run. Scientists are running, and your notion is that "Well if you can't run with me right now, I can't be arsed to explain why walking is faster than crawling."
I'm sorry to hear that you feel that learning is a one-way process in which reams of facts are dumped on an unprepared mind until it either gives up and admits your vast intellectual superiority, or it wrestles the firehose of information being directed at it into submission.
Did you learn that way? Did your teachers actively try to cripple your mind by telling you that you weren't possibly qualified to hold an opinion or ask questions until you understood everything that was possible to understand about a subject?
Teaching (and consequently, learning) is a process, and the best teachers (and students) understand that there's a question-and-answer element to it which is far more effective than simple rote memorization. I could recite a million facts to my mother about what the "concept of a gigabyte" is, and how it relates to binary numbers, storage space, video vs. audio codecs and relative file sizes - and not a single one of those facts will answer her question about why she "should care how many gigabytes a hard drive has."
Please tell me - what's factually incorrect about the answer I gave her? Is a gigabyte NOT a unit of measure for communicating the size of a hard drive? Does a hard drive that holds 500 GB NOT hold more than a hard drive with 350 GB?
Do you see the irony in a researcher writing a paper aimed at educating scientists about a problem they need to address, only to be greeted by howls of derisive laughter?
Did you read the article? They compare the Yucca Mt. issue with a similar issue the Canadian govt handled, and point to specific differences in how the Canadian agency handled it, with far better results.
The paper isn't a 15-page screed stating that "scientists are poopypants and don't dumb down stuff enough for the public."
Yes, there will always be cranks, nutcases, and irrational people, and you have to draw the line at some point.
Even if you don't sway them, the key is to give them an outlet and make them feel as if they've been heard. Address their criticisms head on, and if you don't know, or the data is inconclusive, or there's a "chance" they're right, then say so and explain what the odds really are.
The LHC end-of-the-world scenario was a good example of this - they explained that higher-energy collisions than would happen in the LHC happen all the time naturally, and have not resulted in a black hole swallowing the earth, therefore there is no likely expectation that the LHC would cause that. And despite that, I'm sure there are still lots of cranks out there who are still convinced the earth is going to be swallowed by a black hole any day.
The key is that saying "Hush now, we're scientists, we know better you fool," isn't the most effective response. Separate the people who are "teachable" and reasonable from the cranks, and you'll find that the cranks are a fairly small (if vocal) group.
I'll reiterate the final part of what you're responding to, this time in big bold letters:
Learning to listen to the question being asked and understand *what is really being asked* is important. Listening is an important communication skill too.
And your response is *exactly* the type of confusing, jargon-filled response that I'm criticizing. "Well 1000 gigabytes is a terabyte, and you might see terabyte drives out there too... except it's really 1024, not 1000, because of binary numbers, where everything's a power of 2. And it's possible that less gigabytes could fit more individual photos than individual videos, because of the amount of data in the types of files, and the encoding and compression various filetypes use..."
This is *EXACTLY* the problem I'm talking about, thank you for giving an example. You make the answer needlessly complex in some sort of "look how smart I am" wankfest.
I don't need to be a mechanic to know a car needs gas, oil, and windshield wiper fluid.
And if you were ignorant of how to change your oil, fill your gas, or refill your wiper fluid, would you want your mechanic to scream at you and berate you for being an idiot? Or would you want him to say, "Look, you need to learn to check these things, here's what to do"?
How did you learn that a car needs gas, oil, and wiper fluid - did you magically divine these things, or did somebody take the time to teach you at some point?
Yes, and that's the point - scientists need to be more interesed "in educating" than they are in "smacking down" people who question them, or just don't understand.
Show an interest in educating, rather than smacking down the people who "don't get it," and we might see that the public begins to actually understand, rather than resist and get defensive when they're called mouth-breathers, idiots, morons, and dipshits.
Being a great scientists does not mean that they have to be great teachers. Some of the best scientific minds who ever lived were "socially-challenged" including Newton and Einstein. They were not renowned for their teaching abilities.
I never said that every "great scientist" had to be a "great teacher". I said that explaining things to laymen in terms they can understand isn't lying, marketing, or "dumbing down," it's called teaching.
I think the majority of non-scientists and engineers in the US are probably in the "average" intelligence range, by definition. And I'd say that a large number of scientists and engineers fit neatly into that category, as well.
Out of curiosity - How do you reconcile the notion that "85% of people believe in a god [means they're idiots]" with the notion that there are plenty of scientists and engineers who profess belief in a creator or supreme being?
How does an economy function when everybody in it is only qualified, intellectually speaking, to ask if you'd like fries with that?
I've found that many adults are perfectly happy to be taught if you take the time to explain something to them without frustrating them with jargon, irrelevant "look how smart I am" factoids, and a condescending attitude. Maybe you should try that sometime, and see if you get better results. Engage with them and realize that they likely have a lot of expertise in areas that you lack knowledge of, and maybe you'll even make some new friends.
And understanding the explanation requires *learning*, something many many people are woefully unwilling to do.
Sure it does - this is not to say that the "public" does not have an affirmative responsibility to attempt to understand what's being said, it's a conversation, not a one-way braindump.
But if you start teaching with the outlook that "you people are ignorant, and have no interest or desire to learn," how effective are you really going to be?
You can give a user a flashy drag 'n drop user interface to design a database query, but if they don't understand and haven't taken the time to learn how relational databases work, they'll never achieve anything more complex than a single table query.
I agree - but what if all they ever need to learn how to do is define a single table query? If somebody asks you how to do that, are you going to give them a semester-long course in relational database design?
The point is, rather than say "Your question touches on this massive field that you know nothing about, and you need to know everything about this field in order to have an answer," why not learn to cut away the parts of the field that are irrelevant to the answer, and present them with that?
"How do you know storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain is safe?" doesn't require the person asking the question to have a degree in nuclear physics to understand the safeguards, and how effective they are.
the most basic handle the concept of protein folding
I'd say the "basic concept" of protein folding - that chains of amino acids fold into 3-dimensional functional forms - could be demonstrated in about 5 minutes with a balloon animal.
Would that explanation gloss over many of the fine details? Certainly. Would it be *a lie* to not immediately explain exactly what the current best thinking is on minima, chaperones, and chemical bonding, and how those impact the process of folding and the functional shape of a protein molecule? Not at all.
If somebody asks me, "fucking proteins, how do they work?" I'm not going to launch into a math- and physics-filled lecture to start, I'm going to start basic and build from there: crawl before you walk, walk before you run.
Yeah it was a joke, intended to point out that "isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen" are not removed by distilling the water, because the water is made up of those "isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen."
Most bottled water you buy is bottled very near to the point of purchase, so it would still probably give a decent location as long as the signature was good enough to not provide 500 possible matches.
As has already been discussed ad nauseam here, the technique as described wouldn't allow them to track your location by the minute, but the isotope "signature" would be just as present in your hair as it would be in the hair of anybody else who drinks bottled water or anything else - distillation would do nothing more to affect the outcome than drinking anything else that's not tap water water directly from your sink.
True, but if they do not know the jargon, as 99% of them don't, then I have to be inaccurate or shut up. That applies to science as much as to law, btw.
No, you need to learn how to explain the *relevant* portions of the jargon to laymen, or simply omit the jargon and use understandable language wherever it's possible.
When my mom asks me, "What's a gigabyte, and why does it matter?" I don't have to launch into a detailed explanation of base2 numbers, and how the industry usually oversimplifies GB by using base10 numbers to describe a base2 term - I can simply say "It's how much storage space a disk has, so more Gigabytes simply means you can put more stuff on the disk."
There's a difference between an "accurate answer" and "an exhaustive history of the discipline." Accurate answers can gloss over side-notes that are irrelevant to the issue at hand without being incorrect.
Learning to listen to the question being asked and understand *what is really being asked* is important. Listening is an important communication skill too.
I wish I had the answer to that, but I don't. I'd love to see some of the folks here be on the receiving end of the scorn they love to heap on people who don't "get" their chosen field of study.
Really? You've never read slashdot then? There are thousands of otherwise intelligent people here who spout this view of "the public" every chance they get.
What does happen us that they assume that "because you don't understand my field of expertise, your opinions about scientific results in this field are infrequently accurate."
Which is a nice way of saying, "You don't know what I know so shut up, moron."
When science informs society's policy decisions, there are going to be questions, concerns, and issues. Refusing to give them a legitimate hearing (and a reasoned response) is going to only foster conspiracy theories and harden the position of people who feel their valid concerns are being overlooked, ignored, and waved off.
Look at the Yucca Mountain case as it's discussed in the paper - the concerns and questions were much less about "nuclear science" and much more about "safety concerns". Involving the public earlier on, and spending some time educating them, would have saved a lot of wasted time and energy fighting these people in court.
Instead, science handed down a decision and said, "What? How can you possibly object? We're experts, and you're not!"
I would have to agree with that suggestion. I went to an engineering school, and I cannot count the number of people I met who were thoroughly intelligent, and just as thoroughly incapable of clear written or verbal communication. Over-reliance on jargon & an inability to construct coherent sentences were frequent problems I saw people struggle with.
More emphasis on communication skills (written and verbal) would be tremendously useful to many geeks. Unfortunately, I suspect so many geeks are drawn to science specifically *because* they have such a difficult time with written and verbal communication, whereas math, programming, and science offer mostly limited, clear, and unambiguous vocabularies with which to work.
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Little too early to say that the iPhone 4 won't take a chunk of Android's market share, when it's only been out what, 3 weeks, wouldn't you say champ?
That's like saying "Unfortunately for Google, Android 2.2 hasn't killed iOS as everyone was predicting." FFS, the technology has just been released, give it 6 months and see how things look.
I am a subscriber; could I replace it with equivalent "free" alternatives? Probably... but - having one service to handle the calendar syncing (and syncing to my iphone), the contact syncing, bookmark syncing, as well as the easy web mail interface, plus the easy online storage & gallery functionality - I prefer that to having to find ways to integrate flickr/picasa, delicious (or another bookmark sync service), gmail, google calendar, together.
Plus, for me one of the killer apps here is the ability to sync system settings between my laptop & desktop. It requires a little management to make it work, but in general, it's wonderful to be able to rebuild my laptop (I've had to do this 2 times over the past 3 years, once with a hard drive failure, and once with a rebuild to free up a fair amount of space for a new bootcamp partition) and know that the first mobileme sync will put my system settings back the way I want them, plus the "find my iphone" feature, which I've used a couple times.
There are certainly other ways to get the functionality of mobileme, but for me it's more the 'one-stop shopping' and the fact that most of these things are built right into the apps & os that make me pay for it. I prefer the simplicity and integration to rolling my own.
You've never worked for a division/company/department that has a "mission statement" or "vision statement" before?
This is typical bureaucratic jargon, I read it and thought for a second - "Hey I worked at that place before!" And then I realized that they didn't also claim they were going to "synergize... [their] product offerings while remaining the provider of choice for world-class enterprise solutions."
I'll quote once more from the post you're responding to, since you seem to want to ignore this part:
Are they releasing suggested detailed steps for working around and mitigating the solution for normal users? I saw no mention of that in the article, just that they were releasing a 0-day with proof of concept code.
Yeah, nobody obliterated entire regions with nuclear or bio/chem weapons in prehistoric times, so why should we worry about it now?!
Releasing a statement saying "this exists" is very different from releasing a statement saying "this exists, and here's how to take advantage of it for the black-hats out there."
Are they releasing suggested detailed steps for working around and mitigating the solution for normal users? I saw no mention of that in the article, just that they were releasing a 0-day with proof of concept code.
That announcement does NOTHING to make me secure, any more than Microsoft saying "We won't do anything about this for a year" makes me more secure.
You'll have to excuse me if I don't enjoy the prospect of having my computer and my data being in the middle of a pissing contest between Microsoft and MSFT's "spurned" researchers.
Water has this amazing property, in that it can become a vapor - say, maybe, in the sunny outdoors - and work its way into the darnedest places - say, maybe, a dark cool space between insulation and drywall - where it condenses or simply is absorbed out of the air, and provides paper (food) and moisture (water). So... cool, dark, moist, and a food source = mold & mildew growth.
This is why your house has moisture barriers to prevent moisture from building up where it shouldn't.
I'm glad this isn't the standard for our legal systems, else violent crime would rapidly spell an end to the species.
Nor is it particularly wise to play fast and loose with a company with billions of dollars to burn and a corporate legal team that makes prison-yard thugs look like old ladies in muumuus.
Neither response makes me more secure, so why should I be thanking Microsoft, or their jilted lovers?
Because "proper understanding" and "comprehensive understanding of the totality of human knowledge regarding a subject, as well as current research directions and their promising leads," are very different things.
I don't need to know the biochemistry behind the function of an antibiotic to know that when I have a strep throat, they're going to help. I don't need to have a degree in nuclear physics to understand that radiation is dangerous, but there are ways to control it safely. A good teacher knows that over-simplification with the warning that, "well, there are some exceptions, but we'll come back to those later," is often a better approach than saying, "This is the case. Except when any of these 200 exceptions occur, so let's begin listing all the exceptions that will confuse you and muddy your understanding of the subject."
As I said before - you crawl before you walk, and you walk before you run. Scientists are running, and your notion is that "Well if you can't run with me right now, I can't be arsed to explain why walking is faster than crawling."
I'm sorry to hear that you feel that learning is a one-way process in which reams of facts are dumped on an unprepared mind until it either gives up and admits your vast intellectual superiority, or it wrestles the firehose of information being directed at it into submission.
Did you learn that way? Did your teachers actively try to cripple your mind by telling you that you weren't possibly qualified to hold an opinion or ask questions until you understood everything that was possible to understand about a subject?
Teaching (and consequently, learning) is a process, and the best teachers (and students) understand that there's a question-and-answer element to it which is far more effective than simple rote memorization. I could recite a million facts to my mother about what the "concept of a gigabyte" is, and how it relates to binary numbers, storage space, video vs. audio codecs and relative file sizes - and not a single one of those facts will answer her question about why she "should care how many gigabytes a hard drive has."
Please tell me - what's factually incorrect about the answer I gave her? Is a gigabyte NOT a unit of measure for communicating the size of a hard drive? Does a hard drive that holds 500 GB NOT hold more than a hard drive with 350 GB?
Do you see the irony in a researcher writing a paper aimed at educating scientists about a problem they need to address, only to be greeted by howls of derisive laughter?
Did you read the article? They compare the Yucca Mt. issue with a similar issue the Canadian govt handled, and point to specific differences in how the Canadian agency handled it, with far better results.
The paper isn't a 15-page screed stating that "scientists are poopypants and don't dumb down stuff enough for the public."
Yes, there will always be cranks, nutcases, and irrational people, and you have to draw the line at some point.
Even if you don't sway them, the key is to give them an outlet and make them feel as if they've been heard. Address their criticisms head on, and if you don't know, or the data is inconclusive, or there's a "chance" they're right, then say so and explain what the odds really are.
The LHC end-of-the-world scenario was a good example of this - they explained that higher-energy collisions than would happen in the LHC happen all the time naturally, and have not resulted in a black hole swallowing the earth, therefore there is no likely expectation that the LHC would cause that. And despite that, I'm sure there are still lots of cranks out there who are still convinced the earth is going to be swallowed by a black hole any day.
The key is that saying "Hush now, we're scientists, we know better you fool," isn't the most effective response. Separate the people who are "teachable" and reasonable from the cranks, and you'll find that the cranks are a fairly small (if vocal) group.
I'll reiterate the final part of what you're responding to, this time in big bold letters:
Learning to listen to the question being asked and understand *what is really being asked* is important. Listening is an important communication skill too.
And your response is *exactly* the type of confusing, jargon-filled response that I'm criticizing. "Well 1000 gigabytes is a terabyte, and you might see terabyte drives out there too... except it's really 1024, not 1000, because of binary numbers, where everything's a power of 2. And it's possible that less gigabytes could fit more individual photos than individual videos, because of the amount of data in the types of files, and the encoding and compression various filetypes use..."
This is *EXACTLY* the problem I'm talking about, thank you for giving an example. You make the answer needlessly complex in some sort of "look how smart I am" wankfest.
And if you were ignorant of how to change your oil, fill your gas, or refill your wiper fluid, would you want your mechanic to scream at you and berate you for being an idiot? Or would you want him to say, "Look, you need to learn to check these things, here's what to do"?
How did you learn that a car needs gas, oil, and wiper fluid - did you magically divine these things, or did somebody take the time to teach you at some point?
Yes, and that's the point - scientists need to be more interesed "in educating" than they are in "smacking down" people who question them, or just don't understand.
Show an interest in educating, rather than smacking down the people who "don't get it," and we might see that the public begins to actually understand, rather than resist and get defensive when they're called mouth-breathers, idiots, morons, and dipshits.
I never said that every "great scientist" had to be a "great teacher". I said that explaining things to laymen in terms they can understand isn't lying, marketing, or "dumbing down," it's called teaching.
There is a difference.
I think the majority of non-scientists and engineers in the US are probably in the "average" intelligence range, by definition. And I'd say that a large number of scientists and engineers fit neatly into that category, as well.
Out of curiosity - How do you reconcile the notion that "85% of people believe in a god [means they're idiots]" with the notion that there are plenty of scientists and engineers who profess belief in a creator or supreme being?
How does an economy function when everybody in it is only qualified, intellectually speaking, to ask if you'd like fries with that?
I've found that many adults are perfectly happy to be taught if you take the time to explain something to them without frustrating them with jargon, irrelevant "look how smart I am" factoids, and a condescending attitude. Maybe you should try that sometime, and see if you get better results. Engage with them and realize that they likely have a lot of expertise in areas that you lack knowledge of, and maybe you'll even make some new friends.
Sure it does - this is not to say that the "public" does not have an affirmative responsibility to attempt to understand what's being said, it's a conversation, not a one-way braindump.
But if you start teaching with the outlook that "you people are ignorant, and have no interest or desire to learn," how effective are you really going to be?
I agree - but what if all they ever need to learn how to do is define a single table query? If somebody asks you how to do that, are you going to give them a semester-long course in relational database design?
The point is, rather than say "Your question touches on this massive field that you know nothing about, and you need to know everything about this field in order to have an answer," why not learn to cut away the parts of the field that are irrelevant to the answer, and present them with that?
"How do you know storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain is safe?" doesn't require the person asking the question to have a degree in nuclear physics to understand the safeguards, and how effective they are.
I'd say the "basic concept" of protein folding - that chains of amino acids fold into 3-dimensional functional forms - could be demonstrated in about 5 minutes with a balloon animal.
Would that explanation gloss over many of the fine details? Certainly. Would it be *a lie* to not immediately explain exactly what the current best thinking is on minima, chaperones, and chemical bonding, and how those impact the process of folding and the functional shape of a protein molecule? Not at all.
If somebody asks me, "fucking proteins, how do they work?" I'm not going to launch into a math- and physics-filled lecture to start, I'm going to start basic and build from there: crawl before you walk, walk before you run.
Yeah it was a joke, intended to point out that "isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen" are not removed by distilling the water, because the water is made up of those "isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen."
Most bottled water you buy is bottled very near to the point of purchase, so it would still probably give a decent location as long as the signature was good enough to not provide 500 possible matches.
As has already been discussed ad nauseam here, the technique as described wouldn't allow them to track your location by the minute, but the isotope "signature" would be just as present in your hair as it would be in the hair of anybody else who drinks bottled water or anything else - distillation would do nothing more to affect the outcome than drinking anything else that's not tap water water directly from your sink.
No, you need to learn how to explain the *relevant* portions of the jargon to laymen, or simply omit the jargon and use understandable language wherever it's possible.
When my mom asks me, "What's a gigabyte, and why does it matter?" I don't have to launch into a detailed explanation of base2 numbers, and how the industry usually oversimplifies GB by using base10 numbers to describe a base2 term - I can simply say "It's how much storage space a disk has, so more Gigabytes simply means you can put more stuff on the disk."
There's a difference between an "accurate answer" and "an exhaustive history of the discipline." Accurate answers can gloss over side-notes that are irrelevant to the issue at hand without being incorrect.
Learning to listen to the question being asked and understand *what is really being asked* is important. Listening is an important communication skill too.
I wish I had the answer to that, but I don't. I'd love to see some of the folks here be on the receiving end of the scorn they love to heap on people who don't "get" their chosen field of study.
Really? You've never read slashdot then? There are thousands of otherwise intelligent people here who spout this view of "the public" every chance they get.
Which is a nice way of saying, "You don't know what I know so shut up, moron."
When science informs society's policy decisions, there are going to be questions, concerns, and issues. Refusing to give them a legitimate hearing (and a reasoned response) is going to only foster conspiracy theories and harden the position of people who feel their valid concerns are being overlooked, ignored, and waved off.
Look at the Yucca Mountain case as it's discussed in the paper - the concerns and questions were much less about "nuclear science" and much more about "safety concerns". Involving the public earlier on, and spending some time educating them, would have saved a lot of wasted time and energy fighting these people in court.
Instead, science handed down a decision and said, "What? How can you possibly object? We're experts, and you're not!"
I would have to agree with that suggestion. I went to an engineering school, and I cannot count the number of people I met who were thoroughly intelligent, and just as thoroughly incapable of clear written or verbal communication. Over-reliance on jargon & an inability to construct coherent sentences were frequent problems I saw people struggle with.
More emphasis on communication skills (written and verbal) would be tremendously useful to many geeks. Unfortunately, I suspect so many geeks are drawn to science specifically *because* they have such a difficult time with written and verbal communication, whereas math, programming, and science offer mostly limited, clear, and unambiguous vocabularies with which to work.