As someone raised on a farm, and then attended university (science/education), I can only say that a truly educated person does both theory AND practice. At Uni I cringed when the physics majors said things like 'physics is the basis of all other science - everything else is derivative'. But I also cringed when I went back to my hometown for the holidays and heard people saying 'I don't need book-smarts, I'm street-smart'. As if the two were mutually exclusive and one or the other was superior.:(
Yup, and as a teacher in Australia, I often get a student who will pull the "What if I believe in Creationism?" shtick. In all but one example, I discovered that the student didn't have any such religious beliefs, but was just shit-stirring.
Because I work for a government agency, and even though our IT Tech is on top of things, he has to get permission at a state level for nearly every piece of software he installs? He was swearing a week ago because an update procedure he HAD to use (Step 1. Shut down drive P.) disabled three other pieces of software, INCLUDING the timetabling application.
As Tubal-Cain states, formatting doesn't survive when reading OOXML in OpenOffice. You get the text, styles and fonts, but everything else floats all over the place.
At my place of employment, all software is managed by images. Is it that difficult to run an exe on the original image rather than an msi, before copying the image out to all the other machines.
Here here. Exact same thing happens to me as an educator. Students bring in assignments as docx, and we're still using XP and Office 2000. So the other teachers say "I'm sorry, we can't read that, you'll have to save it as an older format." And then I go, "Give it to me. I have OpenOffice." I wonder if the government plans to expand our budget to update all the school computers. Considering we still have asbestos-based tiles in our staffroom, I'm thinking, probably not!
mjwx, retraining government employees in Australia is incredibly difficult because it usually consists of getting 300+ people to sit in an auditorium and have administration talk at us about how important this is. My employer just did this to us recently and we as teachers got a bit talkative. Then another administrator got up and said "I'm tired of how we put these together and people show disrespect for talking - you wouldn't put up with this in one of your classes." "Nooooo." I thought to myself "We'd bloody well give them a variety of activities to DO, rather than expecting them to sit still four three hours straight and listen to me blather."
Your argument is disingenuous. There's quite a bit of a difference between Active Directory/Group Policies and OOXML/OpenDocuments. The examples you've used require the interaction between actively running technologies across multiple systems and programs. OOXML/OpenDocuments just requires that an office suite can OPEN and SAVE the damn things.
Hmmm. Your comment has actually started to make me wonder, IS this somehow their strategy? "Let's aggravate EVERYONE we can, to stir up controversy over piracy and get a lot of public attention."
I don't know WHY they would want this, but assuming that's what they're after, it would explain a lot of their behaviour over the last five or so years.
Which must be frustrating for him. As human life-span increases and anti-senescence treatments are found, how long before people give up on the idea that only young people can have good ideas?
I like the first sentence of amiga3D's comment - it's the major false assumption being made.
As a government employee of Australia, I can state that lots of large organisations invest sweet-#$!!*@-all in training employees to use any product. It's pretty much "Must be able to use X/Y/Z?" in a job advert, or "you'll have to pick that up in your own free time."
Queensland Education has gotten better in organising training for some new database/email systems recently, but it's still at the cost of teacher preparation time, and is rarely well organised. "Oh, it's four in the afternoon, and you've been working LITERALLY non-stop since seven and it's been a REAAAALLLYYYY long day with all the dramas and issues of high school teaching and you still need to put in three hours uninterrupted work to be really ready tomorrow? I guess it's time for you to attend a two hour training session which will consist of 1 1/2 hours of administration just TALKING to you about the new system... while you're praying that you won't fall asleep in front of the school principle." Yeah, that'll work.
But why go with a commercial format when OpenDocument formats have been around earlier, supported for longer and on just as many (if not more) software packages, including Microsoft Office? There's nothing saying that we can't use Microsoft Office and store/save in OpenDocument. All the IT managers would need to do is change a site-wide setting for default save format.
I get the feel that it's a bit more than the Government being locked in with volume licenses. I suspect that either: 1) There was a bit of pressure on them from Microsoft to support the format, either though threats of "renegotiating volume licenses" (Which Microsoft has done to the Australian Government in the past) or promises of lower costs; 2) Microsoft spread a bit of FUD to the government officials about their version being "better supported", which is completely ridiculous when you consider the concept of an OPEN document format.:/, or my favourite supposition; 3) The people who make these decisions are misinformed, as well as too lazy/stupid to properly research alternatives.
As a government employee, I'd love the Australian Government to get the balls to publicly announce a project to trial opensource alternatives (Firefox instead of IE, OpenOffice/LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office) in pilot schools/offices/whatever. Even if it didn't happen, I'd imagine that Microsoft would scrabble to keep such a big customer by offering some discounts. (If they didn't just bring out the big stick again.) Wow, we might be able to cut an IT expense that comes out of the taxpayer's pocket... naahhh, that sounds too much like common sense. Thank god we've switched to a web-based email/calender a'la Gmail/GCalender-like system. That's one set of Outlook license that we can hopefully get rid of in the future.
*sigh* If it wasn't so hot, dry and isolated in the Northern Territory, I'd be tempted to teach there simply because they've switched to Linux. I guess Microsoft wasn't concerned enough about keeping that territory as a customer to bring out the big twitchy stick.
While climate change is definitely happening, this current flood is not exactly unique in the history of Australia, just the worst that a whole generation has seen.
http://www.bom.gov.au/hydro/flood/qld/fld_history/index.shtml
Australia just simply has a history of flooding and droughts. It's up to you to personally decide if these people who have lost their homes, cars, possessions, and I might point out ALL their Christmas presents, 'deserve' donation money.
Um, I come from a dairy farm upbringing with Friesians and Jerseys. If you don't milk the cow, they get grumpy and suffer discomfort, but then the milk just dries up and you have to mate her to the bull again. This is a STANDARD part of dairy herd maintenance, as without a break from milking, the cow will lose body fat reserves. 'Drying out' allows the cow to be fed up on good pasture for a couple of months to rebuild fat reserves. We've only ever had a few cattle get severe mastitis, and these were in actively milked cattle, and were due to 'udder-chill' during very wet and cold Springs. We've never had a cow die from being dried off.
As a high school teacher in Australia, I'm quite technology literate (as are several of my coworkers), but I also see several teachers in my profession who aren't.
The problem isn't that these teachers are 'dumber' than their students, just that with curriculum demands, increasing class sizes, and increasing behavioural problems, they just don't have the time to develop advanced computer skills. After all, it takes 10 000 hours to become an expert.;)
As things currently stand in education, teachers have to effectively triage skills-learning, and believe me, there are several teaching skills MUCH more important than operating a computer beyond basic levels. Like making sure the classroom horror doesn't cut off the redheaded girl's ponytail.:D Or what to do if the entire school's gas supply conks out out during the one lesson that week you have access to a teaching laboratory. For this one, cry or quietly swear is an appropriate first response.;)
This year, I've seen nearly every teacher in my school become highly competent in using the new state-wide data system. This occurred because everyone could see it's value in managing parent-teacher and student-teacher contact (Automatic email lists - finallly!!!!), tracking behaviour problems between classes, identifying gifted and talented students as well as students with learning disabilities, and, thank god, a sensible grade-reporting system. Now we just have to deal with the Microsoft-based, network-limited computer system taking 5-10 minutes to boot up each day.:(
The plain fact is, that in most educational institutions, until something is physically in a classroom or staffroom with easy access, a teacher has almost no opportunity to develop the skills needed to integrate it with the learning experience. This is usually because educational administrations rarely plan a sensible rollout, well, beyond the "They'll pick it up.". Come back to those OLPC countries in a few years and you'll see most of them have done amazing things with them.
I'm a male high school teacher in Australia, and if it ever got to the point where somebody told me to strip-search a student like that, it'd be "May I have a 'Notice to Quit' Form please?". I'm also very concerned about the fact that other teachers didn't speak up against it when it happened.
Aside from the mental anguish this would cause any young child, how could anyone in the modern education system, in America, land of the no-pay-lawsuit no less, not be concerned about the legal ramifications?
Your post reminded me of a pretty hilarious quote, just can't remember the author. "Just keep in mind that every person who uses the phrase 'sheeple' was told it by somebody else"
personally, i think in terms of commodity computing, we don't really need to squeeze any more power out of the CPU than we've already got. use fully pipelined superscalar architectures, perhaps multithreaded dual or quad cores (for high-end workstations) and VLIW to maximize ILP efficiency. even at current processor speeds, 99% of the applications people (especially casual computer users) use have bottlenecks elsewhere (like memory & disk I/O speeds, internet bandwidth, user response time, etc.).
Oh, is this ever true or what! Even with non-commodity computing like quantum chemical calculations, I found during my honours years that the true bottlenecks were: 1. Use of optimised BLAS libraries to use L1 and L2 caches efficiently, (I nearly had a heart-attack the first time I ran PC-GAMESS on a wine emulator and a 3+ day job on the Linux binary was finished in less than 4 hours on an _emulated_ windows binary.) and when I compiled using an optimised ATLAS BLAS library, 2. Disk access speeds. Recently using my modern laptop and optimised ATLAS BLAS, programs like GAMESS usually spend about ~20% of time CPU bound and ~80% disk-drive bound. And this was with a dual-core system. What I wouldn't give for the ability to RAID-0 my laptop's hard-drive(s).
Here here. I'm not a professional coder, (self-taught) usually code only to solve short to medium term problems. But when I write something in Python, it makes _sense_!!! A few years ago, I had built an electronic kit (a usb electrocardiogram actually) that had a windows application but no Linux application. I debugged the usb chatter that the electrocardiogram used (partly by firing random code at a usbserial connection, partly by decoding the pic assembler that had come with the kit) and was able to build a gui (Tkinter) application (that could run on Linux) in about a day and a half. A few years later, I realised that I wanted to tidy the code up a bit (Including some data filters to clear out the noise.) and wonder of wonders, I could actually _read_ and _understand_ what I had written back then! In my own time I have deciphered (Which is a _far_ cry from actually programming) Java, Javascript, C, C++, Fortan (Ugh!) Basic (Double Ugh!), PIC and AVR assembler (Ma, I have a headache), but the only languages that I can honestly say I can program in are Python and UNIX Shell.
I've found the following works for me. 1. Read the voltage/polarity/current spec. off a charger as soon as I buy a new device. 2. Using a label maker, label the voltage/polarity onto the device, and the device's name onto the charger. 3. Put the charger into storage. 4. Use a little regulated powerpack I bought years ago, that allows you to adjust the voltage it puts out and comes with a variety of different shaped tips, and can output about 1A of juice if needed. (I keep the tips in an old tin that was originally for mints).
If I lose a label off a device, I can go back to the collection of chargers and re-read the specs. On the other hand, I don't have to lug ten different chargers around. You soon get used to ensuring the powerpack is set up properly.
Additionally, I recently bought a mobile phone and forgot to label the charger. Promptly lost the charger so I just plugged in the powerpack at it's lowest voltage setting, then quickly ramped up the voltages until I found the lowest one that would charge my phone. Things are still going fine.
The frightening thing is that for a targeted, "secret" assassin, we don't need to resort to orbital lasers. The technology is already there in biotech.
Each person has a unique identifier on their cells that tells the immune system "Ignore this". Take a hair/skin/etc. sample of your "target" and ligate their DNA into a common cold virus, then release said virus over their capital city. Everyone else gets a sniffle, your target gets something much worse because their immune system has trouble recognizing the virus.
I'm a high school maths teacher, and I often get "challenged" by students to answer a question in my head. (*shrughs* It's a self-perpetuating situation - do it once, and they'll keep asking you.)
Last year I was teaching grade 10 (Grade 12 is last year of high school here in Australia) students trigonometry - they thought they had me stumped when they gave me a made up problem with a couple of sines, cosines and tangents.
Their jaws dropped when I gave an answer correct to two decimal places.
In my head I had simplified the problem (using some approximations), converted all the trig. functions in the question to sines and cosines, converted all the angles to approximate radians (Not that difficult - divide by 60 and then bump the answer up a bit.) and then used the Taylor expansions for sines and cosines to one/two terms.
As I told them, just because I taught them to calculate the ratios using calculators, doesn't mean that there aren't other ways.
Is it possible for the OP to actually go and visit both locations/workplaces? I know America's big, but so is Australia, and it IS possible to cross it by car.:)
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As someone raised on a farm, and then attended university (science/education), I can only say that a truly educated person does both theory AND practice. :(
At Uni I cringed when the physics majors said things like 'physics is the basis of all other science - everything else is derivative'.
But I also cringed when I went back to my hometown for the holidays and heard people saying 'I don't need book-smarts, I'm street-smart'. As if the two were mutually exclusive and one or the other was superior.
Ries van Twisk has forked the free version of QCAD to produce librecad.
http://www.librecad.org/
Yup, and as a teacher in Australia, I often get a student who will pull the "What if I believe in Creationism?" shtick. In all but one example, I discovered that the student didn't have any such religious beliefs, but was just shit-stirring.
Because I work for a government agency, and even though our IT Tech is on top of things, he has to get permission at a state level for nearly every piece of software he installs?
He was swearing a week ago because an update procedure he HAD to use (Step 1. Shut down drive P.) disabled three other pieces of software, INCLUDING the timetabling application.
As Tubal-Cain states, formatting doesn't survive when reading OOXML in OpenOffice.
You get the text, styles and fonts, but everything else floats all over the place.
At my place of employment, all software is managed by images. Is it that difficult to run an exe on the original image rather than an msi, before copying the image out to all the other machines.
Here here. Exact same thing happens to me as an educator. Students bring in assignments as docx, and we're still using XP and Office 2000.
So the other teachers say "I'm sorry, we can't read that, you'll have to save it as an older format."
And then I go, "Give it to me. I have OpenOffice."
I wonder if the government plans to expand our budget to update all the school computers. Considering we still have asbestos-based tiles in our staffroom, I'm thinking, probably not!
mjwx, retraining government employees in Australia is incredibly difficult because it usually consists of getting 300+ people to sit in an auditorium and have administration talk at us about how important this is. My employer just did this to us recently and we as teachers got a bit talkative. Then another administrator got up and said "I'm tired of how we put these together and people show disrespect for talking - you wouldn't put up with this in one of your classes."
"Nooooo." I thought to myself "We'd bloody well give them a variety of activities to DO, rather than expecting them to sit still four three hours straight and listen to me blather."
I'd LOVE for a lab-based training session.
Your argument is disingenuous. There's quite a bit of a difference between Active Directory/Group Policies and OOXML/OpenDocuments.
The examples you've used require the interaction between actively running technologies across multiple systems and programs.
OOXML/OpenDocuments just requires that an office suite can OPEN and SAVE the damn things.
Hmmm. Your comment has actually started to make me wonder, IS this somehow their strategy?
"Let's aggravate EVERYONE we can, to stir up controversy over piracy and get a lot of public attention."
I don't know WHY they would want this, but assuming that's what they're after, it would explain a lot of their behaviour over the last five or so years.
Which must be frustrating for him. As human life-span increases and anti-senescence treatments are found, how long before people give up on the idea that only young people can have good ideas?
I like the first sentence of amiga3D's comment - it's the major false assumption being made.
As a government employee of Australia, I can state that lots of large organisations invest sweet-#$!!*@-all in training employees to use any product. It's pretty much "Must be able to use X/Y/Z?" in a job advert, or "you'll have to pick that up in your own free time."
Queensland Education has gotten better in organising training for some new database/email systems recently, but it's still at the cost of teacher preparation time, and is rarely well organised. ... while you're praying that you won't fall asleep in front of the school principle." Yeah, that'll work.
"Oh, it's four in the afternoon, and you've been working LITERALLY non-stop since seven and it's been a REAAAALLLYYYY long day with all the dramas and issues of high school teaching and you still need to put in three hours uninterrupted work to be really ready tomorrow?
I guess it's time for you to attend a two hour training session which will consist of 1 1/2 hours of administration just TALKING to you about the new system
But why go with a commercial format when OpenDocument formats have been around earlier, supported for longer and on just as many (if not more) software packages, including Microsoft Office? There's nothing saying that we can't use Microsoft Office and store/save in OpenDocument. All the IT managers would need to do is change a site-wide setting for default save format.
I get the feel that it's a bit more than the Government being locked in with volume licenses. I suspect that either: :/,
1) There was a bit of pressure on them from Microsoft to support the format, either though threats of "renegotiating volume licenses" (Which Microsoft has done to the Australian Government in the past) or promises of lower costs;
2) Microsoft spread a bit of FUD to the government officials about their version being "better supported", which is completely ridiculous when you consider the concept of an OPEN document format.
or my favourite supposition;
3) The people who make these decisions are misinformed, as well as too lazy/stupid to properly research alternatives.
As a government employee, I'd love the Australian Government to get the balls to publicly announce a project to trial opensource alternatives (Firefox instead of IE, OpenOffice/LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office) in pilot schools/offices/whatever. Even if it didn't happen, I'd imagine that Microsoft would scrabble to keep such a big customer by offering some discounts. (If they didn't just bring out the big stick again.) Wow, we might be able to cut an IT expense that comes out of the taxpayer's pocket ... naahhh, that sounds too much like common sense.
Thank god we've switched to a web-based email/calender a'la Gmail/GCalender-like system. That's one set of Outlook license that we can hopefully get rid of in the future.
*sigh* If it wasn't so hot, dry and isolated in the Northern Territory, I'd be tempted to teach there simply because they've switched to Linux. I guess Microsoft wasn't concerned enough about keeping that territory as a customer to bring out the big twitchy stick.
While climate change is definitely happening, this current flood is not exactly unique in the history of Australia, just the worst that a whole generation has seen. http://www.bom.gov.au/hydro/flood/qld/fld_history/index.shtml Australia just simply has a history of flooding and droughts. It's up to you to personally decide if these people who have lost their homes, cars, possessions, and I might point out ALL their Christmas presents, 'deserve' donation money.
Um, I come from a dairy farm upbringing with Friesians and Jerseys.
If you don't milk the cow, they get grumpy and suffer discomfort, but then the milk just dries up and you have to mate her to the bull again. This is a STANDARD part of dairy herd maintenance, as without a break from milking, the cow will lose body fat reserves. 'Drying out' allows the cow to be fed up on good pasture for a couple of months to rebuild fat reserves.
We've only ever had a few cattle get severe mastitis, and these were in actively milked cattle, and were due to 'udder-chill' during very wet and cold Springs. We've never had a cow die from being dried off.
As a high school teacher in Australia, I'm quite technology literate (as are several of my coworkers), but I also see several teachers in my profession who aren't.
;)
:D ;)
:(
The problem isn't that these teachers are 'dumber' than their students, just that with curriculum demands, increasing class sizes, and increasing behavioural problems, they just don't have the time to develop advanced computer skills. After all, it takes 10 000 hours to become an expert.
As things currently stand in education, teachers have to effectively triage skills-learning, and believe me, there are several teaching skills MUCH more important than operating a computer beyond basic levels.
Like making sure the classroom horror doesn't cut off the redheaded girl's ponytail.
Or what to do if the entire school's gas supply conks out out during the one lesson that week you have access to a teaching laboratory. For this one, cry or quietly swear is an appropriate first response.
This year, I've seen nearly every teacher in my school become highly competent in using the new state-wide data system. This occurred because everyone could see it's value in managing parent-teacher and student-teacher contact (Automatic email lists - finallly!!!!), tracking behaviour problems between classes, identifying gifted and talented students as well as students with learning disabilities, and, thank god, a sensible grade-reporting system. Now we just have to deal with the Microsoft-based, network-limited computer system taking 5-10 minutes to boot up each day.
The plain fact is, that in most educational institutions, until something is physically in a classroom or staffroom with easy access, a teacher has almost no opportunity to develop the skills needed to integrate it with the learning experience. This is usually because educational administrations rarely plan a sensible rollout, well, beyond the "They'll pick it up.". Come back to those OLPC countries in a few years and you'll see most of them have done amazing things with them.
I'm a male high school teacher in Australia, and if it ever got to the point where somebody told me to strip-search a student like that, it'd be "May I have a 'Notice to Quit' Form please?". I'm also very concerned about the fact that other teachers didn't speak up against it when it happened. Aside from the mental anguish this would cause any young child, how could anyone in the modern education system, in America, land of the no-pay-lawsuit no less, not be concerned about the legal ramifications?
Your post reminded me of a pretty hilarious quote, just can't remember the author.
"Just keep in mind that every person who uses the phrase 'sheeple' was told it by somebody else"
Oh, is this ever true or what! Even with non-commodity computing like quantum chemical calculations, I found during my honours years that the true bottlenecks were:
1. Use of optimised BLAS libraries to use L1 and L2 caches efficiently, (I nearly had a heart-attack the first time I ran PC-GAMESS on a wine emulator and a 3+ day job on the Linux binary was finished in less than 4 hours on an _emulated_ windows binary.)
and when I compiled using an optimised ATLAS BLAS library,
2. Disk access speeds.
Recently using my modern laptop and optimised ATLAS BLAS, programs like GAMESS usually spend about ~20% of time CPU bound and ~80% disk-drive bound. And this was with a dual-core system. What I wouldn't give for the ability to RAID-0 my laptop's hard-drive(s).
Here here. I'm not a professional coder, (self-taught) usually code only to solve short to medium term problems. But when I write something in Python, it makes _sense_!!! A few years ago, I had built an electronic kit (a usb electrocardiogram actually) that had a windows application but no Linux application.
I debugged the usb chatter that the electrocardiogram used (partly by firing random code at a usbserial connection, partly by decoding the pic assembler that had come with the kit) and was able to build a gui (Tkinter) application (that could run on Linux) in about a day and a half. A few years later, I realised that I wanted to tidy the code up a bit (Including some data filters to clear out the noise.) and wonder of wonders, I could actually _read_ and _understand_ what I had written back then!
In my own time I have deciphered (Which is a _far_ cry from actually programming) Java, Javascript, C, C++, Fortan (Ugh!) Basic (Double Ugh!), PIC and AVR assembler (Ma, I have a headache), but the only languages that I can honestly say I can program in are Python and UNIX Shell.
I've found the following works for me.
1. Read the voltage/polarity/current spec. off a charger as soon as I buy a new device.
2. Using a label maker, label the voltage/polarity onto the device, and the device's name onto the charger.
3. Put the charger into storage.
4. Use a little regulated powerpack I bought years ago, that allows you to adjust the voltage it puts out and comes with a variety of different shaped tips, and can output about 1A of juice if needed. (I keep the tips in an old tin that was originally for mints).
If I lose a label off a device, I can go back to the collection of chargers and re-read the specs. On the other hand, I don't have to lug ten different chargers around. You soon get used to ensuring the powerpack is set up properly.
Additionally, I recently bought a mobile phone and forgot to label the charger. Promptly lost the charger so I just plugged in the powerpack at it's lowest voltage setting, then quickly ramped up the voltages until I found the lowest one that would charge my phone. Things are still going fine.
Each person has a unique identifier on their cells that tells the immune system "Ignore this". Take a hair/skin/etc. sample of your "target" and ligate their DNA into a common cold virus, then release said virus over their capital city. Everyone else gets a sniffle, your target gets something much worse because their immune system has trouble recognizing the virus.
I'm a high school maths teacher, and I often get "challenged" by students to answer a question in my head. (*shrughs* It's a self-perpetuating situation - do it once, and they'll keep asking you.)
Last year I was teaching grade 10 (Grade 12 is last year of high school here in Australia) students trigonometry - they thought they had me stumped when they gave me a made up problem with a couple of sines, cosines and tangents.
Their jaws dropped when I gave an answer correct to two decimal places.
In my head I had simplified the problem (using some approximations), converted all the trig. functions in the question to sines and cosines, converted all the angles to approximate radians (Not that difficult - divide by 60 and then bump the answer up a bit.) and then used the Taylor expansions for sines and cosines to one/two terms.
As I told them, just because I taught them to calculate the ratios using calculators, doesn't mean that there aren't other ways.
Is it possible for the OP to actually go and visit both locations/workplaces? I know America's big, but so is Australia, and it IS possible to cross it by car. :)
Sorry, forgot one step. You also need to touch the other end of the battery to your tounge.