First, I think if you asked any evolutionary biologist or geneticist he'd take issue with Idiocracy's assertion that differing birth rates will eventually result in "everybody being dumb". I'm not an evolutionary biologist so I can't do the issue justice, but my gut feeling is that the differing birthrates would simply shrink the number of highly intelligent people relative to the overall population as a whole. Highly intelligent people tend to reproduce with other highly intelligent people. Granted, they may not produce enough offspring, on average, to replace themselves, but there will also be couplings between "highly intelligent" and "not so intelligent" that will nevertheless produce at least one "highly intelligent" offspring. Or more. Another thing to consider is that it's not uncommon for two unremarkable parents to occasionally produce an offspring much more intelligent than themselves. Is this rare? Sure. But when you're talking about a planet with ~10 billion people it becomes more probable.
Second, I think people lack a historical perspective. Flash back 500 years and ask your average English serf to write an essay. Oh wait; he's illiterate. Basically modern society tries to cram everyone into the "white collar worker" mold, since industrialization has so reduced the percentage of "menial" jobs required for society to function. This ignores the fact that a large portion of the human population may not be cut out, as it were, for white collar jobs. Some googling indicates that college enrollment in the United States doubled during the 1930s, then took another huge leap with the G.I. bill after World War II. Do we suppose the genetic distribution of intelligence changed so drastically in the last 90 years? Likely not.
Some people shouldn't be in university. Based on this article, I'd put the number somewhere around 25%. That's not to say they're bad people; just that society is unlikely to benefit from their having spent four years in college. Unfortunately, the system is set up so that they personally benefit form those four years in college (even if they learn nothing) so long as it results in a diploma.
If police departments have to make money by ticketing people, I'd rather they do so by ticketing texters/talkers than by ticketing speeders. If only they'd do the former, and not the latter.
'm sure there are cases of home schooled children who end up "more focused and ambitious", but I doubt it's the majority. Although it seems to be changing, most home-schoolers are still of the religious fanatic variety...
Let me suggest anecdotally that "more focused and ambitious" and "religious" are not mutually exclusive. A friend of mine in college was the child of two missionaries. He spent a large portion of his youth in China, was fluent in Chinese, etc. He was also home schooled for much of his education. Ended up attending a top 10 public university in the U.S.; was this university's Rhodes scholarship candidate; eventually went back and got an M.B.A. His brother graduated from Harvard. Sure, these are just two guys, but I think they adequately demonstrate that you can be home schooled for "religious reasons" and not miss out on the actual education.
most importantly, anything about "safe" sex.
Can't say for sure since this friend and I have never discussed his sexual history, but afaik he abstained until getting married in his 20s. So the "safe sex" education would have been completely irrelevant.
The SAT is theoretically an aptitude test, for what its worth. It tests vocabulary, basic math and grasp of the English language. You can "pass" the SAT and still be woefully ignorant in the areas of science, history, music, foreign languages, etc.
As for the report, my feeling is that the home schoolers' advantage is most likely due to demographics. By definition home schooling parents are "highly interested" and involved in their childrens' education. If you only examined those public school parents who are similarly "dedicated" to their childrens' education, I suspect the home schooling advantage would disappear. Home schooling families are probably also different in other ways. More two-parent homes, etc.
That said, I don't think home schooling is a bad thing. I just don't think its a silver bullet. The quality of one's home school environment depends on the parent doing the instruction. Some parents are great teachers. Others not so much. Just like public school teachers.
Exactly. Weird parents + home schooling = weird kids. Non-weird parents + home schooling = non-weird kids, at least with the same frequency as "Non-weird parents + public school". There are several home-schooling families at the church I attend. Some of their kids really do fit the stereotype. Some don't.
Do you ascribe to the doctrine that no race or ethnicity is inherently "better" than another? i.e. racism is "wrong"? Would you teach that doctrine to your children? Voila. You're for indoctrination too. You just don't approve of this family's doctrine.
Agree. Though, I would add that most folks I know who "eat, breathe and sleep" their jobs do so in what is, IMO, an unhealthy way. That is to say their focus on career is ultimately detrimental to their family life and other social involvement outside work.
"Creative and free thinking" doesn't mean "lets one's entire create process be totally transparent, and broadcasts everything one is going to do months in advance".
As for why so many artsy folks like Apple, I'd identify two main reasons:
1. Microsoft is synonymous with "stodgy corporate culture". Apple gives these folks a way to be "alternative" without having to jump through all the Linux hoops.
2. Apple stuff "looks cool". That's important to a lot of people. They've successfully transformed consumer electronics into an "image accessory".
Other than AOL the only "toxic" email provider I can think of might be Hotmail, and that doesn't really bother me. I'd be much more put off by someone whose address is fucktheman@gmail.com or similar.
In the graduate CS department I was a part of in the late 90s, the problem was foreign students who would indicate that they intended to earn a Ph.D., get a fellowship that covered their first two years (during which it was typical to earn a Master's degree), then leave once they'd earned a Master's. They didn't always go back to China, though; typically they got industry jobs in the U.S.
Interestingly, a large donor who almost singlehandedly funded the Computational and Applied Mathematics program at this same university created a fellowship for CAM students that was available only to citizens, and was ridiculously high-paying. The department actually lobbied him to drop the "citizens only" requirement so they could use the money to attract a higher quantity of top students, as opposed to being limited solely to the crop of U.S. citizens. So far as I know, he refused.
I would have to say that's pretty typical. There's a tendency among developers (and humans in general) to do only what is expected of them. If I can meet my deadlines while doing only 4 actual hours of work in a day, then that's probably what I'm going to do, so long as its not so obvious that I get nailed for it. I'm not saying that's a good thing, necessarily, but its human nature.
The flip side is that if you're someone with sufficient discipline to actually do productive work the entire time you're at the office, and if you're reasonably skilled, then you should shine like a superstar compared to everyone else, which should theoretically translate into pay raises, promotions, etc.
Here are the results of my testing. I didn't take the time to break out each individual test, but I at least broke out each benchmark by its categories. The mile high view is that Firefox is on the bottom, then Chrome, then Webkit and Opera are neck-and-neck at the top, though Opera probably has the edge.
Okay, so, I brought the laptop to work today so I can the run the benchmarks in the background while doing other things. I'm going to test Opera 10.5 pre-Alpha (12/22/09) vs. the 12/22 nightly versions of FF 3.7a1 and Webkit. I'll run them through Sunspider, Dromaeo, Peacekeeper and V8, and give the scores for each individual sub-test.
I agree with you, btw, that its pretty ridiculous that Sunspider is using non-standard extensions. For the purposes of a benchmark, they should really stick to the standard.
How do you figure? The Slashdot post about 10.5 pre-Alpha shows it barely beating Chrome on Sunspider, barely beating Chrome on Peacekeeper, and losing handily to Chrome on V8. That particular blogger didn't give us Dromaeo results. In my past testing, Chrome does especially well on Dromaeo compared to the competition.
Why is Spidermonkey implementing non-standard Javascript extensions? Or are they part of a standard the other browsers just don't implement yet? Do they use these extensions on every sub-test, or just some of them? It looked like Chrome beat Firefox on all of them.
When I get the time I'll test bleeding-edge Firefox vs. Chrome vs. Opera on my laptop. It's a single-core Pentium M with Windows XP, though, so maybe not very representative of modern users.
Process-per-tab shouldn't speed up Javascript unless you're doing something else in a second tab that's hogging CPU. Most likely the Javascript performance gains came simply from the fact that he was using a 3.7 branch of the code. Which is kind of sad, considering bleeding-edge Firefox still lags behind Chrome by a considerable margin.
The U.S. has some things going for it that may tend to mitigate or completely counter this decline. For one, English is the lingua franca of the world, and the U.S. is by far the largest English-speaking economy. Its easy for non-U.S. would-be scientists to come do research at U.S. universities because they most likely already know English. China could create the best universities in the world, but they'd have a much harder time attracting international students because far fewer people learn Chinese as a second language compared to English.
You could argue for the E.U., maybe, but again there's the language issue. Even if all university classes are conducted in English (which would be unlikely), any prospective student still has to contemplate moving to a country where, outside classes, he's not going to speak the language.
I don't own a netbook, but I've considered buying one. Mostly for travel. I want something small and light, that nevertheless allows me to browse the web, send email, edit documents, and maybe watch a movie. A smart phone doesn't fit the bill, even the ones with keyboards. The screen is too small and inputting text is a huge pain in the butt. A normal laptop would work, but then its larger and heavier. And, honestly, all a "real" laptop buys you is a faster cpu, which is typically not the bottleneck for the kinds of tasks I described. That said, if I bought a netbook I'd probably try to get one that would let me swap in a faster SSD. (Which would, yes, destroy the whole "price" advantage of a netbook. But I wouldn't buy one because its cheap- I'd buy it because its small and light.)
And if you're that worried about a verbose section of code, extract a method, give it a good name, and be done.
In total agreement here. Usually just look at a short-ish method's name, its parameters, and its return value, makes it clear what it does. This is different than if that same code were included in-place, since in that situation its not clear what the "inputs" and "outputs". Plus extracting it usually makes the section from which it was extracted easier to read.
Slashdot Mirror
South Park said it in jest, while you clearly believe it. That makes you a dick. "Shouldn't be in university" != "fucking retarded".
Two things here:
First, I think if you asked any evolutionary biologist or geneticist he'd take issue with Idiocracy's assertion that differing birth rates will eventually result in "everybody being dumb". I'm not an evolutionary biologist so I can't do the issue justice, but my gut feeling is that the differing birthrates would simply shrink the number of highly intelligent people relative to the overall population as a whole. Highly intelligent people tend to reproduce with other highly intelligent people. Granted, they may not produce enough offspring, on average, to replace themselves, but there will also be couplings between "highly intelligent" and "not so intelligent" that will nevertheless produce at least one "highly intelligent" offspring. Or more. Another thing to consider is that it's not uncommon for two unremarkable parents to occasionally produce an offspring much more intelligent than themselves. Is this rare? Sure. But when you're talking about a planet with ~10 billion people it becomes more probable.
Second, I think people lack a historical perspective. Flash back 500 years and ask your average English serf to write an essay. Oh wait; he's illiterate. Basically modern society tries to cram everyone into the "white collar worker" mold, since industrialization has so reduced the percentage of "menial" jobs required for society to function. This ignores the fact that a large portion of the human population may not be cut out, as it were, for white collar jobs. Some googling indicates that college enrollment in the United States doubled during the 1930s, then took another huge leap with the G.I. bill after World War II. Do we suppose the genetic distribution of intelligence changed so drastically in the last 90 years? Likely not.
Some people shouldn't be in university. Based on this article, I'd put the number somewhere around 25%. That's not to say they're bad people; just that society is unlikely to benefit from their having spent four years in college. Unfortunately, the system is set up so that they personally benefit form those four years in college (even if they learn nothing) so long as it results in a diploma.
If police departments have to make money by ticketing people, I'd rather they do so by ticketing texters/talkers than by ticketing speeders. If only they'd do the former, and not the latter.
Let me suggest anecdotally that "more focused and ambitious" and "religious" are not mutually exclusive. A friend of mine in college was the child of two missionaries. He spent a large portion of his youth in China, was fluent in Chinese, etc. He was also home schooled for much of his education. Ended up attending a top 10 public university in the U.S.; was this university's Rhodes scholarship candidate; eventually went back and got an M.B.A. His brother graduated from Harvard. Sure, these are just two guys, but I think they adequately demonstrate that you can be home schooled for "religious reasons" and not miss out on the actual education.
Can't say for sure since this friend and I have never discussed his sexual history, but afaik he abstained until getting married in his 20s. So the "safe sex" education would have been completely irrelevant.
The SAT is theoretically an aptitude test, for what its worth. It tests vocabulary, basic math and grasp of the English language. You can "pass" the SAT and still be woefully ignorant in the areas of science, history, music, foreign languages, etc.
As for the report, my feeling is that the home schoolers' advantage is most likely due to demographics. By definition home schooling parents are "highly interested" and involved in their childrens' education. If you only examined those public school parents who are similarly "dedicated" to their childrens' education, I suspect the home schooling advantage would disappear. Home schooling families are probably also different in other ways. More two-parent homes, etc.
That said, I don't think home schooling is a bad thing. I just don't think its a silver bullet. The quality of one's home school environment depends on the parent doing the instruction. Some parents are great teachers. Others not so much. Just like public school teachers.
Exactly. Weird parents + home schooling = weird kids. Non-weird parents + home schooling = non-weird kids, at least with the same frequency as "Non-weird parents + public school". There are several home-schooling families at the church I attend. Some of their kids really do fit the stereotype. Some don't.
I dunno. Do you have any evidence that brown peoples' asylum requests on the basis of denial of education have been rejected?
Do you ascribe to the doctrine that no race or ethnicity is inherently "better" than another? i.e. racism is "wrong"? Would you teach that doctrine to your children? Voila. You're for indoctrination too. You just don't approve of this family's doctrine.
Agree. Though, I would add that most folks I know who "eat, breathe and sleep" their jobs do so in what is, IMO, an unhealthy way. That is to say their focus on career is ultimately detrimental to their family life and other social involvement outside work.
For the record, I've had OS X crash on me more often than Windows XP. But then I'm neither the typical Mac user nor the typical Windows user.
"Creative and free thinking" doesn't mean "lets one's entire create process be totally transparent, and broadcasts everything one is going to do months in advance".
As for why so many artsy folks like Apple, I'd identify two main reasons:
1. Microsoft is synonymous with "stodgy corporate culture". Apple gives these folks a way to be "alternative" without having to jump through all the Linux hoops.
2. Apple stuff "looks cool". That's important to a lot of people. They've successfully transformed consumer electronics into an "image accessory".
What happened to GDDR4?
Other than AOL the only "toxic" email provider I can think of might be Hotmail, and that doesn't really bother me. I'd be much more put off by someone whose address is fucktheman@gmail.com or similar.
In the graduate CS department I was a part of in the late 90s, the problem was foreign students who would indicate that they intended to earn a Ph.D., get a fellowship that covered their first two years (during which it was typical to earn a Master's degree), then leave once they'd earned a Master's. They didn't always go back to China, though; typically they got industry jobs in the U.S.
Interestingly, a large donor who almost singlehandedly funded the Computational and Applied Mathematics program at this same university created a fellowship for CAM students that was available only to citizens, and was ridiculously high-paying. The department actually lobbied him to drop the "citizens only" requirement so they could use the money to attract a higher quantity of top students, as opposed to being limited solely to the crop of U.S. citizens. So far as I know, he refused.
I would have to say that's pretty typical. There's a tendency among developers (and humans in general) to do only what is expected of them. If I can meet my deadlines while doing only 4 actual hours of work in a day, then that's probably what I'm going to do, so long as its not so obvious that I get nailed for it. I'm not saying that's a good thing, necessarily, but its human nature.
The flip side is that if you're someone with sufficient discipline to actually do productive work the entire time you're at the office, and if you're reasonably skilled, then you should shine like a superstar compared to everyone else, which should theoretically translate into pay raises, promotions, etc.
Here are the results of my testing. I didn't take the time to break out each individual test, but I at least broke out each benchmark by its categories. The mile high view is that Firefox is on the bottom, then Chrome, then Webkit and Opera are neck-and-neck at the top, though Opera probably has the edge.
I thought there was a way to isolate just the Dromaeo-specific ones. Could be wrong; I haven't looked at it in a while. Will check.
Okay, so, I brought the laptop to work today so I can the run the benchmarks in the background while doing other things. I'm going to test Opera 10.5 pre-Alpha (12/22/09) vs. the 12/22 nightly versions of FF 3.7a1 and Webkit. I'll run them through Sunspider, Dromaeo, Peacekeeper and V8, and give the scores for each individual sub-test.
I agree with you, btw, that its pretty ridiculous that Sunspider is using non-standard extensions. For the purposes of a benchmark, they should really stick to the standard.
How do you figure? The Slashdot post about 10.5 pre-Alpha shows it barely beating Chrome on Sunspider, barely beating Chrome on Peacekeeper, and losing handily to Chrome on V8. That particular blogger didn't give us Dromaeo results. In my past testing, Chrome does especially well on Dromaeo compared to the competition.
Why is Spidermonkey implementing non-standard Javascript extensions? Or are they part of a standard the other browsers just don't implement yet? Do they use these extensions on every sub-test, or just some of them? It looked like Chrome beat Firefox on all of them.
When I get the time I'll test bleeding-edge Firefox vs. Chrome vs. Opera on my laptop. It's a single-core Pentium M with Windows XP, though, so maybe not very representative of modern users.
Process-per-tab shouldn't speed up Javascript unless you're doing something else in a second tab that's hogging CPU. Most likely the Javascript performance gains came simply from the fact that he was using a 3.7 branch of the code. Which is kind of sad, considering bleeding-edge Firefox still lags behind Chrome by a considerable margin.
The U.S. has some things going for it that may tend to mitigate or completely counter this decline. For one, English is the lingua franca of the world, and the U.S. is by far the largest English-speaking economy. Its easy for non-U.S. would-be scientists to come do research at U.S. universities because they most likely already know English. China could create the best universities in the world, but they'd have a much harder time attracting international students because far fewer people learn Chinese as a second language compared to English.
You could argue for the E.U., maybe, but again there's the language issue. Even if all university classes are conducted in English (which would be unlikely), any prospective student still has to contemplate moving to a country where, outside classes, he's not going to speak the language.
I don't own a netbook, but I've considered buying one. Mostly for travel. I want something small and light, that nevertheless allows me to browse the web, send email, edit documents, and maybe watch a movie. A smart phone doesn't fit the bill, even the ones with keyboards. The screen is too small and inputting text is a huge pain in the butt. A normal laptop would work, but then its larger and heavier. And, honestly, all a "real" laptop buys you is a faster cpu, which is typically not the bottleneck for the kinds of tasks I described. That said, if I bought a netbook I'd probably try to get one that would let me swap in a faster SSD. (Which would, yes, destroy the whole "price" advantage of a netbook. But I wouldn't buy one because its cheap- I'd buy it because its small and light.)
In total agreement here. Usually just look at a short-ish method's name, its parameters, and its return value, makes it clear what it does. This is different than if that same code were included in-place, since in that situation its not clear what the "inputs" and "outputs". Plus extracting it usually makes the section from which it was extracted easier to read.