Which doesn't change the fact that the view on copyright and media sharing presented on/. is massively biased, and doesn't reflect the general consensus of the wider population, which is exactly what the OP was saying.
The problem, of course, is that most people's opinions are formed on the basis of information distributed to them via Big Media. So really it's a cruddy chicken-and-egg problem that I at least don't see any way to solve. People like Michael Geist are fighting the good fight disseminating (relatively) objective information about copyright & associated issues, but really he's kind of preaching to the choir (i.e. not reaching many laypeople).
Exactly! My earliest memories of fatherhood come in at somewhere around 10 weeks. Prior to that, I just existed in some formless, abstract state of maximal fatigue.:D
[snip] 1. Stem cells similar to those present in cord blood are easily obtained from our own (adult) blood if/when the need arises. 2. Very low chance that they will be useful to siblings/parents/other relatives. 3. No guarantee of how well these cells survive in the cryogenic environment. No guarantee from the banks of backup plans in case of failure. 4. All fancy stuff (about regenerating organs) from the cells is science fiction so far. 5. Medical science could find alternative ways to cure your conditions by then. 6. The bank guys are great at emotional blackmail --- like giving the greatest gift to your newborn, and being a bad parent otherwise. I had one guy who told me that I might even make money selling it in future. Shame on him.
My wife and I also discussed cord-blood banking a lot before our girl was born. We read loads, talked loads, and when we met our OB-GYN, she basically said "don't bother" and gave reasons 1, 3, and 6, putting particular emphasis on 3 (in fact, 2 different OBs gave the same reasoning for not bothering). We opted not to bank with a clear conscience.
Of course, like everything else about parenting decisions, this is a massively personal decision that should be made in close consultation with your spouse/partner & medical support person, and whatever makes you all feel most comfortable should outweigh any/. comments enough to pretty much render them moot.
Also, congrats on the new addition. It gets easier after about 10 weeks, I swear.:0)
Seriously. Imagine the public outcry if even just RIM and Nokia stopped all imports of mobile devices overnight (people luuuurve their N810s---don't even get me started on Crackberries). Since RIM's communications all go through a couple of central points, maybe they could even disable ALL of their devices.
"Sorry John Q. Public...this company here, at address ABC, phone number NNX-XXXX, says we're being bad. Take it up with them."
OK, so maybe that wouldn't really happen...I'll go back to the basement now. OK, I was in the basement all along.
Or WingIDE...(yes, yes...non-FREE, yadda yadda)...it's a great IDE that does all the good stuff you want (great code completion, good customizability, good VCS integration, good project management, etc). Has been rock-solid on my Kubuntu (6.10-8.04) boxes.
AND, if you're a Linux developer working on a project, it's free-as-in-beer...yup, they'll give you a license for the Personal (maybe even the Professional?) version.
Semantic and episodic memory are both subtypes of declarative memory. The ToH example showed that semantic memory (viz. declarative memory) is distinct from procedural memory (what Milner called motor memory).
(1) "oot and aboot" is NOT what Canadian Raising sounds like (nor "oat in a boat")...the vowel in "oot" is high and back, whereas the vowel in Canadian Raised "out" is (well, technically starts, since it's a diphthong) mid-high and central (like the vowel in "cut")
(2) Most Canadians don't speak that way
(3) A fair chunk of people in the US speak that way
Hopefully you do not believe in forcing morals on someone else. Otherwise, you stand for man and woman marriage only, no drugs, prudence, etc.
Non sequitur. I can believe in forcing my moral worldview on other people while it includes such things as an uncompromising commitment to gay marriage and legalization of drugs. Remember people, morals are what you believe is right, not what you believe is Right.
My first answer is to echo what a lot of other posters have said, and help her figure out what it is she wants. If she can find something that she can be truly impassioned about, then she'll have a leg up on most other kids starting uni. Of course, she's still pretty young, so she might not know yet what turns her crank.
On the other hand, I've often said that if I could go back to uni and do another undergrad, I'd do math for sure. There are just so many doors that math leaves open, and the kind of thinking the various maths foster is useful.
On the third hand, if you really want a concrete suggestion other than math/science, I'd go with Linguistics or Cognitive Science (but I may be biased;). Have her check out the NACS program at Maryland, or CogSci at Johns Hopkins, or Linguistics or CogSci at MIT. Or the Symbolic Systems BA at Stanford (possibly the coolest undergrad program in existence). There's a lot of non-mathy (well, some math is involved), non (hard-)sciencey stuff going on that's really interesting out there.
Best of luck to her. She's at an exciting time in her Life. Help her realize that.
There are lots of interesting and relevant threads here (some...not so much). I'm definitely down with GEB as being somehow of relevance to this, and of course the Formal Logic/CS connection should be obvious (and yes, CS/Logic is Math, which is why Waterloo is pretty much the only place I know of that has CS in the right faculty...and no, I didn't go there).
But I think the best answer to this question is Cantwell Smith's book The Origins of Objects. It's explicitly about the epistemological and ontological commitments of computation. What is it we're doing when we "compute"? Is the notion of "computation" definable? (please don't give me half-arsed definitions of algorithms in response). It's quite a read...I've gone back to it a few times now and still haven't made up my mind about it.
In case you don't know who Cantwell Smith is and are the kind of person who likes/wants/needs credentials: he was a co-founder of Stanford's CSLI, a principal scientist at Xerox PARC, and (a short quote from his Wikipedia entry) "Smith is currently based out of the University of Toronto, where he is Dean and Professor at the Faculty of Information. Additionally, Smith holds a Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Information, and is cross-appointed as Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Computer Science and in the Program in Communication, Culture and Technology at University of Toronto at Mississauga."
[...] the Sumerians, who sort of invented language.
The mind boggles. The likely timespan between the evolution of spoken language (meaning something with at least some syntax and probably phonology) and written language (which is what the Sumerians are typically credited with) is on the order of 1E4 years. And yes, IAALinguist.
More on-topic, I've personally witnessed a documented unidentified aerial phenomenon, also witnessed by hundreds of others, including police, firefighters, journalists (yeah, yeah). I'm talking about the November 9, 1990 sighting in Montreal. I was in Grade 10 at the time, walking downtown with two friends. One of them noticed the lights over Place Bonaventure, and we all determined that something at least "unusual" was afoot, and stood there looking at it for almost a half-hour. It was pretty neat.
I'd love to get my hands on a copy of the official RCMP report on the incident, which concluded with no plausible explanation for the phenomenon.
It's not that the test is simple, it's that humans are easily duped. Read Dan Dennett's (1985) "Can Machines Think?" and Bob French's (1990) "Subcognition and the limits of the Turing Test" to see why an unrestricted Turing Test is actually really hard. (French's 2000 paper in Trends in Cognitive Science is a great overview of views on the Test since it was first proposed).
Also, the article is pap. The writer plainly did not read Turing (1950), which is a shame, since it's a great paper that is moreover well-written enough to be an enjoyable read. Plus, it's available online for anyone who bothers to look.
Another comment mentioned that in order to plausibly pass, a computer would need a massive database of word, and relations between words, and topics of conversation, but for some reason claimed that the computer still wouldn't be thinking. This sounds a lot like a lexicon, syntax, and some world-knowledge...which pretty much describes how humans create & use language. Denying the relevant descriptive tag to a program that has that kind of strong equivalence (cf. Pylyshyn 1984) to human linguistic competence seems like meat chauvinism.
Try Isis and Mastodon (Meshuggah if you lean harder),
Why has no one mentioned Tool yet in this thread? I saw both Meshuggah and Isis open for Tool (Meshuggah on Lateralus tour, Isis on 10,000 Days). Meshuggah == great & really heavy, Isis == meh (a bit too meandering for my tastes).
BUT. Tool is probably the contemporary band that is your best bet for an initial foray into Prog Metal. Great lyrics (suitably obscure as a rule, and yet somehow generally interpretable), and outstanding musicianship.
[...] or who responsibly make arrangements for them to be cared for (such as *gasp* having Mom stay home and actually raise them)
Because having Mom stay at home is the "responsible" thing to do? So the choice for women is motherhood XOR employment? I won't deny that having someone at home fulltime is the optimal situation (definitely not always possible), but maybe *Dad* could stay home...?
Oh man...serves me right for not checking first that there's a/. user named "Jane Q. Public"...you're certainly not the fictitious person I was talking about!
[...] one that leaves their brains with few dopamine receptors, molecules that act as docking ports for one of the neurochemicals that carry our thoughts and emotions (emph mine - Internalist)
I know/.'s readers won't get sucked into this "explanation" of how the activities of our brains gives rise to our thoughts and emotions, but John & Jane Q. Public might, and boy does that tick me off! OK, so it's probably not a big deal if people don't see the difference, but we as scientists should be encouraging right-thinking ways in the lay public.
Oh, and the subject line is from a paper by Paul Churchland that I can't be bothered to find right now. In one of the first Betty Crocker cookbooks for microwave ovens, the intro explains that microwaves work by making the molecules in food jiggle really fast, thereby encouraging them to rub together more and create heat via friction.
Slashdot Mirror
Which doesn't change the fact that the view on copyright and media sharing presented on /. is massively biased, and doesn't reflect the general consensus of the wider population, which is exactly what the OP was saying.
The problem, of course, is that most people's opinions are formed on the basis of information distributed to them via Big Media. So really it's a cruddy chicken-and-egg problem that I at least don't see any way to solve. People like Michael Geist are fighting the good fight disseminating (relatively) objective information about copyright & associated issues, but really he's kind of preaching to the choir (i.e. not reaching many laypeople).
Exactly! My earliest memories of fatherhood come in at somewhere around 10 weeks. Prior to that, I just existed in some formless, abstract state of maximal fatigue. :D
[snip]
1. Stem cells similar to those present in cord blood are easily obtained from our own (adult) blood if/when the need arises.
2. Very low chance that they will be useful to siblings/parents/other relatives.
3. No guarantee of how well these cells survive in the cryogenic environment. No guarantee from the banks of backup plans in case of failure.
4. All fancy stuff (about regenerating organs) from the cells is science fiction so far.
5. Medical science could find alternative ways to cure your conditions by then.
6. The bank guys are great at emotional blackmail --- like giving the greatest gift to your newborn, and being a bad parent otherwise. I had one guy who told me that I might even make money selling it in future. Shame on him.
My wife and I also discussed cord-blood banking a lot before our girl was born. We read loads, talked loads, and when we met our OB-GYN, she basically said "don't bother" and gave reasons 1, 3, and 6, putting particular emphasis on 3 (in fact, 2 different OBs gave the same reasoning for not bothering). We opted not to bank with a clear conscience.
Of course, like everything else about parenting decisions, this is a massively personal decision that should be made in close consultation with your spouse/partner & medical support person, and whatever makes you all feel most comfortable should outweigh any /. comments enough to pretty much render them moot.
Also, congrats on the new addition. It gets easier after about 10 weeks, I swear. :0)
Seriously. Imagine the public outcry if even just RIM and Nokia stopped all imports of mobile devices overnight (people luuuurve their N810s---don't even get me started on Crackberries). Since RIM's communications all go through a couple of central points, maybe they could even disable ALL of their devices.
"Sorry John Q. Public...this company here, at address ABC, phone number NNX-XXXX, says we're being bad. Take it up with them."
OK, so maybe that wouldn't really happen...I'll go back to the basement now. OK, I was in the basement all along.
It seems like you're knocking it back a notch in the evolution toward legs.
Evolution isn't goal-directed...
One of my customers is a K-12 school. They have 10K students, and 390 different windows applications.
Where do you live, man? What elementary/high school has ten thousand students?!? And I thought my high school was big at 1000...yikes.
And what apps do high school people need that don't run on Linux?
Or WingIDE...(yes, yes...non-FREE, yadda yadda)...it's a great IDE that does all the good stuff you want (great code completion, good customizability, good VCS integration, good project management, etc). Has been rock-solid on my Kubuntu (6.10-8.04) boxes.
AND, if you're a Linux developer working on a project, it's free-as-in-beer...yup, they'll give you a license for the Personal (maybe even the Professional?) version.
Semantic and episodic memory are both subtypes of declarative memory. The ToH example showed that semantic memory (viz. declarative memory) is distinct from procedural memory (what Milner called motor memory).
Pffft. *sigh*
You're right, of course. My head was clearly on backwards & upside-down.
My apologies to the OP.
spreading V.D. amongst the troops
Seriously? "V.D."?!? The 70s called and they want their terminology back.
Also, -1 Grammar for (i) superfluous, and (ii) incorrect use of an archaic 2nd person suffix.
*grumble*
<disgruntled linguist>
Moreover...
(1) "oot and aboot" is NOT what Canadian Raising sounds like (nor "oat in a boat")...the vowel in "oot" is high and back, whereas the vowel in Canadian Raised "out" is (well, technically starts, since it's a diphthong) mid-high and central (like the vowel in "cut")
(2) Most Canadians don't speak that way
(3) A fair chunk of people in the US speak that way
</disgruntled linguist>
There's an ongoing battle in my family [...] They all think I'm this weird limey geek (I'm the only English person in the family) [...]
You...you're the only person of English descent in your family? How does that work?!?
Hopefully you do not believe in forcing morals on someone else. Otherwise, you stand for man and woman marriage only, no drugs, prudence, etc.
Non sequitur. I can believe in forcing my moral worldview on other people while it includes such things as an uncompromising commitment to gay marriage and legalization of drugs. Remember people, morals are what you believe is right, not what you believe is Right.
Shades of "Good Will Hunting", here...
My first answer is to echo what a lot of other posters have said, and help her figure out what it is she wants. If she can find something that she can be truly impassioned about, then she'll have a leg up on most other kids starting uni. Of course, she's still pretty young, so she might not know yet what turns her crank.
On the other hand, I've often said that if I could go back to uni and do another undergrad, I'd do math for sure. There are just so many doors that math leaves open, and the kind of thinking the various maths foster is useful.
On the third hand, if you really want a concrete suggestion other than math/science, I'd go with Linguistics or Cognitive Science (but I may be biased ;). Have her check out the NACS program at Maryland, or CogSci at Johns Hopkins, or Linguistics or CogSci at MIT. Or the Symbolic Systems BA at Stanford (possibly the coolest undergrad program in existence). There's a lot of non-mathy (well, some math is involved), non (hard-)sciencey stuff going on that's really interesting out there.
Best of luck to her. She's at an exciting time in her Life. Help her realize that.
There are lots of interesting and relevant threads here (some...not so much). I'm definitely down with GEB as being somehow of relevance to this, and of course the Formal Logic/CS connection should be obvious (and yes, CS/Logic is Math, which is why Waterloo is pretty much the only place I know of that has CS in the right faculty...and no, I didn't go there).
But I think the best answer to this question is Cantwell Smith's book The Origins of Objects . It's explicitly about the epistemological and ontological commitments of computation. What is it we're doing when we "compute"? Is the notion of "computation" definable? (please don't give me half-arsed definitions of algorithms in response). It's quite a read...I've gone back to it a few times now and still haven't made up my mind about it.
In case you don't know who Cantwell Smith is and are the kind of person who likes/wants/needs credentials: he was a co-founder of Stanford's CSLI, a principal scientist at Xerox PARC, and (a short quote from his Wikipedia entry) "Smith is currently based out of the University of Toronto, where he is Dean and Professor at the Faculty of Information. Additionally, Smith holds a Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Information, and is cross-appointed as Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Computer Science and in the Program in Communication, Culture and Technology at University of Toronto at Mississauga."
Yay Dancehall Crashers! I was introduced to them, of all places, on the Angus soundtrack. Anyway, they're great.
[...] the Sumerians, who sort of invented language.
The mind boggles. The likely timespan between the evolution of spoken language (meaning something with at least some syntax and probably phonology) and written language (which is what the Sumerians are typically credited with) is on the order of 1E4 years. And yes, IAALinguist.
More on-topic, I've personally witnessed a documented unidentified aerial phenomenon, also witnessed by hundreds of others, including police, firefighters, journalists (yeah, yeah). I'm talking about the November 9, 1990 sighting in Montreal. I was in Grade 10 at the time, walking downtown with two friends. One of them noticed the lights over Place Bonaventure, and we all determined that something at least "unusual" was afoot, and stood there looking at it for almost a half-hour. It was pretty neat.
I'd love to get my hands on a copy of the official RCMP report on the incident, which concluded with no plausible explanation for the phenomenon.
There is no dark side of the moon,
as a matter of fact, it's all dark...
It's not that the test is simple, it's that humans are easily duped. Read Dan Dennett's (1985) "Can Machines Think?" and Bob French's (1990) "Subcognition and the limits of the Turing Test" to see why an unrestricted Turing Test is actually really hard. (French's 2000 paper in Trends in Cognitive Science is a great overview of views on the Test since it was first proposed).
Also, the article is pap. The writer plainly did not read Turing (1950), which is a shame, since it's a great paper that is moreover well-written enough to be an enjoyable read. Plus, it's available online for anyone who bothers to look.
Another comment mentioned that in order to plausibly pass, a computer would need a massive database of word, and relations between words, and topics of conversation, but for some reason claimed that the computer still wouldn't be thinking. This sounds a lot like a lexicon, syntax, and some world-knowledge...which pretty much describes how humans create & use language. Denying the relevant descriptive tag to a program that has that kind of strong equivalence (cf. Pylyshyn 1984) to human linguistic competence seems like meat chauvinism.
Try Isis and Mastodon (Meshuggah if you lean harder),
Why has no one mentioned Tool yet in this thread? I saw both Meshuggah and Isis open for Tool (Meshuggah on Lateralus tour, Isis on 10,000 Days). Meshuggah == great & really heavy, Isis == meh (a bit too meandering for my tastes).
BUT. Tool is probably the contemporary band that is your best bet for an initial foray into Prog Metal. Great lyrics (suitably obscure as a rule, and yet somehow generally interpretable), and outstanding musicianship.
Just my 2 senses.
Here's an example from one of my domains:
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/
[...] when you laugh incessantly for no apparent reason
Uh, you know Reefer Madness wasn't real, right?
[...] or who responsibly make arrangements for them to be cared for (such as *gasp* having Mom stay home and actually raise them)
Because having Mom stay at home is the "responsible" thing to do? So the choice for women is motherhood XOR employment? I won't deny that having someone at home fulltime is the optimal situation (definitely not always possible), but maybe *Dad* could stay home...?
Oh man...serves me right for not checking first that there's a /. user named "Jane Q. Public"...you're certainly not the fictitious person I was talking about!
From TFS (and presumably TFA?)...
[...] one that leaves their brains with few dopamine receptors, molecules that act as docking ports for one of the neurochemicals that carry our thoughts and emotions (emph mine - Internalist)
I know /.'s readers won't get sucked into this "explanation" of how the activities of our brains gives rise to our thoughts and emotions, but John & Jane Q. Public might, and boy does that tick me off! OK, so it's probably not a big deal if people don't see the difference, but we as scientists should be encouraging right-thinking ways in the lay public.
Oh, and the subject line is from a paper by Paul Churchland that I can't be bothered to find right now. In one of the first Betty Crocker cookbooks for microwave ovens, the intro explains that microwaves work by making the molecules in food jiggle really fast, thereby encouraging them to rub together more and create heat via friction.