Yet the professors are told that they need to use the new material and they force it down on the students...
I'm not interested in forcing a new textbook on my students, and I'm quite happy to allow them to use an older edition. The problem is that those older editions become harder and harder to find as time passes. After a semester or two it doesn't matter if I force the students to use the newest edition, because only the newest edition is available.
As many others have suggested, profs could be providing their own reading as pdfs. Which I plan to do, eventually, when I have the time. But since this kind of activity isn't recognized as scholarly work unless it actually gets published by an actual publishing company, I can't afford the time, at least until I get tenure.
A doctor that prescribes ineffective pain medications and then gropes at anti-depressants is not a doctor who has a real understanding of the patient's ailment.
Exactly. And if it was only one doctor who took this approach with me, I'd say it was a lone kook. But I went to a number of doctors, and they all provided effectively the same treatment. The bad ones tried drugs and then quit. The good ones tried drugs, then acknowledged that they couldn't help me but a good chiropractor might.
Which is not to say that all chiropractors are good at what they do. But in my experience there are some things that they are more likely to be able to address than a standard doctor.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc is not the basis of good medicine. It just means time passed and you got better.
Except that my condition was not static when I went to see my doctor. It was deteriorating. And it continued to deteriorate despite the treatment. The doctors only response was to suggest that since my problem was upsetting me, I should take anti-depressants and find a new job that didn't require physical activity.
Chiropractic treatments produced limited immediate relief, and gradual long-term improvement. At this point, I can tell when I need to go back for a check up (a few times year), and I get predictable relief of symptoms when I do. More importantly, the insight gained from working the chiropractor has helped me develop exercises that provide me with immediate relief without having to see a medical professional at all.
they are ALL bullshit artists. pushing bones and joints around will accomplish NOTHING for any disorder, except a dislocated joint..and I'd really recommend going to a REAL doctor for one of those.
Really? Cause I went to a whole bunch of MDs for help with a group of related joint problems (neck and back). All they were prepared to do was prescribe pain killers, and when that didn't work, anti-depressants.
Chiropractic hasn't been a silver bullet, but it's light years beyond anything the traditional medical establishment has been able to do for me. If I'd followed my MD's advice, I probably wouldn't be walking now. With the help of a chiropractor, I'm able to do most of the activity that normal people my age do.
I agree that the claims that chiropractic will cure $DISEASE are bogus, but it's also true that traditional medicine is woefully inadequate for anything other than curing acute illness or massive trauma.
GPL is cool but I think emacs was his greatest accomplishment. At least technical accomplishment.
Whoever modded this flamebait needs to have their privileges revoked. I'm not sure I agree with the parent post, but Emacs is unquestionably a substantial contribution in its own right, as is the GCC.
It's not just the single sentence paragraphs, but also the near total lack of flow to the text. It reads like bullet points scraped off a powerpoint. I hadn't noticed how short the NYTimes paragraphs were, mostly because there's still some craft to the prose. The NYT still reads like it was meant to be read by literate humans, not parsed by a computer.
I usually consider the BBC to be both a reliable source of info, and capable of quality reporting. I don't doubt the info in this case, but was the article written by monkeys? Or has the distinction between a paragraph and a sentence been deprecated?
I was under the impression that the English are generally more literate than your average North American, seeing as they invented the language and all. But this article is awful.
What has peer review got to do with this? Peer review is to ensure that what does get published is valid, but this story is about what doesn't get published. Nobody peer reviews a paper that is never released.
You're confusing two different issues here. The paper did get published in a peer reviewed journal. The government didn't interfere with that process at all. There is no evidence that the science was influenced by government agenda.
The government didn't step in until after the peer-reviewed paper was published, and only then did they refuse to let their scientists talk with the media. Even then, the media story wasn't suppressed, it went forward, based on information published in the peer-reciewed literature and interviews with co-authors who were not Canadian government employees.
The sum total of the government interference was to prevent their own scientists from talking directly to the media. Which is pretty darn stupid, without a doubt, but it's not the same as the government burying the data.
I think that there will be book stores around even in the future, but they need to be more specialized.
They need to be more specialized, sure, but that makes their market much smaller. It's easy to stock specialized books when you've got the security of offering Harry Potter and Twilight et al. to keep the money coming in between the rare consumer of niche books. But once Amazon and Walmart start selling the popular stuff at your wholesale cost, it changes things. It's much harder to sell specialized books when you can't subsidize the lower turnover with mass-market books. So yeah, the book stores that remain in the future will be more specialized. But you won't find many of them outside of major cities where there are enough consumers of their chosen specialty to make it financially viable.
This is already the case with electronics. You can get low-end camera gear anywhere, even at drug stores now, but if you want anything beyond the basics you have to go online or to a city big enough to support one real camera store. Used to be a mom & pop camera store in every town more than 50,000, but now that they can't compete with Walmart for point and shoots, there's not enough high end business to keep them open.
Then make your slide so it has each element of that equation you're teaching as a separate element to be introduced into the slide, instead of popping the whole equation at once, so you have to focus on each element. This isn't a matter of powerpoint being the problem, it's a matter of your usage being a problem. You go too fast; powerpoint isn't timed to go faster than you can speak. Click slower.
You still have the problem of the information on the ppt, no matter how granularly you organize it, is locked into a set order. Student questions don't come in any predictable order, so working with chalk provides you with the flexibility to incorporate questions naturally into your presentation.
Another problem inherent to ppt is macdinking. Sure, you can make every element of a complex diagaram or equation come up separately, but that requires fiddling with details. Even if you're extremely disciplined and efficient (which in my experience are not qualities promoted by ppt), it takes more time to do this explicitly in ppt than simply adding elements with chalk as you talk about them.
My students have never complained that my lectures go too slowly for them, and I make extensive use of the chalkboard. Even if the terms are already on the ppt (I use both together), writing it out as I talk about it provides visual emphasis. Some students are capable of scanning a ppt slide to learn a concept; others can learn very efficiently from the textbook; some need to hear me explain it, or see me sketch it out. My job is to reach as many different students, each with a different learning style, as possible.
You are talking nonsense here. The Thesis authors admitted to copy & pasting code from a GPL project. There is no grey area here, it's an out and out copyright violation.
Anyone that worries that you can't use GPL software like Gimp to make proprietary images doesn't understand the license. This isn't a problem with the license itself, so much as it's a problem of disinformation spread, knowingly or not, by folks like yourself.
Well, yes, Ireland has seen more than it's share of religious violence. But I don't recall any Irish organizations, Catholic or Protestant, ever threatening violence over a cartoon depiction of St. Patrick. And it's not like the Irish aren't regularly made the butt of jokes.
Light rail and long range buses are only good if lots of people want to use them. HOV lanes are only good if people can be convinced to carpool. Apparently MS management feels the employees want to drive their own cars to work by themselves. If that's the case, making them idle in the traffic snarls created by the one general lane each way bridge will not only make everyone late to work but also really exacerbate the smog problem.
You almost make sense. Your argument is based on the assumption that people want to drive themselves to work, and no amount of inconvenience will convince them that any other option is viable. However, if they are stuck in traffic jams day after day, they may find themselves much more likely to try the train, bus or carpool option, once it becomes clear that on top of the economic and environmental advantages, it's also faster. At least, it's faster in a well-designed transit system.
We used to have a move-on-when-ready system, only the other way around. If you weren't ready to move on, you would fail and repeat the course/year/whatever. Strange to see this same concept offered as a revolutionary new approach for top students. Maybe it wouldn't be necessary to do this if the less capable students were forced to master a topic before moving on. How many of these apparently super-bright tenth graders are really just good students surrounded by kids that haven't been forced to perform for fear of damaging their self-esteem?
The solution to moving humanity forward is to move off our planet. Every year we delay is one more that brings us closer to extinction. We have LOTS of resources now.
Great idea. Do you have somewhere in mind? As you point out, it's a resource issue. Where could we go where we'd have an abundant supply of oxygen and water, so that we wouldn't have to waste our limited resources on either producing them or having them shipped from earth?
Nobody ever takes 'ecosystem services' seriously, but if you think there's any possible way we could establish off-world colonies that are within several orders of magnitude of the same level of resource efficiency we have on earth, you're off your rocker. We currently have access to dwindling fossil fuels, abundant oxygen, water, and renewable food sources. Anywhere else, we start from nothing. I'll take the odds on fixing what we've got over starting from nothing, thanks.
Only ever through import plugins that do the colour-space downsampling before giving GIMP the 24-bit colour bitmap data. GIMP's whole architecture is limited to 8-bit per channel, and would take a massive rewrite to support anything higher.
The massive rewrite is in progress, and 12 (or 16) bits per channel will be fully supported with version 3.0. The current development version is 2.7, with a release version of 2.8 on the (distant) horizon. So, real soon now...
It's common to see musicians playing with plugs stuck in their ears so they don't drive themselves stone deaf, while they obviously consider it perfectly OK for them to obliterate the hearing of customers frequenting the place.
To be fair, the musicians are essentially standing on top of the speakers, while the audience members can choose how close they are to the stage. And the musicians have to deal with the noise almost daily, while most of the people in the audience are there once a week or less. And the audience members that are regulars tend to have ear plugs too. So it's not fair to point at ear plugs as a sign of the band's lack of concern for their fans. All of which assumes what look like ear plugs are not actually ear bud monitors that allow the musicians to hear more, not less, of the music.
Look, I believe in evolution, but never has there been found a parent species to something alive today. In other words, scientists can not point at any two distinct species, living or extinct, plant or animal, and say that this species evolved directly from that one.
No, this is not true. In plants, polyploidy can lead to the production of a new species, reproductively isolated from the parent species, and quite often ecologically distinct as well. This happens in a single generation, and in some cases you might find the parent species and the new species growing quite close together. So not only can you point to two species and say this one evolved from that one, but you might be able to do so literally, if both species are growing in the same location.
I don't have examples handy, but I found an explanation here.
OK, you linked to a report by the Sierra Club, a group that has a definite agenda. You need to be careful when doing that.
That's ridiculous. Every group has an agenda. The Sierra Club is upfront about theirs:
Since 1892, the Sierra Club has been working to protect communities, wild places, and the planet itself. We are the oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States.
So they have an agenda to protect the environment. Are you suggesting that groups that work towards a stated agenda are untrustworthy, or that we should trust only sources that have 'no agenda'? Who has 'no agenda'? Who would be left as sources of reliable information, if you exclude all groups who have a stated interest in an issue?
As far as the actual report goes, the summary provided by the Sierra Club itself doesn't actually use the term "unsafe", but rather "at-risk", which appears to be entirely consistent with the data they are presenting. So, you have disparaged an organization because a third party has inaccurately reported their work. You need to be careful when doing that.
There is nothing wrong with having an agenda, at least when the agenda is clearly stated. If you want to dispute the facts, go ahead, but to dismiss them because the source might have motivations you don't agree with is silly.
If you just skim through K&R, then yes, I can see why you'd think it was 'just on C'. But if you actually sit down and work through the problems, you'll find a lot more depth. Of course, it's all C code, but some of those exercises are deceptively challenging, and they really helped me to move beyond the mechanics of the language and start thinking about coding in a more sophisticated way.
The other books mentioned provide important insights into different aspects of programming, but to describe K&R as just a reference book for a single language is a serious understatement. Maybe the thought processes involved in solving those problems are second-nature to experienced programmers, but it was a real mind-opening experience for me, something I've not experienced with other "language references".
In a way, the researcher is being paid to produce materials FOR someone, and then that someone (university, funding source, contract, etc) gets the rights to that research. This is the same for any type of 3rd party work.
You're missing a very important point here. For most university researchers, the 'someone' that paid for the research is the taxpayer. But more importantly, the number of university professors whose research has the potential to generate profits for the university is vanishingly small compared to those who are engaged in basic research.
The service most of us are providing to our university employers is measured in courses taught, graduate students mentored, papers published, grants secured, and various other tasks lumped together as 'service'. The professor as profit generator is recent, still rare, and not entirely welcome development.
In many ways, the idea that university researchers should be engaged in producing proprietary 'intellectual property' is counter to the academic tradition that such work depends on. Why should it be acceptable for someone to take generations of 'open access' research in physics, engineering, medicine, or whatever, add a little piece on top, and forbid anyone else from using it? I'm not saying it should never be done, but certainly not in a publicly funded university.
Unfortunately, most of the time, it's cheaper to pay up than to fight in court. His answer doesn't address that nor does my question - I admit my own failing.
I don't follow you. How is 'fessing up' to a violation you didn't actually commit a way out here? There is no option to buy your way out of a GPL violation. If Harald accused someone of a violation, the accused can only avoid legal action by releasing the source code or removing the code from their product. They can't just pay a fine and continue on with no other change.
If they are in fact innocent, and Harald is still convinced they've pinched some GPL code, 'fessing up' makes no sense.
Besides which, in all cases of GPL violation I've every heard of, the use of the code in question was never in dispute, but rather it was the interpretation of the GPL itself that was at issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet the professors are told that they need to use the new material and they force it down on the students ...
I'm not interested in forcing a new textbook on my students, and I'm quite happy to allow them to use an older edition. The problem is that those older editions become harder and harder to find as time passes. After a semester or two it doesn't matter if I force the students to use the newest edition, because only the newest edition is available.
As many others have suggested, profs could be providing their own reading as pdfs. Which I plan to do, eventually, when I have the time. But since this kind of activity isn't recognized as scholarly work unless it actually gets published by an actual publishing company, I can't afford the time, at least until I get tenure.
A doctor that prescribes ineffective pain medications and then gropes at anti-depressants is not a doctor who has a real understanding of the patient's ailment.
Exactly. And if it was only one doctor who took this approach with me, I'd say it was a lone kook. But I went to a number of doctors, and they all provided effectively the same treatment. The bad ones tried drugs and then quit. The good ones tried drugs, then acknowledged that they couldn't help me but a good chiropractor might.
Which is not to say that all chiropractors are good at what they do. But in my experience there are some things that they are more likely to be able to address than a standard doctor.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc is not the basis of good medicine. It just means time passed and you got better.
Except that my condition was not static when I went to see my doctor. It was deteriorating. And it continued to deteriorate despite the treatment. The doctors only response was to suggest that since my problem was upsetting me, I should take anti-depressants and find a new job that didn't require physical activity.
Chiropractic treatments produced limited immediate relief, and gradual long-term improvement. At this point, I can tell when I need to go back for a check up (a few times year), and I get predictable relief of symptoms when I do. More importantly, the insight gained from working the chiropractor has helped me develop exercises that provide me with immediate relief without having to see a medical professional at all.
they are ALL bullshit artists. pushing bones and joints around will accomplish NOTHING for any disorder, except a dislocated joint..and I'd really recommend going to a REAL doctor for one of those.
Really? Cause I went to a whole bunch of MDs for help with a group of related joint problems (neck and back). All they were prepared to do was prescribe pain killers, and when that didn't work, anti-depressants.
Chiropractic hasn't been a silver bullet, but it's light years beyond anything the traditional medical establishment has been able to do for me. If I'd followed my MD's advice, I probably wouldn't be walking now. With the help of a chiropractor, I'm able to do most of the activity that normal people my age do.
I agree that the claims that chiropractic will cure $DISEASE are bogus, but it's also true that traditional medicine is woefully inadequate for anything other than curing acute illness or massive trauma.
GPL is cool but I think emacs was his greatest accomplishment. At least technical accomplishment.
Whoever modded this flamebait needs to have their privileges revoked. I'm not sure I agree with the parent post, but Emacs is unquestionably a substantial contribution in its own right, as is the GCC.
Flamebait is not a synonym for disagree.
It's not just the single sentence paragraphs, but also the near total lack of flow to the text. It reads like bullet points scraped off a powerpoint. I hadn't noticed how short the NYTimes paragraphs were, mostly because there's still some craft to the prose. The NYT still reads like it was meant to be read by literate humans, not parsed by a computer.
To each his own, I guess.
I usually consider the BBC to be both a reliable source of info, and capable of quality reporting. I don't doubt the info in this case, but was the article written by monkeys? Or has the distinction between a paragraph and a sentence been deprecated?
I was under the impression that the English are generally more literate than your average North American, seeing as they invented the language and all. But this article is awful.
You're confusing two different issues here. The paper did get published in a peer reviewed journal. The government didn't interfere with that process at all. There is no evidence that the science was influenced by government agenda.
The government didn't step in until after the peer-reviewed paper was published, and only then did they refuse to let their scientists talk with the media. Even then, the media story wasn't suppressed, it went forward, based on information published in the peer-reciewed literature and interviews with co-authors who were not Canadian government employees.
The sum total of the government interference was to prevent their own scientists from talking directly to the media. Which is pretty darn stupid, without a doubt, but it's not the same as the government burying the data.
yp
I think that there will be book stores around even in the future, but they need to be more specialized.
They need to be more specialized, sure, but that makes their market much smaller. It's easy to stock specialized books when you've got the security of offering Harry Potter and Twilight et al. to keep the money coming in between the rare consumer of niche books. But once Amazon and Walmart start selling the popular stuff at your wholesale cost, it changes things. It's much harder to sell specialized books when you can't subsidize the lower turnover with mass-market books. So yeah, the book stores that remain in the future will be more specialized. But you won't find many of them outside of major cities where there are enough consumers of their chosen specialty to make it financially viable.
This is already the case with electronics. You can get low-end camera gear anywhere, even at drug stores now, but if you want anything beyond the basics you have to go online or to a city big enough to support one real camera store. Used to be a mom & pop camera store in every town more than 50,000, but now that they can't compete with Walmart for point and shoots, there's not enough high end business to keep them open.
You still have the problem of the information on the ppt, no matter how granularly you organize it, is locked into a set order. Student questions don't come in any predictable order, so working with chalk provides you with the flexibility to incorporate questions naturally into your presentation.
Another problem inherent to ppt is macdinking. Sure, you can make every element of a complex diagaram or equation come up separately, but that requires fiddling with details. Even if you're extremely disciplined and efficient (which in my experience are not qualities promoted by ppt), it takes more time to do this explicitly in ppt than simply adding elements with chalk as you talk about them.
My students have never complained that my lectures go too slowly for them, and I make extensive use of the chalkboard. Even if the terms are already on the ppt (I use both together), writing it out as I talk about it provides visual emphasis. Some students are capable of scanning a ppt slide to learn a concept; others can learn very efficiently from the textbook; some need to hear me explain it, or see me sketch it out. My job is to reach as many different students, each with a different learning style, as possible.
yp
You are talking nonsense here. The Thesis authors admitted to copy & pasting code from a GPL project. There is no grey area here, it's an out and out copyright violation.
Anyone that worries that you can't use GPL software like Gimp to make proprietary images doesn't understand the license. This isn't a problem with the license itself, so much as it's a problem of disinformation spread, knowingly or not, by folks like yourself.
Well, yes, Ireland has seen more than it's share of religious violence. But I don't recall any Irish organizations, Catholic or Protestant, ever threatening violence over a cartoon depiction of St. Patrick. And it's not like the Irish aren't regularly made the butt of jokes.
yp.
You almost make sense. Your argument is based on the assumption that people want to drive themselves to work, and no amount of inconvenience will convince them that any other option is viable. However, if they are stuck in traffic jams day after day, they may find themselves much more likely to try the train, bus or carpool option, once it becomes clear that on top of the economic and environmental advantages, it's also faster. At least, it's faster in a well-designed transit system.
yp.
We used to have a move-on-when-ready system, only the other way around. If you weren't ready to move on, you would fail and repeat the course/year/whatever. Strange to see this same concept offered as a revolutionary new approach for top students. Maybe it wouldn't be necessary to do this if the less capable students were forced to master a topic before moving on. How many of these apparently super-bright tenth graders are really just good students surrounded by kids that haven't been forced to perform for fear of damaging their self-esteem?
yp.
Great idea. Do you have somewhere in mind? As you point out, it's a resource issue. Where could we go where we'd have an abundant supply of oxygen and water, so that we wouldn't have to waste our limited resources on either producing them or having them shipped from earth?
Nobody ever takes 'ecosystem services' seriously, but if you think there's any possible way we could establish off-world colonies that are within several orders of magnitude of the same level of resource efficiency we have on earth, you're off your rocker. We currently have access to dwindling fossil fuels, abundant oxygen, water, and renewable food sources. Anywhere else, we start from nothing. I'll take the odds on fixing what we've got over starting from nothing, thanks.
Only ever through import plugins that do the colour-space downsampling before giving GIMP the 24-bit colour bitmap data. GIMP's whole architecture is limited to 8-bit per channel, and would take a massive rewrite to support anything higher.
The massive rewrite is in progress, and 12 (or 16) bits per channel will be fully supported with version 3.0. The current development version is 2.7, with a release version of 2.8 on the (distant) horizon. So, real soon now...
It already does, via UFRaw and Rawstudio, and maybe others.
What does it do that puts it in a different category than Rawstudio or UFRaw?
yp.
To be fair, the musicians are essentially standing on top of the speakers, while the audience members can choose how close they are to the stage. And the musicians have to deal with the noise almost daily, while most of the people in the audience are there once a week or less. And the audience members that are regulars tend to have ear plugs too. So it's not fair to point at ear plugs as a sign of the band's lack of concern for their fans. All of which assumes what look like ear plugs are not actually ear bud monitors that allow the musicians to hear more, not less, of the music.
yp.
No, this is not true. In plants, polyploidy can lead to the production of a new species, reproductively isolated from the parent species, and quite often ecologically distinct as well. This happens in a single generation, and in some cases you might find the parent species and the new species growing quite close together. So not only can you point to two species and say this one evolved from that one, but you might be able to do so literally, if both species are growing in the same location.
I don't have examples handy, but I found an explanation here.
yp.
That's ridiculous. Every group has an agenda. The Sierra Club is upfront about theirs:
So they have an agenda to protect the environment. Are you suggesting that groups that work towards a stated agenda are untrustworthy, or that we should trust only sources that have 'no agenda'? Who has 'no agenda'? Who would be left as sources of reliable information, if you exclude all groups who have a stated interest in an issue?
As far as the actual report goes, the summary provided by the Sierra Club itself doesn't actually use the term "unsafe", but rather "at-risk", which appears to be entirely consistent with the data they are presenting. So, you have disparaged an organization because a third party has inaccurately reported their work. You need to be careful when doing that.
There is nothing wrong with having an agenda, at least when the agenda is clearly stated. If you want to dispute the facts, go ahead, but to dismiss them because the source might have motivations you don't agree with is silly.
yp.
If you just skim through K&R, then yes, I can see why you'd think it was 'just on C'. But if you actually sit down and work through the problems, you'll find a lot more depth. Of course, it's all C code, but some of those exercises are deceptively challenging, and they really helped me to move beyond the mechanics of the language and start thinking about coding in a more sophisticated way.
The other books mentioned provide important insights into different aspects of programming, but to describe K&R as just a reference book for a single language is a serious understatement. Maybe the thought processes involved in solving those problems are second-nature to experienced programmers, but it was a real mind-opening experience for me, something I've not experienced with other "language references".
yp.
You're missing a very important point here. For most university researchers, the 'someone' that paid for the research is the taxpayer. But more importantly, the number of university professors whose research has the potential to generate profits for the university is vanishingly small compared to those who are engaged in basic research.
The service most of us are providing to our university employers is measured in courses taught, graduate students mentored, papers published, grants secured, and various other tasks lumped together as 'service'. The professor as profit generator is recent, still rare, and not entirely welcome development.
In many ways, the idea that university researchers should be engaged in producing proprietary 'intellectual property' is counter to the academic tradition that such work depends on. Why should it be acceptable for someone to take generations of 'open access' research in physics, engineering, medicine, or whatever, add a little piece on top, and forbid anyone else from using it? I'm not saying it should never be done, but certainly not in a publicly funded university.
Unfortunately, most of the time, it's cheaper to pay up than to fight in court. His answer doesn't address that nor does my question - I admit my own failing.
I don't follow you. How is 'fessing up' to a violation you didn't actually commit a way out here? There is no option to buy your way out of a GPL violation. If Harald accused someone of a violation, the accused can only avoid legal action by releasing the source code or removing the code from their product. They can't just pay a fine and continue on with no other change.
If they are in fact innocent, and Harald is still convinced they've pinched some GPL code, 'fessing up' makes no sense.
Besides which, in all cases of GPL violation I've every heard of, the use of the code in question was never in dispute, but rather it was the interpretation of the GPL itself that was at issue.
yankpop
The second line of the article states that it is one of the smallest computers in the world, not the smallest.
yp.