Goldman Sachs gave Brazil (the "favorite") only a 13% chance of winning the world cup.
The fact that Brazil was eliminated is not at odds with the reports.
Exactly. The editorial comment has the misconception that this form of betting aims to find the winner.
Instead, they are looking for models which better predict to the "true" likelihood of any team winning. These models output a series of probabilities, and the amount of money you can make depends on the disparity between this distribution and that predicted by the current betting odds. You place a family of bets which target this disparity proportionally, and then after a sufficient number of events you'll make money reliably.
If other people start predicing the odds more accurately, you'll find that the disparity between betting odds and your model will narrow, and there'll be less opportunity for you to make money. There are a lot of people doing this sort of thing professionally, since sports betting is supposedly a less efficient market than share trading.
Um, if you're gonna get it tattoo'd, you probably want to go with the more traditional form of: e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0. This single equation shows a relationship between 5 important mathematical constants, as opposed to the other form, which just shows 3 (I don't think -1 qualifies, as i is the more fundamental).
So you tattoo something safe, and then people start using tau instead of pi.
Sure, Pinker's opinion is worth more than comments here, where we're mostly pissing into the wind. There's an underlying problem though, which is that there's no easy way to distinguish the hard-nosed and appropriately qualified opinion of an academic expert from a well thought out but speculative personal opinion, especially in an op-ed piece like this.
The ideal would be a kind of argument tree of claims and evidence which ultimately supports the conclusion at hand, preferably with a wiki-like structure and references to the scientific literature. Something like that backing an op-ed piece would, although being a whole lot more work, let you and me work out how seriously academic X has thought out their position, or whether they too were pissing into the wind.
The fundamental argument they are having is whether or not deep thinkers learn to be deep thinkers or if they are born to be deep thinkers. If thinking deeply is a learned behavior, then Carr may have a good argument. Then you move on to the specifics of whether or not the Internet promotes skimming or thinking deeply (my opinion is it depends greatly on where you go on the internet). If deep thinkers are born that way, then it doesn't matter.
The argument seems more subtle than that. Carr thinks that deep thinking is learned (or at least, promoted) through old methods of media consumption, but that our new methods of consumption are ruining this ability. Pinker also thinks that deep thinking is a learned behaviour, but that it is taught (and learned) in the institutions where it is most needed, in particular in universities.
Pinker's not worried about recent changes, because he's confident that people who need these skills pick them up, and uses increasing success in sciences as evidence that nothing is going too wrong. Carr doesn't believe this evidence is sufficient, since he believes that modern science may not need deep thinking for its advances. That claim seems to severely underestimate the difficulty of doing good science, or even average science, and seems trivially false.
Really though, Carr values "deep thinking" in and of itself, and doesn't care if people who need it can do it. He's worried that the general population as a whole will not be able to think deeply on anything, but instead will become light "skimmers" of information. It seems to me that the ability to skim and critically combine information from multiple sources is incredibly important now, maybe more important than the "deep thinking" Carr promotes.
I definitely side with Pinker here. The skills are always around for those who want or need them. Nothing about our current consumption habits prevents us from learning them or using our self-control and employing them. Carr should be deeply uncomfortable with the amount of information we need to wade through day in day out, and realise that people are just adapting to do the best they can in our modern environment.
Imagine imagine yourself reading the NYT archive from the 1920s and finding "flivver" or "flapper". Now imagine someone in a hundred years reading the archive of the now-current NYT and finding "tweet". Same deal.
He's may be too uptight* about it, but his idea is not completely without merit.
[*: 40 years ago?]
In 100 years, the archive will interactively back up the word tweet with a wealth of information about Twitter and the culture of the times, for those interested. For those not, it will simply paraphrase tweet with something comprehensible to the person reading it, so that they can understand and move on.
I don't think thoughts of future archiving should deter us from using language however we see fit.
Now having RTFA, they are providing a rental scheme which looks quite reasonable, and financial assistance to parents who aren't able to meet even that. Seems very reasonable to me.
Is it really necessarily to require every student to have a laptop in order to learn? Are they saying it's nearly impossible to correctly teach students without this technology?
I went to a privileged school, and when I went to high school years ago they brought out their first laptop policy. In many ways, the laptops were "wasted" for official classes, and it was quickly learned that 95% of classes didn't need or use the laptop. For the other 5%, it was really very useful. The side effect of everyone having laptops was a lot of tinkering by all the students, and that had real benefit too.
Laptop schemes are nothing new. There are two questions in this case: why standardise on MacBooks, and what will they do about the underprivileged kids?
As to why they standardise at all, that's clear. It will save them a lot of support effort. They may also be able to do some bulk deal for all these laptops, instead of families having to purchase them at retail price. Whilst I'd love them to demand laptops running Ubuntu instead, I think choosing Macs is reasonably defensible.
As for underprivileged kids, the school clearly needs a policy where their laptops are subsidised or bought outright. If they do something like this, then far from screwing the poor parents they'll be doing the kids a huge favour, likely giving them access to some tech literacy that only comes from having your own machine you can use night and day. Will they do the right thing? I don't know, but it's far better to focus pressure on this particular issue than on the broader issue of requiring laptops.
The real deal is that the scientific method can never really disprove the existence of God, so there can be no genuine conflict between science and the belief in God.
That's not quite true. Science demands a kind of skepticism in evaluating evidence, and makes heavy use of principles such as Occam's Razor to prune the space of propositions considered realistic given the evidence. Despite not being able to disprove many things, it certainly passes judgement on beliefs about the world which are beyond the minimum required to explain the world around us (e.g. the Flying Spaghetti Monster). The scientific mindset requires us to discard propositions which are spurious and unsupported by concrete evidence. The belief in one or more gods or an afterlife certainly fails to meet standards of evidence; scientific rigour would thus allows as to discard such beliefs. If further evidence can be brought to bear, great! Until then...
Hypocrisy is putting forth a set of philosophical arguments against Flash while performing the exact same business practices that he's decrying.
Jobs doesn't make philosophical arguments against Flash though, he only makes business arguments.
His problem is that Adobe dropped the ball, and are lagging instead of innovating. Jobs claims Flash is the number one source of crashes on OS X, and Adobe has done nothing about it. In the mobile device space, Flash doesn't yet support use of hardware acceleration in video decoding, which means massively increased resource usage and thus reduced battery time. Since Adobe lags on these issues, Apple prefers a process they can contribute to and in some sense control, hence open standards in this area of their business. If Adobe had not dropped the ball, Jobs would be happy to use Flash and there'd be no conflict to see.
There are ideographic relationships between concepts and what's in the characters. Each of the elements in complex characters bears some of the meaning of the word. Dictionaries for Chinese and Japanese Kanji are in fact organized in this manner (by character radical). I can't recommend a particular manner of memorizing them (i failed abysmally at the task as a child, and am functionally illiterate as a result), however the relationships are there if you want to look for them.
I also have studied Chinese as a child and Japanese as an adult, neither to a fluent level, and can vouch for the parent's suggestion to look at components during study. That's about half of Heisig's method, which other posters have mentioned, the other half being to not worry about pronunciation until you've first learned the meaning of many characters. (Aside: plenty of people vouch for Heisig, plenty criticise it too; I don't know of any studies showing that it really works, only anecdotes from individuals.)
The only point I'll add is that learning characters is a big memorisation task, and many characters aren't based on strong visual meaning. Don't feel bad about inventing a story to help you remember, even if the story is technically wrong or makes incorrect assumptions about components. Chinese and Japanese teachers make up such stories all the time to teach characters to their students, since as a pure memorisation technique it works.
that's pretty interesting. I'd guess that the phonetic part of japanese (hiragana & katakana) is probably even shallower than spanish tho.
Exactly. It's only the kanji script which makes the Japanese writing system as a whole deep. You take an already deep writing system from one language (Chinese), smush it over the top of an existing spoken language (native Japanese), salt it by borrowing pronunciations from the first language during three or four historic periods (i.e. different dialects), and you get a very weak relationship between the sounds you're saying and the glyphs you're writing, at least compared to other languages.
since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters
so it's sort of like in English then?
You're right on the money. They call the complexity of a writing system's form-sound relationship orthographic depth. English is a deep language, Chinese is deeper, Japanese is deeper still. Spanish on the other hand is orthographically shallow. So it's considered easier to learn to read and write in Spanish, than English, in English than Chinese, in Chinese than Japanese.
Yes, actually that is what they do. I'm from the midwest and in a city (I think it was near Kansas City) they were proposing opening a small (like 1 week) hunting season in this park that was overwhelmed with deer (far beyond the carrying capacity and people kept hitting deer left and right) and they seriously proposed putting birth control or something in the food to stop this overpopulation. And this is in Missouri where the first day of deer season practically is a state holiday! Let alone what the idiots in California are thinking.
In similar situations in Australia, animals (e.g. kangaroos) are simply culled to keep their population down. It's still a bit controversial though. IMHO, animal rights groups don't quite have a coherent take on this, and seem to object to culling on principal. Animals suffer in the wild too though, and if their population is allowed to explode, the amount of suffering will increase as many starve. I'm all for population controls like culling done humanely.
That said, if you could plausibly implement birth control, that would be far more humane. It works in situations where you're the one giving them food to begin with (e.g. pigeons), but I can't see how it be cheap enough to do otherwise.
It only makes sense to take precautions so as to avoid any chance of eliminating your own species. If you're wrong, you spent some money unnecessarily.
Despite catastrophic consequences, I sincerely doubt that humanity would perish if global warming continues unabated. I wouldn't want to live in that world though, and surely a lot of people would suffer or die. However, reducing emissions doesn't come for free either. The cost of being wrong, aside from setting society back a few decades, is to keep another generation or two of third worlders in severe poverty. That's hardly free, so it's good that the science gets appropriately debated. Now I just wish that politics would hurry up and iterate towards the same level of consensus as is there in the science.
Just a few days ago there was a post right here on Slashdot asking how easy it was to cheat in CS. Based on the forum discussions, a significant number of students today get programming degrees and can't produce a lick of decent code.
This has certainly been my experience. I don't know how they graduate, but they do, just, every time. I never heard of someone who didn't graduate because they couldn't code. Somehow they fumble their way through every project and still pass. I'd say maybe 30% of graduates of the degree I'm thinking of could not write a small program correctly in their language of their choice in any reasonable time. That said, employers aren't hiring people who just pass fresh out of uni, so it's not really a problem for the job market. There are also plenty of good, even excellent, programmers who come out of the degree. I'd much prefer to tighten things up though, so the degree itself was worth more.
"The fact that you have 30 years of COBOL experience doesn't help you if you don't learn new technologies."
learning a new language is easy. Learning to program is hard.
c, java, c#, php, perl, are all very much alike. Once you know one learning the rest are easy.
Learning a new language is easy if you commonly take the time to learn a new language and challenge the assumption that your current pet language is best for business. If you have only used two or three languages in 30 years, people might rightly question why you haven't explored your own field more.
What experence teachs you is when you need to use a hash vs a btree.
That's actually what a computer science degree teaches you. Experience would instead help you to see to the core of a new problem, and find that one or two insights which turn a complex problem into a simpler one. It would also help you to manage client expectations, so that even with similar output everyone would be happier.
People may disagree on the monetary costs associated with various outcomes. That does not mean that monetary costs are impossible to assign. In fact, we have to assign costs and benefits to various scenarios in order to judge if one outcome is more beneficial than another. Saying "costs are impossible to assign" is a fancy way of throwing up one's hands and giving up thinking about the problem. If you can't assign costs, how can you judge whether the course of action you've chosen is the best one?
I'm all for reducing the problem to the numbers we can project. Perhaps what I really object to is reducing those numbers further (i.e. human lives lost, suffering increased) to just a single dollar amount. There's a pretty significant value judgement there which is not "objective" economic modelling. Come up with a new measure, call it person-years of poverty, and let's talk about how that measure changes between the two scenarios, (potentially) independently of the other measurable projections.
It certainty of the data depends on the question you're trying to answer. Is the earth warming? Absolutely. We have numerous bits of evidence from ice cores, tree rings, and soil samples that confirm that the earth's climate is warmer now than it was before. Is mankind causing this warming? There is more uncertainty here, but signs are increasingly pointing towards the affirmative.
The real question is, "Does the cost of adaptation outweigh the cost of going carbon free?" Humanity is the most adaptable species on the planet. It may very well be the case that the cost of adapting to climate change outweighs the cost of stopping climate change.
I don't doubt that humans will survive no matter the climate change which occurs. When you talk about comparing cost, we should be clear that there's no monetary value we can put on the possible outcomes. On the one hand, if changing climate patterns mean that species become extinct, arable land is lost, millions don't escape poverty, suffering increases, many die. If we halt climate change, but in doing so slightly increase suffering in first-world countries, reduce resources in third-world countries, millions don't escape poverty, suffering still increases, many die. Let's compare. The third world, hard to say which is better. The first world would probably be better off doing nothing, in terms of limiting suffering and keeping people's standard of living. As for species dying? What price do we assign? It's a question of ideology, of philosophy, the price we put on such things, and thus which is the better course. Let's not pretend otherwise.
Science has answered many of the questions that religion once was used for, but that doesn't mean there are many deep questions to which the scientific method cannot be applied.
Naturally, and there is a deep philosophic tradition which focuses on these questions. I'm deeply suspicious about the "solutions" to these problems chosen by traditional religions. Whilst I agree that in most cases they evolved through argument and popularity over long time periods, they carry far too much arbitrary baggage. Modern philosophy seems better at getting to the core of the idea and discarding the somewhat arbitrary baggage along for the ride.
Your post is about belief, agnosticism and atheism, but you completely mischaracterise all three.
Belief does not require faith, but can be based in reason. I can believe that the sun will rise tomorrow based on the evidence encountered so far in my life. If the evidence changes, I can change my belief. Both agnostics and atheists typically seat their beliefs in reason, rather than requiring faith.
Agnostics take the position that the factual existence or non-existence of a deity (for example the one you believe in) can not be proven either way. This leaves an agnostic free to actually believe whatever they like regarding a deity, knowing that they will never be proven wrong.
Many people who are agnostics do take a "don't know, don't care" attitude as you describe. However, if they base their beliefs on reason and evidence, they are further restricted to positions which seem likely given the evidence, and given principles for interpreting that evidence, in particular Occam's razor, which states that the simplest explanation for evidence is likely to be the correct one.
You argue that atheists are the irrational ones, since they'll never be able to prove their position. However, they don't need to. Just as they have no need to disprove the existence of Russell's teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or any number of potential phenomena. There's infinitely many such phenomena we could think up, each equally likely and equally provable to the deity you profess belief in. The burden is on you my friend to justify your belief, if only to yourself, for without justification your belief is simply irrational.
Atheists are increasingly evangelical (myself included) because religions and the blind faith they feed off can be incredible damaging.
Taking the fruits of your neighbors labor to supply for yourself would be called stealing if it was done directly and without the government as a middle man.
You call it stealing, I call it investment. Even people who come from "nothing" and labor to achieve large "fruits" are not really doing it on their own. They make use of common goods, such as roads, at an least minimally educated labour pool, a relatively stable society, a mostly predictable legal system, and many others.
We have governments take a proportionate share of this investment and redistribute it to us because it's more efficient and because, more than any other arrangement worked out so far, the government can be trusted to take a only a predictable and fair share. Now, we're constantly debating with each other what constitutes this fair share, but our governments are basically doing what we've agreed on so far, and what works.
I get really tired of reading sloppy sound bites about the evil and tyrrany of social democratic systems. How about making actual arguments instead?
This is one area where OS X lags behind. Sure you can zoom, but if you use a 27" or 30" display, the menu is just as small as on a 13" macbook. As much as I love other aspects of Mac usability, I'm still hoping that tomorrow they'll have the same scalability for large displays that windows and linux have today. My parents are getting old now, and they're both finding this particular aspect of computing a problem. After quite a while, I estimate that about 80% of computer issues my mother has are related to her difficulty reading what's on her screen.
Mod parent up. I'd use an editor like TextMate which is highly customisable, and then create some snippets and shortcuts which allow you to type the primitives you need for LaTeX quickly. Another alternative is of course to just type in plain text, and worry about rendering it nicely later. You can then use any symbols you like, and if your prof uses some new notation you can just invent your equivalent quickly on the spot, instead of worrying about how you could type it in LaTeX. Make it pretty later, as a form of revision.
Even if you choose to look at A afterwards, and you originally asked for A to be counted, you still don't know that the machine didn't count your dummy vote B instead as the real one. I don't think that this circumvents the problem. Malicious software could simply flip people's "real vote" from A to B or vice versa, depending on the options involved, and you'd never know.
Government doesn't provide for citizens. It forces some citizens to provide for others.
The citizens who are doing the providing also get substantial benefits from not living in a society ridden by poverty and other social issues, and also from knowing that the safety net they are paying for is also available to them in the worst case. Let's not pretend it's a one way street.
Slashdot Mirror
Goldman Sachs gave Brazil (the "favorite") only a 13% chance of winning the world cup.
The fact that Brazil was eliminated is not at odds with the reports.
Exactly. The editorial comment has the misconception that this form of betting aims to find the winner.
Instead, they are looking for models which better predict to the "true" likelihood of any team winning. These models output a series of probabilities, and the amount of money you can make depends on the disparity between this distribution and that predicted by the current betting odds. You place a family of bets which target this disparity proportionally, and then after a sufficient number of events you'll make money reliably.
If other people start predicing the odds more accurately, you'll find that the disparity between betting odds and your model will narrow, and there'll be less opportunity for you to make money. There are a lot of people doing this sort of thing professionally, since sports betting is supposedly a less efficient market than share trading.
Um, if you're gonna get it tattoo'd, you probably want to go with the more traditional form of: e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0. This single equation shows a relationship between 5 important mathematical constants, as opposed to the other form, which just shows 3 (I don't think -1 qualifies, as i is the more fundamental).
So you tattoo something safe, and then people start using tau instead of pi.
Sure, Pinker's opinion is worth more than comments here, where we're mostly pissing into the wind. There's an underlying problem though, which is that there's no easy way to distinguish the hard-nosed and appropriately qualified opinion of an academic expert from a well thought out but speculative personal opinion, especially in an op-ed piece like this.
The ideal would be a kind of argument tree of claims and evidence which ultimately supports the conclusion at hand, preferably with a wiki-like structure and references to the scientific literature. Something like that backing an op-ed piece would, although being a whole lot more work, let you and me work out how seriously academic X has thought out their position, or whether they too were pissing into the wind.
The fundamental argument they are having is whether or not deep thinkers learn to be deep thinkers or if they are born to be deep thinkers. If thinking deeply is a learned behavior, then Carr may have a good argument. Then you move on to the specifics of whether or not the Internet promotes skimming or thinking deeply (my opinion is it depends greatly on where you go on the internet). If deep thinkers are born that way, then it doesn't matter.
The argument seems more subtle than that. Carr thinks that deep thinking is learned (or at least, promoted) through old methods of media consumption, but that our new methods of consumption are ruining this ability. Pinker also thinks that deep thinking is a learned behaviour, but that it is taught (and learned) in the institutions where it is most needed, in particular in universities.
Pinker's not worried about recent changes, because he's confident that people who need these skills pick them up, and uses increasing success in sciences as evidence that nothing is going too wrong. Carr doesn't believe this evidence is sufficient, since he believes that modern science may not need deep thinking for its advances. That claim seems to severely underestimate the difficulty of doing good science, or even average science, and seems trivially false.
Really though, Carr values "deep thinking" in and of itself, and doesn't care if people who need it can do it. He's worried that the general population as a whole will not be able to think deeply on anything, but instead will become light "skimmers" of information. It seems to me that the ability to skim and critically combine information from multiple sources is incredibly important now, maybe more important than the "deep thinking" Carr promotes.
I definitely side with Pinker here. The skills are always around for those who want or need them. Nothing about our current consumption habits prevents us from learning them or using our self-control and employing them. Carr should be deeply uncomfortable with the amount of information we need to wade through day in day out, and realise that people are just adapting to do the best they can in our modern environment.
Imagine imagine yourself reading the NYT archive from the 1920s and finding "flivver" or "flapper". Now imagine someone in a hundred years reading the archive of the now-current NYT and finding "tweet". Same deal.
He's may be too uptight* about it, but his idea is not completely without merit.
[*: 40 years ago?]
In 100 years, the archive will interactively back up the word tweet with a wealth of information about Twitter and the culture of the times, for those interested. For those not, it will simply paraphrase tweet with something comprehensible to the person reading it, so that they can understand and move on.
I don't think thoughts of future archiving should deter us from using language however we see fit.
Now having RTFA, they are providing a rental scheme which looks quite reasonable, and financial assistance to parents who aren't able to meet even that. Seems very reasonable to me.
Is it really necessarily to require every student to have a laptop in order to learn? Are they saying it's nearly impossible to correctly teach students without this technology?
I went to a privileged school, and when I went to high school years ago they brought out their first laptop policy. In many ways, the laptops were "wasted" for official classes, and it was quickly learned that 95% of classes didn't need or use the laptop. For the other 5%, it was really very useful. The side effect of everyone having laptops was a lot of tinkering by all the students, and that had real benefit too.
Laptop schemes are nothing new. There are two questions in this case: why standardise on MacBooks, and what will they do about the underprivileged kids?
As to why they standardise at all, that's clear. It will save them a lot of support effort. They may also be able to do some bulk deal for all these laptops, instead of families having to purchase them at retail price. Whilst I'd love them to demand laptops running Ubuntu instead, I think choosing Macs is reasonably defensible.
As for underprivileged kids, the school clearly needs a policy where their laptops are subsidised or bought outright. If they do something like this, then far from screwing the poor parents they'll be doing the kids a huge favour, likely giving them access to some tech literacy that only comes from having your own machine you can use night and day. Will they do the right thing? I don't know, but it's far better to focus pressure on this particular issue than on the broader issue of requiring laptops.
The real deal is that the scientific method can never really disprove the existence of God, so there can be no genuine conflict between science and the belief in God.
That's not quite true. Science demands a kind of skepticism in evaluating evidence, and makes heavy use of principles such as Occam's Razor to prune the space of propositions considered realistic given the evidence. Despite not being able to disprove many things, it certainly passes judgement on beliefs about the world which are beyond the minimum required to explain the world around us (e.g. the Flying Spaghetti Monster). The scientific mindset requires us to discard propositions which are spurious and unsupported by concrete evidence. The belief in one or more gods or an afterlife certainly fails to meet standards of evidence; scientific rigour would thus allows as to discard such beliefs. If further evidence can be brought to bear, great! Until then...
Hypocrisy is putting forth a set of philosophical arguments against Flash while performing the exact same business practices that he's decrying.
Jobs doesn't make philosophical arguments against Flash though, he only makes business arguments.
His problem is that Adobe dropped the ball, and are lagging instead of innovating. Jobs claims Flash is the number one source of crashes on OS X, and Adobe has done nothing about it. In the mobile device space, Flash doesn't yet support use of hardware acceleration in video decoding, which means massively increased resource usage and thus reduced battery time. Since Adobe lags on these issues, Apple prefers a process they can contribute to and in some sense control, hence open standards in this area of their business. If Adobe had not dropped the ball, Jobs would be happy to use Flash and there'd be no conflict to see.
There are ideographic relationships between concepts and what's in the characters. Each of the elements in complex characters bears some of the meaning of the word. Dictionaries for Chinese and Japanese Kanji are in fact organized in this manner (by character radical). I can't recommend a particular manner of memorizing them (i failed abysmally at the task as a child, and am functionally illiterate as a result), however the relationships are there if you want to look for them.
I also have studied Chinese as a child and Japanese as an adult, neither to a fluent level, and can vouch for the parent's suggestion to look at components during study. That's about half of Heisig's method, which other posters have mentioned, the other half being to not worry about pronunciation until you've first learned the meaning of many characters. (Aside: plenty of people vouch for Heisig, plenty criticise it too; I don't know of any studies showing that it really works, only anecdotes from individuals.)
The only point I'll add is that learning characters is a big memorisation task, and many characters aren't based on strong visual meaning. Don't feel bad about inventing a story to help you remember, even if the story is technically wrong or makes incorrect assumptions about components. Chinese and Japanese teachers make up such stories all the time to teach characters to their students, since as a pure memorisation technique it works.
that's pretty interesting. I'd guess that the phonetic part of japanese (hiragana & katakana) is probably even shallower than spanish tho.
Exactly. It's only the kanji script which makes the Japanese writing system as a whole deep. You take an already deep writing system from one language (Chinese), smush it over the top of an existing spoken language (native Japanese), salt it by borrowing pronunciations from the first language during three or four historic periods (i.e. different dialects), and you get a very weak relationship between the sounds you're saying and the glyphs you're writing, at least compared to other languages.
Hey, that's what makes Japanese fun =)
since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters
so it's sort of like in English then?
You're right on the money. They call the complexity of a writing system's form-sound relationship orthographic depth. English is a deep language, Chinese is deeper, Japanese is deeper still. Spanish on the other hand is orthographically shallow. So it's considered easier to learn to read and write in Spanish, than English, in English than Chinese, in Chinese than Japanese.
Yes, actually that is what they do. I'm from the midwest and in a city (I think it was near Kansas City) they were proposing opening a small (like 1 week) hunting season in this park that was overwhelmed with deer (far beyond the carrying capacity and people kept hitting deer left and right) and they seriously proposed putting birth control or something in the food to stop this overpopulation. And this is in Missouri where the first day of deer season practically is a state holiday! Let alone what the idiots in California are thinking.
In similar situations in Australia, animals (e.g. kangaroos) are simply culled to keep their population down. It's still a bit controversial though. IMHO, animal rights groups don't quite have a coherent take on this, and seem to object to culling on principal. Animals suffer in the wild too though, and if their population is allowed to explode, the amount of suffering will increase as many starve. I'm all for population controls like culling done humanely.
That said, if you could plausibly implement birth control, that would be far more humane. It works in situations where you're the one giving them food to begin with (e.g. pigeons), but I can't see how it be cheap enough to do otherwise.
It only makes sense to take precautions so as to avoid any chance of eliminating your own species. If you're wrong, you spent some money unnecessarily.
Despite catastrophic consequences, I sincerely doubt that humanity would perish if global warming continues unabated. I wouldn't want to live in that world though, and surely a lot of people would suffer or die. However, reducing emissions doesn't come for free either. The cost of being wrong, aside from setting society back a few decades, is to keep another generation or two of third worlders in severe poverty. That's hardly free, so it's good that the science gets appropriately debated. Now I just wish that politics would hurry up and iterate towards the same level of consensus as is there in the science.
Just a few days ago there was a post right here on Slashdot asking how easy it was to cheat in CS. Based on the forum discussions, a significant number of students today get programming degrees and can't produce a lick of decent code.
This has certainly been my experience. I don't know how they graduate, but they do, just, every time. I never heard of someone who didn't graduate because they couldn't code. Somehow they fumble their way through every project and still pass. I'd say maybe 30% of graduates of the degree I'm thinking of could not write a small program correctly in their language of their choice in any reasonable time. That said, employers aren't hiring people who just pass fresh out of uni, so it's not really a problem for the job market. There are also plenty of good, even excellent, programmers who come out of the degree. I'd much prefer to tighten things up though, so the degree itself was worth more.
"The fact that you have 30 years of COBOL experience doesn't help you if you don't learn new technologies." learning a new language is easy. Learning to program is hard. c, java, c#, php, perl, are all very much alike. Once you know one learning the rest are easy.
Learning a new language is easy if you commonly take the time to learn a new language and challenge the assumption that your current pet language is best for business. If you have only used two or three languages in 30 years, people might rightly question why you haven't explored your own field more.
What experence teachs you is when you need to use a hash vs a btree.
That's actually what a computer science degree teaches you. Experience would instead help you to see to the core of a new problem, and find that one or two insights which turn a complex problem into a simpler one. It would also help you to manage client expectations, so that even with similar output everyone would be happier.
People may disagree on the monetary costs associated with various outcomes. That does not mean that monetary costs are impossible to assign. In fact, we have to assign costs and benefits to various scenarios in order to judge if one outcome is more beneficial than another. Saying "costs are impossible to assign" is a fancy way of throwing up one's hands and giving up thinking about the problem. If you can't assign costs, how can you judge whether the course of action you've chosen is the best one?
I'm all for reducing the problem to the numbers we can project. Perhaps what I really object to is reducing those numbers further (i.e. human lives lost, suffering increased) to just a single dollar amount. There's a pretty significant value judgement there which is not "objective" economic modelling. Come up with a new measure, call it person-years of poverty, and let's talk about how that measure changes between the two scenarios, (potentially) independently of the other measurable projections.
It certainty of the data depends on the question you're trying to answer. Is the earth warming? Absolutely. We have numerous bits of evidence from ice cores, tree rings, and soil samples that confirm that the earth's climate is warmer now than it was before. Is mankind causing this warming? There is more uncertainty here, but signs are increasingly pointing towards the affirmative.
The real question is, "Does the cost of adaptation outweigh the cost of going carbon free?" Humanity is the most adaptable species on the planet. It may very well be the case that the cost of adapting to climate change outweighs the cost of stopping climate change.
I don't doubt that humans will survive no matter the climate change which occurs. When you talk about comparing cost, we should be clear that there's no monetary value we can put on the possible outcomes. On the one hand, if changing climate patterns mean that species become extinct, arable land is lost, millions don't escape poverty, suffering increases, many die. If we halt climate change, but in doing so slightly increase suffering in first-world countries, reduce resources in third-world countries, millions don't escape poverty, suffering still increases, many die. Let's compare. The third world, hard to say which is better. The first world would probably be better off doing nothing, in terms of limiting suffering and keeping people's standard of living. As for species dying? What price do we assign? It's a question of ideology, of philosophy, the price we put on such things, and thus which is the better course. Let's not pretend otherwise.
Science has answered many of the questions that religion once was used for, but that doesn't mean there are many deep questions to which the scientific method cannot be applied.
Naturally, and there is a deep philosophic tradition which focuses on these questions. I'm deeply suspicious about the "solutions" to these problems chosen by traditional religions. Whilst I agree that in most cases they evolved through argument and popularity over long time periods, they carry far too much arbitrary baggage. Modern philosophy seems better at getting to the core of the idea and discarding the somewhat arbitrary baggage along for the ride.
Your post is about belief, agnosticism and atheism, but you completely mischaracterise all three.
Belief does not require faith, but can be based in reason. I can believe that the sun will rise tomorrow based on the evidence encountered so far in my life. If the evidence changes, I can change my belief. Both agnostics and atheists typically seat their beliefs in reason, rather than requiring faith.
Agnostics take the position that the factual existence or non-existence of a deity (for example the one you believe in) can not be proven either way. This leaves an agnostic free to actually believe whatever they like regarding a deity, knowing that they will never be proven wrong.
Many people who are agnostics do take a "don't know, don't care" attitude as you describe. However, if they base their beliefs on reason and evidence, they are further restricted to positions which seem likely given the evidence, and given principles for interpreting that evidence, in particular Occam's razor, which states that the simplest explanation for evidence is likely to be the correct one.
You argue that atheists are the irrational ones, since they'll never be able to prove their position. However, they don't need to. Just as they have no need to disprove the existence of Russell's teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or any number of potential phenomena. There's infinitely many such phenomena we could think up, each equally likely and equally provable to the deity you profess belief in. The burden is on you my friend to justify your belief, if only to yourself, for without justification your belief is simply irrational.
Atheists are increasingly evangelical (myself included) because religions and the blind faith they feed off can be incredible damaging.
Taking the fruits of your neighbors labor to supply for yourself would be called stealing if it was done directly and without the government as a middle man.
You call it stealing, I call it investment. Even people who come from "nothing" and labor to achieve large "fruits" are not really doing it on their own. They make use of common goods, such as roads, at an least minimally educated labour pool, a relatively stable society, a mostly predictable legal system, and many others.
We have governments take a proportionate share of this investment and redistribute it to us because it's more efficient and because, more than any other arrangement worked out so far, the government can be trusted to take a only a predictable and fair share. Now, we're constantly debating with each other what constitutes this fair share, but our governments are basically doing what we've agreed on so far, and what works.
I get really tired of reading sloppy sound bites about the evil and tyrrany of social democratic systems. How about making actual arguments instead?
This is one area where OS X lags behind. Sure you can zoom, but if you use a 27" or 30" display, the menu is just as small as on a 13" macbook. As much as I love other aspects of Mac usability, I'm still hoping that tomorrow they'll have the same scalability for large displays that windows and linux have today. My parents are getting old now, and they're both finding this particular aspect of computing a problem. After quite a while, I estimate that about 80% of computer issues my mother has are related to her difficulty reading what's on her screen.
Mod parent up. I'd use an editor like TextMate which is highly customisable, and then create some snippets and shortcuts which allow you to type the primitives you need for LaTeX quickly. Another alternative is of course to just type in plain text, and worry about rendering it nicely later. You can then use any symbols you like, and if your prof uses some new notation you can just invent your equivalent quickly on the spot, instead of worrying about how you could type it in LaTeX. Make it pretty later, as a form of revision.
Even if you choose to look at A afterwards, and you originally asked for A to be counted, you still don't know that the machine didn't count your dummy vote B instead as the real one. I don't think that this circumvents the problem. Malicious software could simply flip people's "real vote" from A to B or vice versa, depending on the options involved, and you'd never know.
Government doesn't provide for citizens. It forces some citizens to provide for others.
The citizens who are doing the providing also get substantial benefits from not living in a society ridden by poverty and other social issues, and also from knowing that the safety net they are paying for is also available to them in the worst case. Let's not pretend it's a one way street.