As a historian of science myself, alarm bells went off immediately at the `anticipated the Scientific Revolution' line. The actual claim in the paper was the Plato was a Pythagorean, not that he had secretly already achieved the chief scientific insights of the 17th century. Sounds a lot more sensible in that light, and I don't know what to make of the thought that the paper needed to be dressed up with the sort of claim few serious historians would make. Kennedy's "non-expert" description on his Manchester webpage does a nice job of explaining why his finding is interesting without resorting to such tactics.
No one here meant this in a derogatory way,...There's no need to turn this into a gender war or a political crusade, it was a funny innocent joke, let's leave it at that:)
I certainly believe it was an innocent joke without derogatory intent, and I absolutely don't want to make this a "gender war". My point was that everyone makes innocent jokes (us, our significant others, random/.ers), but it can be valuable to point out that even innocent jokes can be unsavory to some. More to the point, they tend to be unsavory mainly to people who aren't in on the discussion, often precisely the same people most of us would want to be a part of what we do because they might have something new to contribute.
Thanks for taking my earlier comment in the spirit of a helpful observation. It's easier to be mindful of what we're doing when people on all sides are being relatively sane.
Yeah, I'm hoping I can adapt this patch to my wife's integers too.
You don't need to, there's a patch available today!
I believe another patch that fixes the same problem is implemented in wife-menopause-1.0.55.
I know you (and the others making menstruation jokes) are just trying to be funny, and you probably are to a lot of people reading this thread, but writing about women as computers with buggy code isn't exactly the best way to show them your respect. I wonder how many people connect comments like this to the threads that pop up from time to time wondering why there are so few women programmers and computer scientists?
One reason lower quality playback often sounds better is it smooths out some of the shortcomings in the original recording. A lot of people prefer lo-def for casual listening because the most authentic sound isn't always the easiest on the ears.
NYT article on this a while back, but couldn't find it immediately...
As the subject of this reply suggests, Cornell is also getting in the robot game, although I don't think they're collaborating with MSFT in the effort. In fact, I'm signed up for the course right now. The idea had the full endorsement of the campus's top computer science pedagogue, and here's how my advisor explained it to me (I'm a math major):
The point of an intro computer science class is to teach you how to write clean programs, independent of what language you're working in. Languages are relatively easy to learn. How to not write "spaghetti code" is not. It doesn't really matter what you're programming, be it java or aibo (Sony's robot dogs), so long as it has a computer's logical structure and you learn how to use it effectively.
Also, many people underestimate just how much of a challenge many robotics programming tasks can be, and how relevant they are to emerging computer scientists. I've seen talks on uses of de Bruijn (forgive spelling) sequences for position recognition, and lectures on genetic algorithms for getting robots to perform complicated task. Someone tell me that these ideas are too simple or irrelevant, and I'll show you hordes of computer science professors who disagree.
Most Schools Already (Fail To) Do This Already
on
No Space for MySpace?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The vast majority of high schools and elementary schools in the US (i.e. those with funding to hire someone who knows how to use the internet) already do extensive blocking of this sort of material. The problem is that with proxy sites and other work-arounds this legislation will be no more effective than the policies which are already in place. The flip side is that those teachers who have found innovative ways to use blogging, wiki-ing, and other interactive web media in their teaching won't just be able to go to local officials to clear ideas.
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As a historian of science myself, alarm bells went off immediately at the `anticipated the Scientific Revolution' line. The actual claim in the paper was the Plato was a Pythagorean, not that he had secretly already achieved the chief scientific insights of the 17th century. Sounds a lot more sensible in that light, and I don't know what to make of the thought that the paper needed to be dressed up with the sort of claim few serious historians would make. Kennedy's "non-expert" description on his Manchester webpage does a nice job of explaining why his finding is interesting without resorting to such tactics.
No one here meant this in a derogatory way,...There's no need to turn this into a gender war or a political crusade, it was a funny innocent joke, let's leave it at that :)
I certainly believe it was an innocent joke without derogatory intent, and I absolutely don't want to make this a "gender war". My point was that everyone makes innocent jokes (us, our significant others, random /.ers), but it can be valuable to point out that even innocent jokes can be unsavory to some. More to the point, they tend to be unsavory mainly to people who aren't in on the discussion, often precisely the same people most of us would want to be a part of what we do because they might have something new to contribute.
Thanks for taking my earlier comment in the spirit of a helpful observation. It's easier to be mindful of what we're doing when people on all sides are being relatively sane.
Yeah, I'm hoping I can adapt this patch to my wife's integers too.
You don't need to, there's a patch available today!
I believe another patch that fixes the same problem is implemented in wife-menopause-1.0.55.
I know you (and the others making menstruation jokes) are just trying to be funny, and you probably are to a lot of people reading this thread, but writing about women as computers with buggy code isn't exactly the best way to show them your respect. I wonder how many people connect comments like this to the threads that pop up from time to time wondering why there are so few women programmers and computer scientists?
One reason lower quality playback often sounds better is it smooths out some of the shortcomings in the original recording. A lot of people prefer lo-def for casual listening because the most authentic sound isn't always the easiest on the ears. NYT article on this a while back, but couldn't find it immediately...
As the subject of this reply suggests, Cornell is also getting in the robot game, although I don't think they're collaborating with MSFT in the effort. In fact, I'm signed up for the course right now. The idea had the full endorsement of the campus's top computer science pedagogue, and here's how my advisor explained it to me (I'm a math major): The point of an intro computer science class is to teach you how to write clean programs, independent of what language you're working in. Languages are relatively easy to learn. How to not write "spaghetti code" is not. It doesn't really matter what you're programming, be it java or aibo (Sony's robot dogs), so long as it has a computer's logical structure and you learn how to use it effectively. Also, many people underestimate just how much of a challenge many robotics programming tasks can be, and how relevant they are to emerging computer scientists. I've seen talks on uses of de Bruijn (forgive spelling) sequences for position recognition, and lectures on genetic algorithms for getting robots to perform complicated task. Someone tell me that these ideas are too simple or irrelevant, and I'll show you hordes of computer science professors who disagree.
The vast majority of high schools and elementary schools in the US (i.e. those with funding to hire someone who knows how to use the internet) already do extensive blocking of this sort of material. The problem is that with proxy sites and other work-arounds this legislation will be no more effective than the policies which are already in place. The flip side is that those teachers who have found innovative ways to use blogging, wiki-ing, and other interactive web media in their teaching won't just be able to go to local officials to clear ideas.