I've fantasized with asking my students to use a VCS to submit their code as it gets written. Of course, in Computer Science, this would be educational beyond the "controlling their times" sense. And could be used as a collaboration tool within each student team.

The only thing keeping me back is the maintenance headache.I would have to setup accounts for each student, and build the initial projects, too; yes, this can be partially automated. And the extra burden of explaining how to use the system (they only learn about VCSs, in an abstract way, in their 7th semester...)

[tongue-in-cheek] You are totally correct. We should trust people entirely. I say, do not even read student essays, just ask them what mark they deserve. Actually *reading* the essays would reveal a blatant lack of trust. [/tongue-in-cheek]

Never mind experience, never mind the fact that dishonesty tends to spread if rules are not enforced (as initially-honest persons may decide that they too are entitled to the personal benefits of dishonesty, even if the community starts to rot). A rotten community is *not* where you want to study or teach.

Academic achievement is not only personal growth. It has a very real meaning in the job market. Handing out diplomas to people who have weaseled their way through the system can only discredit the institution that issued those diplomas, and by extension, anybody holding them, even if they were honest.

I would have more patience with academic dishonesty if the only problem was students cheating themselves. But the whole system suffers when plagiarism goes undetected.

Manually signing things is cumbersome because (a) you have to be within arm's reach of the signature's destination, and (b) because it takes a certain amount of time to sign each paper.

These folks seem to have a (complex) system to create signatures remotely, addressing (a). If you record and play back what comes into the signing machine, you would also have (b) - at the expense of an even greater security headache. I really hope they are keeping the connection encrypted. And kudos to them on account of imitating fine manipulation.

But signatures as authentication are more than flawed. Only a specialist can distinguish between a valid signature and a forgery of any quality, and there are few specialists. About the only saving grace of signatures is that they are low on technology - anyone can sign, and anyone can "low-leve-verify" a signature.

If you are going to use a machine and a secure communications channel for identification -- use cryptography.

Also, if whatever the machine signs in your name is going to be legally binding, you had better be very sure that the machine is signing what they tell you that it is signing. I can imagine all types of mischief with blank checks instead of "book covers". An advantage of being (a) within arm's reach of something is that you can easily examine what it is that you are signing.

Great comment, should be up-modded.

On the other hand, you forgot to account for sail array maintenance costs, additional crew training, and the extra risk of sail failure in the event of harsh weather - not that I have much of an idea of sailing, but the investment is not completely risk-free. Most container ships don't have sails on them, and diesel engine expertise is much more widely found than sail array expertise; this makes maintenance harder that it could be.

There is bound to be a first-mover risk (as well as rewards) to the venture.

I disagree about math in general. Proving theorems requires a lot of creative thinking. You may be thinking about good old canned integration formula substitution; but there are parts of math that are every bit as challenging as writing clever code.

On the other hand, few get to the interesting part of maths, or to the interesting parts of history (when you learn that there is only rough consensus on certain events, but very little certainty), or have teachers that are willing to explain that much of what we currently "know" about the world around us is still open to new answers.

Too many teachers treat their textbooks as the Holy Writ, and fail at stimulating curiosity and critical thought. Teaching the experiments is nice, because it allows you to get a glimpse at the long sequence of stumbles that have lead to present science. I would love to lay my hands on an "introductory physics" textbook of a few hundred years in the future.

No, not at all. Economy, understood as "interchange of goods and services" is certainly not zero-sum. There can be many levels of dynamic equilibrium, and it is both possible to have almost everybody be poor (have a look at the history books - they were human back then too) and to have almost everybody live in abundance -- with identical inputs in terms of people involved and natural resources tapped.

Certain things multiply the efficiency of an economy, and benefit all involved. Technology, for instance, allows a lot of physical labor to be avoided. A working justice and health system allow economic actors greater confidence in the safety of their investments and their persons, and results in more economic actions (instead of hoarding assets for an uncertain future).

Economy is not (only) about money. There was economy before money. Money is only a very useful mechanism to exchange goods and services efficiently, and a handy measuring rod -- even it its length changes constantly.

You write that "The science shows that free markets cause peace", and that lack of economic freedom causes both poverty and war. But correlation is not causation.

I can also argue that poverty and war cause lack of economic freedom: poverty can be seen as a lack of property (or means to acquire it), and there can't be much of a free economy, without circulation of property and means. War destroys civilian lives, property and freedoms, and results in poverty for those involved. Not exactly the recipe for a free economy.

Or you can conclude that free markets, individual freedoms and peace are all positively interrelated. I have the hope that China will need to embrace political freedoms as its markets grow, if only because lack of these freedoms results in a suboptimal economy: free press and political accountability are the only way to stem corruption and reward good risk-taking.

Sure, Java has a great security model and will not cause buffer overflows. But you have to write it in (duh) Java.

The fun part about NaCL is that it can eat existing (C, C++, pick-your-own compiled language) code with only minor modifications to the compile chain, as long as that code does not make weird system calls. Just make sure that the compiler does not echo any of the 'forbidden' instructions, aligns jumps to 32-bit boundaries, and uses the prescribed instruction sequences for jumps and system calls. And they provide modified versions of GCC that do just that. The paper also says that, in their experience, modification of most programs they tried was, at most, a problem of "a few hours".

If I had to port an existing app to run as a sort of browser plugin, guess what sounds better: a full rewrite in Java, or a few changes to the Makefile. Because *that* is the selling point of NaCL.

Not an expert in biology, but unless these contaminated areas have been contaminated for a very long time (read tens of thousands of years), and are quite large, the chances for life to have sprung up seem very, very slim. Current life needed millions of years to gain a firm foothold and start building up complexity. Lucky meteorites aside, starting from zero is bound to be hard.

If the experiment succeeds (here or elsewhere), and something "life-ish" is found, the results will still be tricky to classify. Can a given chemistry lead to increasing complexity, or is it just a dead end? Without hindsight, this seems like a very difficult question.

Not another branded "national OS" flavour of Linux.

You can turn that around, and say that without freedoms, safety is worth very little. Identity theft and computer hacks could be stopped on their tracks by restricting the 'net to a whitelist of "licensed" sites, outlawing anonymous access, and mandating logs of all traffic for careful inspection by "authorities". Would you advocate such a design?

So much for extreme examples.

So, in your humble opinion, science publishing should continue essentially as it is, perhaps with a shift towards open publishing. And the current 'science accounting' methods (adding up citation sum-totals, relying on journal weights, or combining both) are perfectly adequate. And there the pressure from these flawless accounting systems does not drive scientists to publish un-matured, partial results in a frenzy to score more papers than their peers.

No, I do not have a silver bullet, and yes, the system sort-of, kind-of works. But I am sure that it can be improved. Funding depends very heavily on accounting.

A social network, if divorced from editors and anonymous reviewers, may not be so bad as you paint it. I, for one, would not mind to see rated and commented papers...

When building its databases, Google does not treat all links as equal. You have the 'rel=nofollow' link attribute to indicate that you don't want to attribute trust to the destination of the link, and Google can discount link weight based on the outgoing anchor text.

I would be very interested in seeing that done in scientific publications. As you said, notability can come in many flavors, and they are not equally yummy.

Citing a paper does not necessarily mean endorsement for its contents. Only that the paper you are referencing was relevant to a part of your discussion. References can be used to provide counter-examples or denounce bad research; but they are counted as a citation anyway. In scientific citation number-crunching, any publicity is good publicity.

A crazy idea would be to add metadata to references, describing the type and relative importance of the source. That would make 'paper A, main inspiration, very important' actually count more than 'paper B, cited in an off-hand comment to exemplify bad research in this field'. The crazy part is changing the established format of scientific papers to accomodate this metadata, standarizing the metadata, and convincing authors to adhere to standards and editors to enforce them.

Placing landmarks on a one-dimensional scale is a poor way of defining political thought. Additionally, if you ask a random sample for their definitions of 'left' and 'right' there would be little consensus. Trivia: 'left' and 'right' come from seating arrangements in the french parliament. The scale is not only one-dimensional: there is no consensus on the exact dimension.

Defining individualism and colletivism, beyond the extremes (cave or hive), is also quite hard. Would social solidarity count as collectivism? Is an active voice in political matters a signal of individualism (by adding liberty), or collectivism (by collaborating with the government)?