Comment Re:Inspiration. The suicide of one's online self. (Score 1) 89
It's not often I genuinely laugh out loud at a comment, so I congratulate you heartily on making me do so!
Comment Re:This morning? (Score 1) 1613
You must be new here. This is standard Slashdot obituary wording. Ask Stephen King and he'll explain.
Comment Finland's success is understood but not emulated (Score 1) 614
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland is well worth a read. Politicians running education systems often want to find out how the likes of Finland do so well, but they ask the questions (going on fact-finding missions etc) and then don't like the answers they get back.
Here in the UK the drive in schools for years now has been towards pitiless onslaughts of standardised national testing at all levels, and league tables and measurement everywhere you look. It is the exact opposite of letting children learn and grow in idiosyncratic ways without pressure for them to 'acquire key skills' and essentially tick the boxes the government wants ticking. This is all driven by the business imperative to turn education into training for jobs rather than anything about nurturing well-rounded, inquisitive, open-minded, moral human beings, and is combined with some ill-informed tabloid crap about how kids these days don't respect their elders, blah blah blah.
Politicians see that the country's schools are some way down the league tables, look across the water to Finland, refuse to believe what they hear about no high-pressure exams until the end of school, teachers being respected instead of turned into drones, and so they go ahead and implement the exact opposite.
Comment General computer illiteracy (Score 1) 247
Just as most people are unaware of widespread keyboard shortcuts, think the blue 'e' is the Internet, and confuse RAM with hard disk space (emptying the recycle bin if their computers slow down with a bazillion browser tabs open), so are most users ignorant of text files and text editors and believe that if you want to write something down, you need a word processor.
This is the mentality that leads to people sending out emails with subject lines like "PLEASE READ", body text consisting of something like "See attached" and the actual content in a bloated and superfluous
The only formal education in computing I received at school consisted of things like how to make words underlined in, you guessed it, Microsoft Word, so it is no wonder the average hospital employee believes they need expensive proprietary software to perform trivial computing tasks.
Comment Re:Royal Army? (Score 1) 59
While technically correct, the recruitment posters have ra.mod.uk on them, not ba.mod.uk (which doesn't redirect to anything) or army.mod.uk (their actual website). So if they advertising as such, I don't think they mind too much when people get it wrong. Also, a couple of individual sections are called as such, like the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Royal Army Veterinary Corps.
Well I just pointed my browser to ra.mod.uk and it took me to the website of the Royal Artillery, which is a set of regiments in the Army, not the entire Army.
Comment Re:Honestly... (Score 3, Interesting) 59
It's been heartening to see the increased recognition the computing pioneers at Bletchley Park have received over the last few years, after being neglected for decades. Gordon Brown's posthumous apology to Alan Turing for the persecution he received for his sexuality was a great moment. Most people have never heard of Turing but he deserves recognition. They ought to put his face on a banknote or something. About three years ago when I was at university a guy visited from Bletchley Park to give a talk on the work that was done there, and he brought with him a genuine Enigma machine and demonstrated its operation. Fascinating stuff.
Comment Re:It can't be said for sure (Score 1) 283
Much as I dislike Facebook, I've been reluctant to move to Google+ because I don't really want my email and my social networking to be done by the same company. It's one thing for Google to know loads about me based on my email behaviour and Facebook to know loads about me based on my posts and friends and so on, but to have all this tied together in one account is even greater cause for concern about privacy.
Submission + - Cryptic codes in Oslo-terrorist manifest (no.net)
repvik writes: The 1500 page manifest of terrorist that killed 77 people in Oslo and on Utøya two weeks ago, contains a series of seemingly encrypted URLs. There are 46 of them, and the initial part of the URLs appear to be GPS coordinates. An effort to analyze the codes have been launched.
Submission + - UK's voicemail security flaws were (bbc.co.uk)
kuiperbelt writes: Britain's long-running phone-hacking scandal could have been averted years ago, says the man who went to the papers and the police in 1999 after he became concerned about the remote access exploit that made tabloid newspapers' phone hacking possible. Salesman Steven Nott aimed to get phone companies to close the backdoor by going public, but nothing was done despite prescient warnings of the later controversy. Nott informed the phone companies, but they appeared uninterested. He went to the press, but they used the exploit themselves instead of reporting on it. Journalists and private investigators gained access to targets' voicemail messages by taking advantage of the default PINs that secured a remote access service most phone users were not even aware of.
Submission + - 10 Countries With Highest Illiteracy Rate (gizmocrazed.com)
Mightee writes: "The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines literacy as:
The ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.
UNESCO is being involved in providing global education to all the countries of the world. But sadly numerous developing countries are at loss in this field of education. There literacy rates show appalling condition of education which has a direct affect on infrastructure, economy and development of the country. This determines the main reason of the slow rate of progress in the Top 10 following lowest states in literacy with an increased rate of disharmony and chaos in the total administrative setup."
The ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.
UNESCO is being involved in providing global education to all the countries of the world. But sadly numerous developing countries are at loss in this field of education. There literacy rates show appalling condition of education which has a direct affect on infrastructure, economy and development of the country. This determines the main reason of the slow rate of progress in the Top 10 following lowest states in literacy with an increased rate of disharmony and chaos in the total administrative setup."
Submission + - The Mathematics of Lawn Mowing 4
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "I enjoy mowing my six acre lawn with my John Deere 757 zero-turn every week and over the course of the last five years of mowing I have come up with my own most efficient method of getting the job done which takes me about three hours. While completing my task this morning, I decided after I finished to research the subject to discover if there is a method for determining the most efficient path for mowing and found that Australians Bunkard Polster and Marty Ross wrote last summer about an elegant mathematical presentation of the problem of mowing an irregularly shaped area as efficiently as possible. First we simplify our golf course mowing problem by covering the course with an array of circles with each circle radius equal to the width of the mower disc. Connecting the centers of the circles produces an equilateral triangular grid, with vertices at the circle centers. Following a path consisting of grid edges, there will necessarily be a fair amount of overlap so the statement of the problem is to minimize the overlap by minimizing the number of vertices that are visited more than once which Polster and Ross say is easily achieved by well-known computer search algorithms. Any other tips from slashdot readers?"
Comment Re:GO GERMANS (Score 4, Informative) 278
Countries in Germany, eh? Which ones would those be exactly?
Parent almost certainly means the states of the federal republic (Länder). The word "Land" in German can translate as "country" or "state".
Comment Re:It speaks volumes that we all believed it (Score 1) 185
From the BBC article on this:
The BBC sought alternative views for the original story, including Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University's Statistical Laboratory, who said: "I believe these figures are implausibly low - and an insult to IE users."
And I agree. No way will measuring the IQs of a large number of people using a very widespread, mainstream web browser produce an average anywhere near 80. My prediction: average user IQs of all browsers with more than a few per cent market share will be within a few points of each other. No way will you get figures like 80 and 120.
