This is indeed the problem I see teaching introductory physics at a small college: students are smart, students are hard-working, but they don't have either the technical or study skills they need.

If there were better prepared in STEM fields, they wouldn't have as far to catch up in their first year, and so the "death march" would be substantially easier.

If they were better prepared to be challenged, to accept intellectual problems of much larger magnitude than they have seen before, then they would also be OK. They would know how use their hard work instead of revving in neutral, madly reading and re-reading textbooks they don't understand.

There are lots of things we can do to teach better, but all of those things require time, in class and out. We can't just 'make time' to do them: that would leave an undergraduate student without a complete education. (For example: we could cover only half of the topics on the MCAT, so future doctors would need to take twice as long learning science requirements, delaying their medical school by years and driving up their debt load.)

So, it took them 1 week to come out with an update to patch their browser? That doesn't seem an egregious delay to me. I haven't yet patched any of my other browsers yet. I'd be surprised if most users patch within the week of bugfix releases anyway.

And if I understand it, this "security hole" is basically that you won't get bad-certificate warnings if you visit certain fraudulent sites... which isn't likely to happen unless you're clicking links in phishing emails.

This hyperbole about apple being slow seems like hot air to me.

Apparently my cheap-ass university doesn't have download rights to the original article in Neuroscience, but my guess is that the weak point is in the paper-and-pencil questionarre. The problem is that they aren't asking people how often they get distracted... they're asking people how often they _remember_ getting distracted.

An equally valid hypothesis is that big-brained people remember getting distracted more than small-brained people.

Again, I haven't RTFA so maybe they deal with it. They talk about inheritability of the 'distraction' scores, but that just means that it's something either genetic or social. In fact, there could instead be a correlation between 'big brained' and 'more honest'.

The only power of theoretical models is in making predictions. If I can can consistently predict the outcome of a set of experiments, you can trust that my theories are not wrong. You can never prove a theory right, of course. But you can throw so many tests at it that you can be sure that it's not completely wrong - and any contradictory evidence that comes forward will only modify your theory, not expunge it.

You don't have to understand wave mechanics to believe that it works. You can ask a theorist to predict what happens when you put two slits in front of a laser. They make a prediction, and then you see it. You don't even need to see it yourself. You can trust people whose job it is to look at things, just as you trust that books and newspapers haven't invented whole continents out of fantasy.

We can make transistors. We can make them very well. This shows we understand the principles of transistor-making, which we call quantum mechanics.

This is either stupid or a troll - yet another attempt to build a false equivalency between proven methods of finding out the truth, and unproven magical thinking.

Unless you want to wait a few millennia for alpha decay to replenish our supply, there simply won't be anything like this... at least not for more than a few years. We are foolishly squandering our remaining supply.

http://www.livescience.com/technology/helium-reserve-shortage-expensive-party-balloons-100823.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Livesciencecom+(LiveScience.com+Science+Headline+Feed)

I'm rather fond of the low-end Tek scopes. The LCD screen is a little slow, and there's only 2 channels, but these are not huge limitations for most basic work. I use these teaching physics and intro electronics to undergraduates - they're easy to use, lightweight, and can store data through USB or pen drives. 100 MHz for about $1200, which is OK for general use.

I have done this from Beijing and it worked the week I was there.

FoxyProxy is a nice add-on to use for this, since it allows you to either whitelist specific sites for use through the proxy, or to simply switch back and forth to the proxy as you need.

There's already a better method, which doesn't kill liquidity (as some have suggested below)... simply put a microtax on all stock transactions of less than a percent.

Even this super-AI is going to make mistakes - it's profit margin is not likely to be large on the _average_ transaction, to microtaxes like this will keep this sort of activity to a minimum. Lots of people have suggested such a tax.
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/56789-afl-cio-dems-push-new-wall-street-tax

Basically: this sort of transaction does NOTHING for the economy except leech money from the people that actually produce things. Wall Street, as a whole, has a purpose: allocation of capital to build the economy. But there's no reason that people working on Wall Street should make more money than other facilitators or utiilities of our system, like payroll accountants or garbage collectors. The only reason they do is because we let them.

Yes.. for people. But not necessarily for organizations.

Of course, making such a distinction will require reversing a very old (and recently reinforced) precedent in US law, where organizations have personhood. Probably requiring an amendment. So it won't happen.

Agg
Seriously? Keep your notes in a book or some other time-ordered form. Pretty fast to flip through, find things before and after the stuff in question. Basic indexing (putting a two-letter abbreviation at the top of each page by topic) makes it even easier.

The human eye is remarkably good at picking out visual subject material. If I've read a pure-text book, I can usually flip to a section I remember faster than using the index. Pure computer-based searches are useful mainly in contexts where you _haven't_ read the source material before, but that's not the application we're discussing here.

I'm sorry, but is the submitter fscking insane? I rely heavily on handwritten notes all the time. So does every college student and scientist that I know. Note that I'm talking about extremely tech-savvy people here, who often DO own an iPhone... but they are fundamentally useless for taking notes.

Taking notes, of course, is not the only writing one does, but it's a pretty important thing. Writing serves a a communication medium to others, but equally serves as expansion of short- and long-term memory for ourselves. I have yet to meet any GUI interface that has the flexibility of a pad of paper:

- Effortless data entry.
- Figures, mathematics or other non-ASCII input are faster than any other technique (and likely to remain so)
- No learning curve (for people past 6th grade)
- Bookmarking, fast page finding.
- No limit to page-space viewable at one time
  -Needs no recharging, syncing
- Not a target for theft
- Light and comfortable in the hand
- Cheap, reliable components
- Easily backed up by photocopier or scanner

The only downside, for me, is it's a little slow for pure-text entry, and it's sometimes hard to read by own sloppy writing. But that's just user skill, not the fault of the technology.

This is my own personal pet peeve.

And don't give me the 'language is evolving' line. This isn't about language evolving, it's about the users of the language devolving.

It's perfectly acceptable to say that it 'raises the question 'or 'asks the question' or 'slams its fists on the table demanding an answer to the question' but begging the question means to simply re-ask the question. You never want to beg the question. The question will tell you to go get a job, hippie.

---Nathaniel, shouldn't drink beer before posting.

Always a classic screw-up.

Lessee.. google up 'binomial distribution' with n=16 and m=5 and...

Yup, if we take the null hypothesis that no one could tell the difference, there's a 6% chance of null hypothesis giving this result. This isn't a study, it's some gossip. No meaningful statement can be made, other than 'it's pretty clear that the lower bitrate isn't likely to be PREFERABLE' which is not much of a conclusion.