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Comment Not even a little surprising to me. (Score 3, Interesting) 116

40 years ago or so, I taught those same remedial classes to freshmen students at a large Midwestern land-grant 4-year university. The only reason my pass rate was higher than 44% was because I felt sorry for the kids. I was then, and am now still considered a good instructor. Most of those students had no business being in college in the first place, and I could tell that few if any would finish regardless of how I graded them. Remember, these are students who were unable to pass the basic requirements coming out of high school. Not representative of the population as a whole. I suspect the "online-edness" of these classes has very little to do with it.
Earth

Scientific Literacy vs. Concern Over Climate Change 545

New submitter gmfeier writes "An interesting study reported in Nature Climate Change indicates that concern over climate change did not correlate with scientific literacy nearly as much as with cultural polarization. Quoting: 'For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions. Even if cultural cognition serves the personal interests of individuals, this form of reasoning can have a highly negative impact on collective decision making. What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments. As a result, if beliefs about a societal risk such as climate change come to bear meanings congenial to some cultural outlooks but hostile to others, individuals motivated to adopt culturally congruent risk perceptions will fail to converge, or at least fail to converge as rapidly as they should, on scientific information essential to their common interests in health and prosperity. Although it is effectively costless for any individual to form a perception of climate-change risk that is wrong but culturally congenial, it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way.'"

Comment Not soon (Score 1) 417

Management may think they're going to make the switch, but when it comes to actually doing it, it'll prove to cost more in terms of effort than they'll save on licensing. There's a hell of a lot more to VMWare than just the virtualization of servers, and it doesn't take a propeller-head to effectively use the tools. Can the same be said of the alternatives?

Comment Re:Oh For Chrissakes (Score 1) 466

I find it amusing that some people think that a nation's defense research organisation, which helps build ICBMs, supersonic aircraft, tactical software and so on, needs advice from someone who reading slashdot on how to write an operating system.

Eh? It's their history in such areas that convinced me they could screw up Water Soup with a recipe from Alton Brown.

Google

Submission + - Interesting data from the YouTube outage (techworld.com)

superapecommando writes: YouTube continues to fascinate people, even when nobody is able to watch it.
A revealing data nugget has turned up from the Internet department of Arbor Networks on the effect (or lack of it) of yesterday’s well-publicised YouTube ‘outage’.
The interruption was relatively brief — perhaps an hour and a half — which turns out to correspond to a measurable drop in Google Internet traffic seen by the company across a random sample of 50 small and mid-size ISPs spread across the world.

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