bascule

The problems I'm referring to stem from curriculums which center around a single language, particularly when that language is designed to abstract what the programmer is doing away from the underlying concepts. When I say "Java schools," the term could apply just as easily to a program where virtually all concepts are taught in C# (although personally I'd consider C# a better language than Java). It's borrowed from Joel Spoelsky, who describes the problem I'm talking about here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html The university I attended was a Java school through and through. Almost every single class we took used Java as the one and only language option for completing assignments. Things got downright silly when the class in question was something like systems programming. I think it's the duty of a CS program to expose students to a variety of languages. Java certainly isn't the most horrible language in existence and is actually getting a lot better, but in the pantheon of languages it's something of a mid-level grunt work imperative language. It's relatively fast, garbage collected, and generally easy to program in if you don't mind typing lots of boilerplate. But, learning a language like that shouldn't be the be-all and end-all of your CS curriculum. I think in addition to that it's important to learn at least one high level (preferably functional) language, which introduces to you the concepts of lambda expressions / closures (coming soon to Java, I guess), but more importantly functional approaches to problem solving, particularly the map / filter / reduce concepts. MIT teaches Scheme as a freshman course, for example. I think it's also important to learn a low-level natively compiled language, preferably C. Understanding the complete spectrum of languages from Turing to Church is critically important to understanding what programming is all about.

What are you planning on studying? For example, if you plan on studying law, Cambridge is the better choice by far, considering MIT doesn't have a law school

Now if only they hadn't all converted to Java schools to keep from scaring away prospective students...

Guess people got tired of this thread: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=8029 Indeed. Are you an evil scientist who wants to blow up the world? MAKE IT 2012!

Urrrrgh, this troll is back. Can one of the admins please do something? Like, uhh, ban with extreme prejudice?

I've been a fairly avid follower of Penn's style of skeptical libertarianism, rationalism, atheism, and a general aversion to what he and his partner Teller refer to as "Bullshit!" in the eponymous TV show. He's a fellow at the Cato institute, who've been doing some great work lately combating the Bush administration's illegal spying program. I'm a bit concerned about his views on global warming: http://medioh.tv/videos/3750182 Actually, I'm not concerned about his views so much, but more the reasons why he has them. What he's asking for is entirely reasonable: falsifiability and evidence. Science can easily provide this information: averaged multi-decadal trends in global mean surface temperature show a continual increase. If they inexplicably cease to do this for a prolonged period of time, then climate scientists are wrong and need to find a new theory which fits the new evidence. Unfortunately, the information which reaches the general population can't easily relay this, and such factual tidbits tend to get drowned out in the overall noise surrounding the phenomenon. Penn is a rational-minded, skeptical, scientific-thinking person, and I'm sure if he could sit down and have a frank scientific discussion with some climate scientists, he could be convinced otherwise. He attests that he simply does not know the answers, but complains about the uninformative noise he's exposed to. What can be done about this? How can science reporting be improved? My general feeling is that the problem with science reporting is the article is structured around the motivations of the journalist, who typically isn't qualified to understand the material being reported on. Scientists, on the other hand, typically have trouble presenting information in a way that's accessible to the general public as they're generally used to framing their descriptions in such a way that they can withstand the scrutiny of other scientists. Is there anything that can be done? Can scientific knowledge be rendered accessible to Joe Blow while still preserving the objectivity science offers?

That's really the point. Any right/left bickering about the obligation of a society to provide healthcare as a human right can be set aside in the light of the fact that the cost of care for everyone will decrease at the same time you can set aside any worries of being denied critical catastrophic care like an organ transplant. Sure, access to care will be less timely for the affluent, but then again you'll be paying a lot less.

If I understand correctly, you're asking why the reverse of a regular language must be able to match a string whose length is at least two to the power of the number of states of an NFA which describes the original language. If that's true, I'll have to do some research into the reverses of regular languages...

My gut feeling on autism is that there are certain genes which select for different modes of verbal vs. non-verbal communication, particularly in regard to mirror neurons. Just exactly how these genes express themselves depends on what combination you have. Some configurations may work great and produce a genius (albeit a socially inept one) who relies on non-verbal modes of thought as the primary means of formulating complex ideas. Other configurations lead to a situation where a person's modes of thought are completely non-verbal and they are unable to understand either verbal or non-verbal communication of others.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/05/autism.vaccines.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories So to toss some more fuel on the fire of the whole vaccine autism "debate", the US government recently paid out on a case in which it's claimed vaccines caused a disease which influenced the onset of autism. I've felt the whole angle has been completely discredited at this point, but I assume we'll be hearing about this case for quite some time. Meanwhile the parents ignore the real causes of their children's autism: their genes.

I'm a collector of vinyl records, but I'll certainly concede that for the most part CDs provide a higher quality representation of music than does vinyl. However, one of the limiting factors of vinyl, its dynamic range (45dB, about half that of CDs) has also limited how much music can be compressed (acoustically). Compression is normally intended to boost the loudness of quieter sounds, but the CD age has ushered in the "loudness wars", where the massive dynamic range of CDs is exploited to create the loudest music possible. Because vinyl's dynamic range is much lower, vinyl masters tend to be free of this sort of crap. There's also some other arguments for vinyl as well: tape degrades with time whereas vinyl degrades with use, so if you have a relatively clean copy of an old record made from (what was) a fairly recent copy of the master, it can sound better than a CD mastered from a copy of (a copy of a copy of etc) the master tape, which thanks to the lower quality materials available at the time has undergone a lot of degradation. Sure, there's lots of software and equipment to restore whatever copies of the original master remain, and in some cases (MFSL releases) CDs can be mastered from the original master recording. I generally don't buy audiophile arguments that CDs are "colored" or that vinyl is "warmer." They're clearly hearing something differently than I am. Of course, I'm the kind of person who likes an equalizer too...

The people who attacked us are there. They aren't in Iraq. Iraq is a diversion from getting those people. They've certainly taken out high ranking members of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" He says what he means, and in doing so leaves himself wide open for his points to be spun completely out of his favor. It's un-American and unpatriotic not to wear an American flag pin, don't you know.

The way I see it, Obama is trying to make a nuanced point, i.e. we should go after the people who attacked us on 9/11 (in Afghanistan), not some people in Iraq who happen to go by the same name for publicity's sake. And, McCain and posse retort with: the people who attacked us on 9/11 are in Iraq too! But they're not, and you'd have to be f*cking retarded to believe that crock of sh*t. Unfortunately, this message gets lost on mainstream America after years of Bush brainwashing, and meanwhile people accuse Obama of being all charisma and no substance, like our friend Michael Ramirez: But perhaps the reality is: Obama is a man of substance whose points have to be analyzed at a higher level than mainstream political punditry.

Michael Ramirez is my new favorite political cartoonist: As I understand it, Obama wants to go after "Al Qaeda"... in Afghanistan. You know, the people who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. He thinks the war in Iraq has diverted attention from this group. McCain and the conservative blogosphere retort: "But Al Qaeda is already in Iraq lolz! U are teh stupeed" If the BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares" is to be believed, Al Qaeda (bin Laden's loosely organized militant Islamicist organization) assumed the name after US media began reporting that as their name. In other words, they chose the name to fuel media coverage and speculation. That's exactly what "Al Qaeda in Iraq" did. Are you a terrorist cell who wants to get some publicity? Just call yourself Al Qaeda! Instant media coverage. For someone who's opinion is "I want to go after the people who attacked us on 9/11, something Bush hasn't been doing," Obama's sure getting attacked a lot...

Hillary is, but it seems like at this point she's irrelevant

The relevance is America is a period of record credit card debt, not to mention debt in general. Spending is a bad thing for the economy if you're spending on credit. Unfortunately that's something the present Administration doesn't seem to get...

Data corruption isn't a problem. The technique you're describing is known as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), and is used for all sorts of high speed digital transmissions, like high speed fiber optic links, cable modems, cell phones, satellites, and dozens of other applications. QAM is ideal when you have a serial line spanning a long distance, because you can pack a lot more data in than just a simple binary signal. However, where a binary signal can be decoded by a single transistor, the number of components needed to decode QAM is a few orders of magnitude higher. Binary circuits work great because of their simplicity. Transistor-transistor logic (TTL) is all that's needed to implement standard logic gates, and modern manufacturing techniques make it relatively easy to place hundreds of millions of transistors onto a single integrated circuit. Compare this approach to trying to perform bitwise logic operations on QAM-encoded signals. There's just no good way to do it, short of decoding the signal to binary and performing it in parallel.

Depends. In many ways that's preferable to John and Suzie Q. Public financing purchases on credit... and failing to pay for it

I'm a bit unclear on what you're asking (probably because my background is somewhat informal). It's certainly possible for finite regular expressions to define infinite languages, but I don't know if regular languages must inherently be defined by a finite regular expression. Any regular expression which has an underlying pattern should be expressible through the Kleene star operators * and +. If the regular expression is infinite and has no pattern, I don't think it's possible to decide whether a given string exists within the language.

The biggest reason why we don't use analog computers is the immense challenges of both designing and programming an analog computer. Analog computers operate on continuous data streams, which is more like a river of information, whereas digital computers operate on discrete data streams, which are more like cars driving on a road. It's much easier for us to reason about the behavior of cars: we can break down the problem and examine each car individually to determine its behavior. In an analog system, we can only examine how the data evolves. Unlike cars, you can't examine a "piece" of a river and see how it behaves independently of the rest of the system. Far and away, humans reason about programming in an imperative manner, which relies on pushing discrete chunks of data around. Functional languages are much better suited for operating on analog data streams, but then there's the problem of actually executing the program. How do you compile a context-free program to run on an analog computer? A compromise between analog and digital has perhaps been struck with SIMD units. These exist in many forms, such as SSE on Intel/AMD chips, AltiVec on PowerPC, and many types of DSPs, including the "SPEs" on the PlayStation 3's Cell processor. These units are primarily designed to work on continuous data sets which have been sampled into discrete chunks, applying particular transforms in parallel. This gets you many of the supposed theoretical benefits of analog computers while still retaining a discrete, digital control structure.

Some perspective: A recession is: "a decline in a country's gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters of a year." I don't have data about the GDP for Q1 2008 to date, but given what I'm hearing I'm assuming it's negative. Here's the latest data: http://www.bea.gov/briefrm/gdp.htm This shows growth of the GDP in decline for Q4 2007, but it's still positive. We won't know if we're in a bona fide recession until the end of Q2 2008.

I think it's pretty clear I'm passionate about Iraq. However just a few months ago there were murmurs about hostilities and potential armed conflict in the Balkans. A peaceful resolution (through continued balkanization!) is always welcome.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j057jBReERcsF-FcZRSWe0h1gaXQD8V3ICFO5 Despite economists warnings to the contrary, Bush says the US just in a slowdown, not headed towards recession. What do you think? Is the US headed towards recession?

I personally consider peer review integral to rational, evidence-based thinking. In that regard facts and contrary arguments will certainly get in the way of creativity, but isn't that a good thing?

Now compare to the traditional oil refinement process and the Otto engine