> However, he admits the plan is not without its difficulties: "There are other problems, of course. Winston is vulnerable to the weather and predators such as hawks. Obviously he will have to take his chances but we're confident this system can work for us,' says Rolfe.
They might need to retransmit once or twice a month too . . .
"Among the activities the government initially suggested for prekindergarten to sixth-grade students: that they 'write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.' Another task recommended for students immediately after listening to the speech: to engage in a discussion about what 'the president wants us to do.'"
The speech as they released it Monday is a great one that I'd want my kids to hear. But because of the information about the assignments we had before hand, I wouldn't have thought it would be a good speech last week.
I'm not American, but I don't see anything particularly wrong with either of these assignments you mention. It kind of falls along the lines of the JFK speech "Don’t ask what your country can do for you. Ask instead what you can do for your country" in the first example.
Just because it specifically says the "president" shouldn't be a detractor in this regard considering the president is generally considered to be the leader of your country.
Also considering these lesson plans are written with regard to prekindergarten to 6th graders. I would imagine keeping the language in this simple way keeps the message clear for the children.
> Just because it specifically says the "president" shouldn't be a detractor in this regard considering the president is generally considered to be the leader of your country.
Actually, it should be "a detractor" because "the leader of your country" in the US is both extremely transient and somewhat weak.
This cultural difference is communicated in a standard American story. This story involves a non-American who is looking for the boss/owner. He comes across someone who is clearly a worker and asks "please tell me where to find your master". The worker says "that person hasn't been born yet".
In short, "do for president" and "do for country" are very different things in the US.
It's okay if non-Americans don't understand, but don't lecture us on how we're wrong. Eating at McDonald's and watching Bay Watch doesn't mean that you understand US culture. (Folks who actually know US culture are now screaming "there are multiple US cultures".)
I don't watch Baywatch, I do like McDonalds from time to time however. I am Canadian and while our countries are certainly different my father and his family are Americans and I feel I do have a decent grasp on American culture.
Your President is the highest elected official in your country, the head of your government. While the government functions without the president, the president is certainly its leader(at least of the executive branch and the federal gov). Which makes him the leader of your country.
You may draw the distinction between your president and your country, a completely valid distinction( This is something I certainly understand as a Canadian , our Prime Minster has much less power and influence then your president), that doesn't mean that the President of the United states is not the leader of your country. While he is not your "Master", he is your leader and what you say does not make what he said or the lesson plans inappropriate.
Are you saying that children shouldn't help their president, or consider what he wants them to do based on the content of the speech? Are you saying that the language is inappropriate for young school children?
Just this morning I've set up a wiki for myself to help with this problem.
As ideas come in, I'll post them to the front page under "free floaters" (working on quicksilver action for that right now), then as they start to form or as I do research, I'll start fleshing out the pages for each idea.
I'm hoping the wiki aspect will also force me to look at how individual ideas might be related. I'm thinking of it conceptually as a mind map that changes with time.
I'm not sure if MediaWiki has the ability to view those relationships at a high level, but if not, I'll write something that does.
very similar idea here. I also run a mediawiki wiki on my laptop, and my pile of ideas is in a template I call the idea garden. The front page of the wiki is a pile of templates: to do list, idea garden, and a subject-matter-specific meta template that has two levels of links into all the other areas. Been using it for over a year now, swear by it. SVN and PHP are not cool, but it works, and that counts. BTW, what plugins are you using? I'm using
* SpamBlacklist (just in case)
* ConfirmEdit (just in case)
* Cite
* Parser Functions
* FCKEditor
* Quiz
I'm getting mediawiki and plugins through mediawiki svn, and apache, php, postgres, etc, from macports. You?
I haven't yet looked into the plugin's available, but I'll check out the ones you mentioned.
I've installed PHP, MySQL, and MediaWiki from zips/installers on a Windows server I have access to so I could hit it from any of my computers or (eventually) phone.
I guess I could have set it up at home, but I don't like keeping my computers on 24/7. I'm considering getting an Asus EEE box that supposedly only needs 20W, so I may revisit that in the future.
My post specifically refers to vectorization where you may use the fact that you can multiply 4 pairs of 16-bit integers in the time it takes to multiply a pair of 64-bit integers. So, you could operate four 16-bit hash tables in the time it takes to operate a 64-bit hash table.
That's all somewhat theoretical sure, but the point is to challenge your assumptions. (People do use vectorization, right now.)
"That's all somewhat theoretical sure, but the point is to challenge your assumptions. (People do use vectorization, right now.)"
You're assuming that people are not aware that multiplication is not always a constant-time operation. That assumption generally doesn't hold among people with any sort of academic CS background. Multiplication algorithms - and the fact that they were typically O(N) in number of bits - were covered in my intro machine architectures course.
In practice, there are many, many other things that can negatively impact hash table performance in a much bigger way. Like cache misses - one cache miss costs far more than an integer multiplication. Or interpreter overhead from using, say, Ruby instead of C (bad example, since Ruby's hashtables are implemented in C, but the general point holds). Or the difference between -O0 and -O3. Or how early versions of Java Hashtables would often devolve into linked lists because the hash function only looked at the first 8 characters of a string.
You're making a point about where we take cognitive shortcuts. Short version: don't assume the classroom example assumptions always hold in the real world.
> You should not be using n for the number of bits and n for the size of the input.
I don't see that I ever did use it for a number of bits. I said, to have n numbers with distinct values, you need O(log n) bits in each number. n is not a number of bits.
Prior to the summer, I've been working part time at the local university bioinformatics lab. It's been incredibly fun and full of learning, and time consuming.
I intend to continue in September.
Other than that, I keep starting personal projects and failing to finish them.
