sprout

Joined 16 years ago

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1,500

Submissions

566

Member since

Jun 11

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Recent submissions

Comment · 14 years ago

It's a key design constraint of status.aws.amazon.com that it not depend on any AWS services. (Or so I've heard.)

Comment · 15 years ago

    That is not dead which can eternal lie,
    And with strange aeons even death may die.

Comment · 16 years ago

It was a series of reading comprehension problem-solving problems with short answer response.

One bit was five documents relating to an environmental issue in a small town. The exam asked the student to analyze the documents, looking for biases the sources may have and flaws in their reasoning.

It did a good job of measuring ability to synthesize and analyze sources, but it definitely would be harder to recognize more focused improvements in reasoning ability.

Comment · 16 years ago

I actually took part in this study. A few notes:

1. The exam was supposed to be administered 3 times, Freshman, Sophomore, and Senior years. I took it my Freshman and Senior years.

2. The exam was not a normal exam. I won't say it was pointless, it definitely measured something, but it's hard to say exactly what. Imagine you have to make an exam to measure "learning" and this thing was about as close as you could come to getting one. But that's still far off the mark.

3. The sample was not representative. Taking the exam was opt-in, and the college put forth a variety of incentives to get people to take the exams. Despite this, they definitely had a high drop off between sign-up-for-everything freshmen and I'm way too busy to spend three hours taking another exam seniors.

I believe there were schools where it was not opt-in, but even so, I can't imagine any of the students taking this exam had grades riding on their performance. And given that it was a single exam, it was dependent on the students' state of mind on the particular day they took the exam. Three data points per person, over four years. It's hard to draw any conclusions from this data.

Comment · 16 years ago

From personal experience watching my CPU usage, you're dead wrong.

Comment · 16 years ago

>It seems reasonable to expect that such tools can hardly improve the battery life over unrestricted Flash.

If you mean to say what you're saying, that Flashblock doesn't make a significant change from unrestricted Flash, you're dead wrong. Wireless transfer is a notable driver of power consumption, but generally it being on is the main driver, not use. CPU on the other hand draws much more under load, and Flash will put it under a lot of load.

Comment · 16 years ago

I disagree. I don't want to rely on Google for social. Separation of concerns is very important.

As is data portability. This isn't an anti-competitive move, this is a pro-openness move.

Comment · 16 years ago

Not at all. I'm gainfully employed with no intention of moving to Reddit, but the last time they put up a puzzle I solved it just for the fun of it, and wrote a cover letter just to stay in the habit.

Comment · 16 years ago

Politics are politics. Any time more than 10 people form an organization, there are odd political heuristics used by the establishment that can be gamed.

Comment · 16 years ago

If Apple's Click2Flash is really letting 1x1 apps through, that kind of kill Safari as a reasonable Firefox alternative in my book.

Comment · 16 years ago

Given the fact that my 6 year old desktop I never use would serve me just as adequately as "the future of notebooks" for things I need to do, I've always found that attitude to be a useful hedge against needless spending.

Comment · 16 years ago

  s|s/_/*|  s/_/*|

And since I haven't debugged that regex even if it was legible, add two spaces to the beginning of a line to reproduce text verbatim. (Even if it's on one line.)

Comment · 16 years ago

I take fundamental issue with the idea that a single metric should be sufficient to disqualify a student.

If papers and research are exemplary, I see no reason that exams should disqualify someone from obtaining a Doctorate. The bar should be somewhat higher, but not to the point that the only way you can get a PhD without passing all the exams is to win a Nobel.

I don't know how well that applies to this specific case, however.

Comment · 16 years ago

If the Republicans continue to stonewall, I'd expect the filibuster to be abolished. The inaction is getting poisonous.

Comment · 16 years ago

Wow, you travelled to a warzone and you dealt with weaponry. Clearly you're interested in expanding the warzone.