dstyrb

Not sure, for boys it goes cub scouts then boy scouts. But there'a an analogous girls organization that goes brownies to girl scouts.

I've not a clue what the girls organization does at meetings, but they're famous for selling thin mint cookies and being overtly over sexualized to teenage boys.

I've seen this for sale in Japan for years now. And clip on lenses that work with most phones are, what, 10 years old? And priced at 2-10$?

"Unlike other macro photography lenses, which can cost hundreds of pounds, Toby's product costs a fiver, and slips straight onto any smartphone."

I feel horrible for the reporter if they can only find _hundreds of pounds_ priced smartphone lenses. Unless of course they're making the comparison between some megazoom professional lens and a rubber band...

I guess I fail to see the excitement of this article.

Ditto.

My pool skills are remarkably improved from my youth though.

maybe something like this: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newss...

This sounds extremely similar to the way I was personally taught trigonometry, calculus, linear algebra, and tensor calculus.

First you are asked to work out some monstrous 4 page problem by hand. Then you have a lecture on the specific tricks in each of those courses (SOC-CAH-TOA, differentiation by dropping the power, linear algebra by matrices, tensor calculus by superscript-subscript interaction). Then you are asked to do the same problem again in 3 lines... Perhaps it's not outright failure, but you are forced to "discover" an advanced concept for yourself before being given the proper tool.

I feel perhaps the author is too bold with: "Singapore, the land of many math geniuses, may have discovered the secret to learning mathematics (pdf). It employs a teaching method called productive failure (pdf), pioneered by Manu Kapur, head of the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore."

I feel a bit more research will show that this is an extremely well established teaching methodology. I mean, who _wasn't_ taught integration in this manner?

["Given the curve f(x), find the area under the curve from x=0 to x=10" so you pick a bunch of random points, find the value of f(x) at those points, multiply by however far you chose to put the points apart, go in with the wrong-but-kind-of-close answer "Oh, by the way, there's this thing called integrating, sit down for a sec kids"]

Anyone else find it ironic that the site has a twitter, facebook, g+, diaspora share bar hovering on the right hand side?

I was impressed with some of the developments apparently taking place in American school systems:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-14/public-school-stude...

"In their zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the schools might also fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and $100,000 shooting detection systems."

"Indeed, the transformation of hometown police departments into extensions of the military has been mirrored in the public schools, where school police have been gifted with high-powered M16 rifles, MRAP armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and other military gear. One Texas school district even boasts its own 12-member SWAT team."

"One SRO is accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line. That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury. In Pennsylvania, a student was tased after ignoring an order to put his cell phone away."

Wish they had proofreaders.

"and mass is one of the most properties anything can have."

"one of several experiments studying antineutrinos, which is does by looking at"

"The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame."

“When cheap modern things in our lives inevitably broke, we replaced them with sturdy historic equivalents instead of more disposable modern trash.”

There it is, the inevitable disdain, the hallmark of the chronic hipster.

I worked in this area briefly and I verify that this is actually a high quality article on the topic. The last one I read was a publicity ploy for a rushed job.

A similar low-cost telescope for science education: http://galileoscope.org

Not quite papercraft cheap...

Nice Tycho Brahe reference.

In astronomy I've always heard the rule of 10s.

10% of astronomers get the PhD, 10% of the PhDs get post docs, 10% of post docs get tenure.

And tenure in 0-2 years? That's impossible outside of China or India or the Soviet bloc. I think the average amount of time an Astronomer spends in post-docs is 9-12 years.

Nothing really productive to say to anyone except professional astronomers in the room:

This is a similar tutorial we went through at ESA: http://python4esac.github.io/index.html

This is a more advanced machine learning focused module, go through the "book figures" and example code is given. I also have a collection of slides on the module if anyone is interested: http://www.astroml.org

This is a padova isochrone query tool for python: https://github.com/jonathansick/padova

MCMC library, arguably better than pymc, written by astronomers: https://github.com/dfm/emcee

Lifesaver on how to make fancy plots: http://matplotlib.org/gallery.html

Not python specific, tools of the trade: http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr (star chart with survey data overlays), http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/ (table manipulation and quick visualization for CSV, FITS, VOTable, IPAC, etc.), http://ds9.si.edu/site/Home.html (CCD image visualization), http://iraf.noao.edu (a house of cards build by grad students for grad students where no one really knows how it works but everyone seems to know about)

Please cite these resources if you use them.

Finally, a fun link for grad students: http://astrobites.com

I laughed.

A concise summary of just about everything wrong with the mainstream music industry.

This excerpt is particularly nice: "You want them to turn on the radio and hear Rihanna, turn on BET and see Rihanna, walk down the street and see a poster of Rihanna, look on Billboard, the iTunes chart, I want you to see Rihanna first."

Another relevant article: https://medium.com/cuepoint/why-do-all-records-sound-the-sam...

A horrific excerpt: "Two or three times a year, a company like L.A.-based Music Research Consultants Inc arrive in town, hire a hotel ballroom or lecture theatre and recruit 50 to 100 people, carefully screened for demographic relevance (they might all be white suburban housewives aged 26–40). They’re each given $65 and a perception analyzer—a little black box with one red knob and an LED display. Then, they’re played 700 seven-second clips of songs. If they turn the knob up, the song gets played. If they turn it down, it doesn’t."

Why is it so hard for indie artists these days? The world may never know. Damned Spotify.

Well, not precisely.

I don't know how it is outside astronomy (hello parent parent), but inside astronomy it's relatively well known that there are four journals that are likely to be scrutinously peer reviewed and which _will_ reject you and which _will_ force you to do further analyses. It is also extremely well known that some journals advertise "In print in two months or less!" Inside the field (so to the people who will give you the next contract), it's obvious where you publish.

In some cases, it _is_ very valuable to put the extra months of effort in to lay down a rock solid piece. For example, in CAS, you can make an extra 10,000 RMB for publishing in a low impact Indian or Chinese journal. You can make upwards of 100,000 RMB (a full year's salary) for publishing in one of the "big four" journals. And up to 3 years salary for getting a Nature or Science publication. This is money being invested by the Chinese government to intentionally combat the plague of falsified Chinese research. I don't know of any other country or system that does this. It is also remarkably easy to get tenure in China, which allows a lot of long-term type focus. But this is a tiny bubble for China as it attempts to brain drain the rest of the world and is not likely to continue for long.

It's a big problem that the media doesn't understand which are which. For example when everyone was raving about the "faster than light" neutrinos a few years ago the first thing _every single person_ in my building said was "The Italians set their clock wrong didn't they?" Half a joke, but dead serious that no one should even consider this until it showed up in a publication.

Another big problem is that only basing your research on verifying others research is suicide for an academic career sing you're intentionally doing _low impact_ science. The only people willing to fund that are people with agendas, ie. BP, Exxon, Coca Cola etc.

I'm sure this article "The Outsiders" from the Prometheus society has been posted here before:

216.224.180.96/~prom/oldsite/articles/Outsiders.html

Summary: it's well known that high IQs are linked to maladjustment in later life.

I sort of question if this 'bipolar' diagnosis is really a true bipolar disorder, or just an observed similarity between bipolar traits and high IQ thinking patterns.

Acute awareness and overdeveloped imagination can lead to exceptionally strong emotions about things that wouldn't even register to "normal" people (highly gifted children are often noted for some strange things like hypersensitivity to touch and color as well as both the intensity _and passing speed_ of their emotions). Simultaneously hyper-rationalization can cause those emotions to be checked rather forcefully even to the extend of flat affect (ala "Ender"). I wonder if the exterior effect could be seen as irrational mood swings, especially from a multi-choice survey...

It is a little frustrating that the sample is an extremely limited 22-23 years of age... I imagine that this age group is far more prone to _self-report_ behaviors that could be interpreted as bipolar behavior as it's a relatively unstable period of life to begin with, especially for gifted students who will selectively be entering high pressure job markets as opposed to their less competitive peers who will be settling into long-term careers.

Also, 10 IQ points is less than one standard deviation from the norm (a SD of IQ being defined as 15 points), so perhaps "above average intelligence" is a bit more accurate than "high intelligence" (I think 2 standard deviations is when you start talking about "gifted"ness). It would be interesting to see the wings of the distribution, although a sample of just 2000 would likely not spread much light there.

This comes of as pretty pompous and assuming when neither of the diametric constructs (mechanical and biological intelligence) are even close to understood.

"Ancient astronaut theorists say yes"

Sometime in season 1 or 6 I think. The one where Akhenaten is an alien. But not the one where the pyramids are microwave lasers.

I don't think I've ever seen someone commit so much time and effort to making a game sound so boring.

We played this as an essentially neverending drinking game... Not a special session of the junior senate.

A fun little trip on a related note is the Alaska Ferry (Alaska Marine Highway I think) which leaves Seattle (well, suburb) and spends about 4 days heading up to Alaska. You can sleep on the deck with a sleeping bag (or in a little heated patio) for real cheap and get great views with chances of whales. Cost is similar per day.

Cool little blog link: http://jackandjilltravel.com/roughing-it-on-the-alaskan-stat...

What?

I'm fairly positive this has nothing to do with oppression except in a wildly politicized worldview where somehow lower socioeconomic areas were actually prohibited access to the reporting functionality. As far as I'm aware this wasn't the case, it was a completely unintended side effect of a good idea: we can save money on pothole patrols by letting people report potholes and then fix them in a queue-like order from when they were reported thus lowering costs and improving response time...

And here they are trying to make city planning decisions with something that I think will probably suffer the same bias. It's not an intentional classist plan, it's just not fully thought out (although I don't know this, maybe if I read the paper they will talk about controlling for this effect).

And I don't see anything in your solution that would solve anything, you seem to have just thrown a ton of hotwords into a grammatical structure...

At that time I think it had to do with disproportionate smartphone penetration (since it was a smartphone app, not a phone number, you just tap it when you see a pothole and it sends your geodata).

But then and now, even close to 100% smartphone ownership, I think it's the same thing with disproportionate app penetration. What social groups actually use foursquare and twitter and with what frequency?

Cool stuff -- author doesn't mention that Roman cement had a usability life of >2000 years, while Portland cement starts to degrade after 50 years (for rough harbor usages).

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-06-14/ancient-roma...

This reminds me of the -- Chigago? -- city app where citizens could report the locations of potholes on the roads in Chicago and the city would send repair crews time permitting...

What happened? The upscale trendy neighborhoods were all pothole free and the lower economic class neighborhoods got bumpier.

Making jumps from foursquare and twitter to "valuable information about land use and utilization of services in urban areas" seems like a recipe for disaster.

Cattle and schoolchildren, our last line of defense against the encroaching flood of raisins.

Well, not sure it was a complaint, I was just lightheartedly commenting that it was a bit redundant, but ok, umbrage seems a reasonable response.

And yeah, that's pretty much the point of eliding bits of text, to put things together that weren't together before; I'm almost positive that's why we invented that specific punctuation mark.

It's like saying: "The 35th president of the United States, JFK, who was widely known for the space race and the bay of pigs, was elected after the 34 presidents before him."

And my comment is like: "The 35th president of the United States ... was elected after the 34 presidents before him."

I said the clause was an unnecessary inclusion, the ellipses are there specifically to highlight that. The rest of the article is about the cyclicity of the digit.