To add a different but orthogonal perspective to this:
My higher-level math courses were pure mathematics courses, and we pretty much always used Springer textbooks, which were only a few hundred pages long and the size of a normal paperback (i.e., not the size of, say, CLRS). When we didn't use Springer textbooks, we used other textbooks similar in size and length (e.g., [0]). I found these textbooks to be completely manageable to read as a student, and they were the best textbook-related learning experiences of my undergraduate years.
I've had a similar experience with linguistics. The main textbook I've used was $40, is a bit under 500 pages (but is smaller than a typical textbook, and paperback), and I've used it for 3 classes. That's the kind of book I'm happy to buy. Meanwhile my experience with CS classes has been a > $150 textbook that is never referenced in class, is outdated, and is seemingly on the syllabus just to have something there. I ended up just not bothering with the books even if the syllabus claimed they were required.
Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 3rd edition by Andrew Carnie. I got it used, so it's probably a bit more expensive if you want a new copy, but it's a great book.
Isn't part of that due to math being quite dense? What I mean by dense is that a small amount of mathematics can express things that will take a long time to understand. Because of the density you don't need a lot of pages to contain enough material to occupy a student for a whole semester.
For subjects that are less dense, you need bigger books.
For instance all of the required and recommended books from the courses I took as part of getting a bachelor's degree in math from Caltech take less space on my bookshelf than the required books from just my first semester of law school.
Toss in the second semester of law school and include the non-required books I bought, and that would bring it to more shelf space than all the recommended and required books I bought for all the science and engineering classes I took in four years at Caltech.
While that may be true, I think what this boils down to is a form of prosecutorial discretion, where the discretion is in the hands of the ruling party.
For the record, I just read about the use of eagles (not falcons, though they are kept at falconries in France) in combating drones in a daily newsletter I highly respect. Here is the article they cite: http://en.rfi.fr/wire/20170220-born-killers-french-army-groo...
I guess I don't understand how at least the anti-drone eagles can be considered "fake news."
Do you honestly think a bird is a good solution to deal with what is, to the bird, a whirling blade flying death machine? I also saw people pushing the story about millions of wind powered devices to freeze the arctic, it's just impractical nonsense on the face of it.
I think you're using an older definition, wherein "fake news" means unworthy of attention. In recent weeks and months, "fake news" has been used by President Trump and others to mean factually incorrect.
Something being a bad idea or stupid or impractical doesn't make it factually incorrect, i.e., does not make it fake news under the new definition.
The article asserts several facts, among them:
- birds of prey are often already kept near airports to scare birds away from the runway to reduce accidents during takeoff and landing.
- the French air force has an experiment running with 4 eagles to train them to attack small drones, in addition to their normal scarebird duties.
- the French air force thinks the experiment is promising enough to order a second group of 4 eagles.
If those facts are correct, it is not "fake news." It is a silly puff piece about something that is not important, because it will almost certainly never turn into anything beyond an experiment.
From the abstract [0]: "Conclusions: Endogenous IAP’s protective effects in regard to the metabolic syndrome may be inhibited by PHE, a metabolite of aspartame, perhaps explaining the lack of expected weight loss and metabolic improvements associated with diet drinks."
Can someone explain to me what I'm missing here? What is the "expected weight loss," and what are the expected "metabolic improvements associated with diet drinks"? As far as I'm concerned, one should expect neither metabolic improvements nor weight loss simply from consuming diet soda.
High-glycogen metabolism and glucose intolerance (insulin IgE failures really...) would be cut out if you'd had a 'diet' (without aspartame or other ridiculous dimers of phenylalanine.) Delicious irony (and poor showing as literary or legal SEO) ensues.
the title we've been given and the abstract you just quoted fits with my prior that the sugar industry pays for such studies. after all it's obvious that someone who drinks diet sodas isn't getting more Calories than on the packaging, whereas if they drank sugared drinks it would be a huge source.
maybe water would be better as far as "expected weight loss" but it's obviously false that diet soda can prevent weight loss. (unless it takes away a person's will to exercise and takes away a person's ability to make correct calorie-related choices.) If someone is active and eating less than they're using, or exercising heavily and especially building muscle, it's obvious that drinking any amount of diet soda won't inhibit these processes, since people do it all the time.
since you've read and quoted the abstract, could you suggest a title for the mods that's even vaguely true?
" among the groups that received a high-fat diet, the mice that drank the sweetener solution became considerably heavier than those who drank plain water. However, the blood sugar level was higher than normal in all of the mice that received sweetener solution. "
In mice, at least, it seems that the artificial sweetener helped them accumulate more fat than mice who were given water and the same diet. So, aspartame may act like an obesogen[1] in mice.
If you think this is hard to believe and that calories in are calories in, consider diabetics. If untreated, they excrete sugars to the point where they have difficulty maintaining weight on a diet that would make somebody else quite fat. The body's chemistry is complex and, as far as I can tell, not well understood at all, especially when it comes to diet. There seems to be a lot more funding available to develop drugs and procedures to treat illness than there is to optimize (relatively) healthy peoples' diets.
I still didn't click through but you do not suggest a title. Can you summarize in a neutral way? Maybe "on a high-fat diet, artificial sweeteners may exacerbate weight gain?" Is that fair?
While I was downvoted, 12 hours later Reddit managed to post a much more accurate title (which made its front page). This is Reddit's title:
>Low-calorie sweetener use is independently associated with heavier relative weight, larger waist, and higher prevalence and incidence of abdominal obesity, suggesting that low-calorie sweetener use may not be an effective means of weight control, based on a study of 1,454 participants over 10 years.
This makes total sense to me. It is not fair to summarize this as "prevents weight loss."
Most people I know get grossed out when I mention this, but one way I saved a bunch of time re: all the chicken I had to eat for my bulking diet was to just buy canned chicken breast in bulk [0].
It's not nearly as gross as you think, and it saves so much time!
There's a lot of prep/clean-up I just don't want to deal with.
I've tried this method before, and it just didn't work out.
All the washing of things you have to use in intermediate steps really adds up. And unless you eat chicken breast for every non-breakfast meal, 10 cooked chicken breasts will get gross in the fridge pretty quickly, so you'll probably want to do something like 3 breasts at a time if you're only eating one meal with chicken breasts per day. This means doing meal prep twice in the week, as opposed to once. If you don't refrigerate them, then you have to wait for the breasts to thaw, which is time I don't want to spend every day, multiple times a day potentially.
I have a busy schedule, and every hour counts some weeks, so the time saved after buying canned chicken breast really adds up.
If you don't want to cook in bulk, a pressure cooker is very easy as well. It takes about 15-20 minutes to build the pressure and cook the chicken, but my own time investment is somewhere around 30-45 seconds.
The chicken does come out moist and tastes awesome, but that goes for the outside as well which I don't mind that much, but you can also toss it on the grill for like 20-30s a side after it's done if you want nice grill marks and a little crispier outside.
I would argue that my Math degree made me a "better" writer than my Philosophy degree did. Writing quality in philosophy
is generally much poorer than other disciplines; you pretty much have to use passive voice everywhere, which is the first thing your college writing lab will tell you not to do.
On the other hand, in my Math classes, I had to turn in 5-10 pages of proofs every week/every other day for problem set work. It was this work that taught me how to write clearly and parsimoniously, much more so than my Philosophy courses.
This proved to be the case for myself as well, when going through medical school and practice. I discovered I have a pretty good knack for breaking things down to their core principles and presenting them in a succinct, logical manner. I gained a reputation as the guy who could help explain complex medical issues to patients clearly and simply. I credit my undergrad years as a math major with this wonderfully useful skill.
Where in philosophy is using passive voice common? At least in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, first-person active voice has been the norm for decades, since the days when in other fields it was seen as too informal to start a sentence with "I". Even today, scientists love to write things like "three types of experiments were performed to test this hypothesis". While a philosophy paper is more likely to contain active-voice, first-person sentences like "I present an internal problem for David Lewis's genuine modal realism" [1].
As a computer science major with a philosophy minor, I personally found my philosophy minor much more useful in learning how to write clearly than my CS major was.
The idea that passive voice is used in philosophy doesn't seem to be a novel idea [0].
For what it's worth, I don't think undergraduate CS degrees develop students' writing abilities at all. There are only a few proof-based courses I can think of, and those courses (e.g., Theory of Computation, Algorithms) need not necessarily be taught in a mathematically rigorous manner (which is to say, proof writing in these courses may be minimal, depending on the instructor).
Yes. My mileage definitely varied. There's no doubt that there is bad philosophical writing out there, but I've never met anyone (until today!) who thinks that philosophical writing requires or encourages the passive voice. It may be that the passive voice is harder to avoid in Philosophy than in other disciplines, but avoiding it is a useful exercise. That's how you improve!
And at any rate, I don't believe I ever claimed that a Philosophy degree was the best way to develop your writing.
What philosophy program is this? At my school the professors explicitly told us to write in active voice. Also, what material are you studying? It's been a while since I've been in school, but most analytic philosophy material I read were written in very clear and precise prose.
See, e.g., Quine's "Translation and Meaning,"[0] as well as the blog post I linked to further down the page. Not every philosophy program consists solely of analytic philosophy; continental philosophy writing is rife with passive voice.
There's a lot of poor writing in philosophy all around. Passive voice is far from the only authorial sin. Dryness, obscurity, long-windedness and lack of engagement with the audience are probably the most common.
This poor writing is certainly not limited to any particular philosophical discipline, or even to philosophy in general. Math and science tend to be just as bad (often even much worse, except sometimes on the issue of clarity -- at least as far as their intended audience is concerned).
I think the common laborous style comes from the desire to seem "objective", the tradition of presenting very long, drawn out arguments in a "logical" fashion, and the attempt to efface the author from the work (so as to make the argument seem to be self-evident given the premises, and not at all biased or based on one person's experience or opinion). That's hard to do in an engaging manner.
More recently, the practice of revealing who the author is and where he stands is starting to become a little more common. That helps to make the writing more engaging and helps the reader to make more of a connection with the author, but I think this still is very much a minority style. Most of philosophical writing is still mired in "objective" style, and it's difficult to foresee when or if it'll ever make it out.
PS: I'm guilty of this myself, and should really take some writing courses! :)
Coincidentally enough, this was a submitted puzzler to the NPR syndicated show "Car Talk," except there were 10 men in a line wearing black or white hats. The goal was to determine the optimal strategy for guessing hat colors.
In fact, that's what NVIDIA did at my alma mater, Grinnell College. I believe the intent was for courses like the OS course to be taught using CUDA (at least to some degree). I don't think that has panned out, but now a tiny liberal arts college has a ton of GPUs to use.
I can't remember where I heard this, but I think the whole listicle thing generating a profit so that they could produce actually good journalism was always the plan.
I mean, I sometimes hear from their foreign correspondents on NPR or podcasts I'm interested in. They do have some great journalists on staff.
My higher-level math courses were pure mathematics courses, and we pretty much always used Springer textbooks, which were only a few hundred pages long and the size of a normal paperback (i.e., not the size of, say, CLRS). When we didn't use Springer textbooks, we used other textbooks similar in size and length (e.g., [0]). I found these textbooks to be completely manageable to read as a student, and they were the best textbook-related learning experiences of my undergraduate years.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Galois-Correspondence-Ma...