Or bio-fuel crops, indeed!
Posts by TRT
9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
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Tomorrow Water thinks we should colocate datacenters and sewage plants
The wild world of non-C operating systems
Re: Necrophilia for fun and profit
I wouldn't build a house out of dead people either. It would get rather smelly and unhygienic.
Mind you, I suppose that invites the philosophical viewpoint that when you die, your body doesn't... it's just becomes a somewhat different sort of "living" - more of an ecosystem.
Dev rigs up receipt printer to spit out GitHub issues
IT outage at Scotland's Heriot-Watt University enters second week
It looks to me like the scrutiny of further education provision brought about by the Robbins Report led to H-W being awarded University status. This would only have been done if their level of teaching and assessment was equivalent to the classic university. What we think of as the classic "Polytechnic" was a creation of the local education authorities's responses to the Robbins Report. This new drive in vocational learning, to match the new "red brick" universities, led to the take over of existing, willing, educational colleges, schools, polytechnics (of which there were scarce few calling themselves that prior to the 60s) etc. The government funding injections into technical subjects following WW2 (they got very keen on training the youth in engineering and electronics following that little conflict for some reason!) were no doubt dependent upon submitting to LEA control under Wilson and Crosland etc. Where provision didn't exist to expand, LEAs created it de novo.
H-W doesn't fit any of this. It was a "private" establishment long before this time, and I expect it was "boosted" to university status in order to distinguish it from the slightly more vocational, work-place based, training envisaged for the polytechnics, i.e. the skilled factory floor engineer rather than the design department boffin types.
Or you could see Crosland's reforms as being the formalisation, standardisation and generalisation of the apprenticeship system that operated prior, which took youths from ages 14 to 18 and delivered a very specific skill set. As the school leaving age was raised, the foundations taught during an apprenticeship, such as more advanced levels of numeracy and literacy, had to be transferred entirely to a schoolroom setting. This led to what you might call assembly-line learning.
TL;DR, H-W never called itself a Polytechnic and was a university before the widespread emergence of Polytechnics that were modelled on the few places prior to that era which already called themselves that.
RIP: Creators of the GIF and TRS-80
Re: Tandy
Rebadged versions of other kits.
Archer was the sub-brand. The 300-in-1 was the ultimate. A blue plastic carry case with meters and segment displays on the front/top.
I believe it was also badged Realistic at one point.
Loved those things.
You know you can take your kids to various Victorian high streets around the country and they can see what sweet shops, general stores, grocers, chemists etc were like but there's no place I know where you can visit a Tandy or a Maplin or a Singer sewing shop or any of a dozen or more high street staples from the 50s to 90s that have vanished now. Collecting a realistic atmosphere for that kind of shop will be hard in future museums of now.
Re: Loved my TRS-80 as a kid.
I was a regular fixture at our local branch of Tandy as a school child. I'd go in and play around with the machine for a few hours most weekends. I later worked for them to pay my way through college and university. An interest in electronics helped immensely. I loved the TRS-80. A great machine. So sad to hear this news.
UK Ministry of Defence takes recruitment system offline, confirms data leak
BOFH: Putting the gross in gross insubordination
Nestlé says it leaked its own test data, not Anonymous
One of Nestle's brands is Purina...
And as we know they've been sponsoring Rebel Alliances for years now.
OVHcloud datacenter 'lacked' automatic fire extinguishers, electrical cutoff
Fresh concerns about 'indefinite' UK government access to doctors' patient data
Researchers made an OpenAI GPT-3 medical chatbot as an experiment. It told a mock patient to kill themselves
Tesla employee: I was fired after sharing video of self-driving car crash
Oxidation-proof copper could replace gold, meaning cheaper chips, says prof
Boys outnumber girls 6 to 1 in UK compsci classes
Re: Bring back the girls!
Sexism and racism... '-isms' are ideologies, not biases. Many ideologies manifest as biases, and -ists denotes either people or their actions, intentional or otherwise, that practice or exemplify an ideology.
Biases can occur as a result of the practices of certain ideologies as they can equally result from non-ideological roots, or even through a combination of this. Certain ideologies can even arise as a result of the observation of these non-ideological roots - humans love to explain things, draw inferences and categorise things in order to make predictions. I did exactly that, just then, see? When I categorised humans as "inference engines".
When applied to the observations about the gender make up of compsci classes, how can one dissect out any root explanations for that observation of a difference? From what we've learnt about society in the widest terms, encompassing work, home, leisure, economics etc. how can we be sure that there isn't a hidden or intrinsic mechanism at work, be that a conscious or an unconscious ideology, or one with an inherent biological root? How do we even dissect biology from society? Should we even try to do that? What is the profit in such activity? We know that different social structures display different group biases, although who is to say that our imposition of groupings is not artificial in itself? If we accept that there has been and/or still is an implicit and unfair ideological bias in, say for example, employment field (income) by race, can we extrapolate that there may be a hidden "-ism" behind other observed biases?
To return to the biological basis of society, I think it stems from our understanding of fairness. Much research has been done on this topic, and some (many) researchers say that fairness is a pre-requisite for long-term cooperation within a species, and that such long-term cooperation accentuates reproductive success and individual survival, thus presenting an evolutionary bias towards a sense of fair-play. We value fairness highly, and, therefore, when we see evidence of a bias which appears unfair, we (in general, as humans) question it on an intellectual level.
Personally, I wouldn't say it's a good idea to dismiss an observed bias out-of-hand and put it down to some intrinsic property - it should at least be investigated.
When the argument about "most programmers were female in the past" is trotted out, I think it's valid to question if that factoid is a result of another "historic -ism" around keyboard operators and the biases evident in their contractual obligations such as pay, hours, age, qualification, career guidance/expectations etc.
Re: Bring back the girls!
It was an unusual step for the LEA to subsidise an after-schools club beyond use of the buildings, insurance etc ( Bare-bones enablers) which is why I think they must view it as a concern. There are also girls football clubs and rugby clubs in the area, which is understandable and not uncommon.
Re: Bring back the girls!
As I took pains to point out, this initiative didn't mean boys were deprived of access to a similar club. It's not sexism if handled like this. The fact it had female tutors was exactly to try to set up role models and break preconceptions about gender and tge subject.
You can try to draw a parallel with a blacks only computer club if you like. That would be emotive but somewhat of a straw man argument. There's clearly evidence of a strong gender bias in uptake of the subject and there's no clear indication of why that is excepting that it results from self-selection.
As I indicated it's not been officially reported what the uptake of these clubs has been and the longitudinal picture is distorted by Covid. From what I understand in the year it was running all the places were filled and there was a distinct bias towards girls of Indian / Asian descent taking part. I don't find that particularly surprising myself.
But that was just rumour I picked up on the parents network rather than an official account.
That would work if, on the whole, everyone just falls into some field of occupation or other.
Which, looking at my "career" seems a reasonable assumption. Rudderless occupation path, go with the flow. I happened to like a particular subject at a critical point in life (choosing o-levels) and that's the point I jumped in the river clinging to a lilo.
Re: Bring back the girls!
Seems my comment was worded too loosely for some people. I felt it was an important point, so I'll try again.
In an attempt to address what might be "going wrong" with female participation in what is seen to be the important skill of coding, our Local Education Authority set up a number of special out-of-school coding clubs for girls only, aged 7 to 15. This required an additional funding stream because they usually only support "daytime" activities, so they obviously felt this was important. These funded clubs were IN ADDITION to volunteer-led clubs of a similar nature but open to all in the age group, which received only bare-bone support from the LEA. The new clubs were led by skilled female tutors as well, which is one reason why additional financial support was needed - the volunteer field isn't exactly awash with these, and even where they are available it can mean increased distances travelled.
When these "girls-only clubs" were announced in the local newspaper it appeared to upset a particular class of individuals who, with great enthusiasm, will jump up and down on top of anything they consider to be an example of reverse bias, this one being no exception. I find this reactionary behaviour to be perplexing and amusing in some small, wry, way. No-one was being disadvantaged by this initiative; the same equipment and the same curriculum was available under existing arrangements.
It's unclear exactly what effect this has had yet, or what its potential might be. The scheme's been running only 3 years now, and for 2 of those it was suspended due to COVID.
How CAPTCHAs can cloak phishing URLs in emails
Re: Paying attention may not be enough
Ukraine's nuclear plants: Chernobyl off diesel power, explosions explained
Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'
Re: Who cares....
Another good question.
I suppose one could set up a trial of similar circumstances... a dummy, a bike, a car, a button to press if / when you register the presence of the dummy. Run a series of trials and controls.
I suppose it's easier to prosecute the "driver" than open the can of worms that would involve prosecuting Uber.
pretty cold and dark thought...
Could it even be in the vaguest realms of possibility that they would deliberately put someone in their car and instruct them or misguide them as to the level of interaction required, knowing that this was a likely outcome and that, in fact, what their "experiment" was intended to do was not so much to test the car but to test the legal system?
Re: Software to arbitrate between two soldiers -- haven't they heard of rank?
We seem to be stuck in a foxhole in the ground underneath a giant tank that we can't possibly move with no hope of rescue. Does the AI battle computer have anything to say about that?
Yeah. There's bound to be something... Just got to fill in the right... Ah! Here it is...
What to do if you find yourself stuck in a foxhole in the ground underneath a giant tank you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.
It's about time we did something about that AI.
Brit techie shows us life in Ukraine amid Russian invasion
Microsoft proposes type syntax for JavaScript
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