Can I provide evidence to prove to you that my generalization is accurate?
Can you prove to me that Antarctica exists? That there were ever dinosaurs? If I'm intent on not being convinced?
Come to China for an extended visit. Reside in one region for a while, then move to another for a bit. Repeat that process a few times until you're satisfied. Being able to read and write Chinese (simplified characters) and speak Putonghua (or, if you stay in one place long enough, the local dialect) would probably speed things up for you.
Even then, you could (if you were determined enough) maintain a conviction that you had just had a run of bad luck in terms of the places you'd chosen to live and the people with whom you'd happened to interact.
I don't know how much time you'd have to spend here to be satisfied.
Cheating is not endemic within the gaokao system because, as a testing regime, it's excessively vulnerable to cheating. It's not any more cheatable than the SAT, GREs, or other standardized entrance or aptitude exams.
Mainland Chinese society at all levels is thoroughly corrupt and its pretty much impossible to achieve what a reasonable observer would recognize as a materially successful life within the PRC without being actively involved in corruption.
Even simply to muddle along and live hand-to-mouth, content to have most of the doors to success either closed to them from the get-go or slammed in their face, a regular Mainland person has to turn a blind eye to a steady stream of illegal, unethical, and downright harmful behavior on the part of their peers.
That's a part of why (along with many other factors) many Mainland citizens are eager to emigrate to pretty much anywhere that's not the PRC.
If you had been made aware, in advance, that there was a fine, then sure, you should be fined for being tardy.
Are you pattern-matching on "VC", "lateness", "fine", and your own negative feelings regarding having been late to a VC meeting?
Your reaction to this story (VC firm trying to show that it values potential investment targets' time) is like someone worrying that, since a pizzeria has a policy of not charging customers for a pizza if it's delivered late, you're going to have to provide the delivery person with a free sandwich if you don't get to the door quickly enough after he rings the bell.
Instead of discouraging people from showing their care/regard for you (which, with a generous helping of social obligation, is what gift-giving is about), why not try to find ways to help gift givers give useful/desirable gifts?
Children have wishlists (adults too nowadays -- e.g. Amazon), people 'register' for weddings, etc.
Actually, no. If you give someone a delicious homemade chutney and that inspires them, they could gift you the following year with a marmalade or cherry confit or something else.
Your reply suggests that you may be giving homemade gifts and getting retail-purchased gifts in return.
I actually agree with what you're doing but doubt that many recipients truly appreciate your gifts, which are likely pretty neat.
People tend to be polite, especially when it comes to expressing thanks for a gift.
One way to gauge the recipients' true enthusiasm would be to look at how many of them have followed your lead.
If you've been doing this for three years, how many home-made gifts did you receive in return in the second and third years? If you're counting this as the third year, how many such gifts did you receive last year?
If I look at the sky and it's blue and I tell you that it's blue but you're convinced that it's yellow, should I compromise and agree henceforth to tell people that the sky is green or some shade of yellow?
If the cost of winning certain potential allies to your cause would amount to the complete subversion and hollowing out of your cause, maybe it's better to forge ahead without those allies. If your vision is correct, some of them may come around to the correct position, your position, as time goes on. Or maybe not.
It has a "privacy button" that stops it from taking photos for a few minutes and records other information along with the images (like temperature, for example). Also, all of the images and data are stored locally on the device.
Another lifelogging camera, with better specs, about to hit the market (Nov 2012 according to the register/buy page) is Autographer, from the Oxford Metrics Group:
The article heralds soy as having an uber-low glycemic index ... but doesn't note that soy appears to function as an endocrine disruptor in humans, something of concern for everyone but especially for children/infants.
Indeed. AFAICT from the linked post, there's no proof (e.g. visual sighting of a whale at any of the locations from which the sounds have emanated) that the source of the sounds is even a whale at all.
Thanks for posting this. A few seconds before the eight-minute mark, Vinge says that he expects the Singularity to occur before 2030 assuming that (A.) it is technologically possible and (B.) no disasters (e.g. a nuclear war) derails us before that point.
I'm a year or two away from eligibility of permanent resident status here in HK and, while I obviously haven't hated living here enough yet to pull up stakes and move, I can't really agree with your assessment of HK as a great place.
The pollution is frighteningly terrible most of the year (some from vehicles here, some from coal-fired power plants here, and about 60% from industrial activities across the border on the Mainland), about half of the population endure a desperately low standard of living and live in sprawling public housing estates because they simply cannot afford to purchase or rent apartments of their own, the economy is run by a handful of tycoons that dominate every sector and drive the price of each and every good and service up, elections for the chief executive (local equivalent of mayor/governor) are "small circle" (a few hundred people, mostly pawns of the tycoons or pro-Beijing folks cast votes last time), etc.
It's a third world city with some British traditions that are being systematically expunged or, when that would likely draw too great of an outcry, gradually eroded under Beijing's rule.
I think that something like the Math Emporium could represent an excellent additional resource ... but using it to replace lectures altogether would seem, to me, to be a missed opportunity and a big mistake. I hope that they at least have something like recitations / TA-led classes so that students can get face time with, periodically, with someone knowledgeable w/re to the subject matter.
Also, the article says "The key is letting computers do what they do best - grading multiple-choice tests, [...]".
That's alarming because it suggests that the automatically generated practice tests and possibly even the real, proctored tests in the Math Emporium scheme are all multiple-choice. For exams in introductory, memorization-heavy humanities courses, that's fine, but the multiple-choice format is ill-suited for math. There's no way to assign partial credit for wrong answers and, more importantly, there's no capability to examine the steps that the student took when trying to find the solution to a given problem so that their mistake can be explained to them.
Based on the article, it sounds as though Virginia Tech is replacing part of their undergrad math curriculum with Kumon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumon) for grown-ups. Depressing.
Can you prove to me that Antarctica exists? That there were ever dinosaurs? If I'm intent on not being convinced?
Come to China for an extended visit. Reside in one region for a while, then move to another for a bit. Repeat that process a few times until you're satisfied. Being able to read and write Chinese (simplified characters) and speak Putonghua (or, if you stay in one place long enough, the local dialect) would probably speed things up for you.
Even then, you could (if you were determined enough) maintain a conviction that you had just had a run of bad luck in terms of the places you'd chosen to live and the people with whom you'd happened to interact.
I don't know how much time you'd have to spend here to be satisfied.