Burro velho não aprende línguas II

Brian May futuro doutorado em Astrofísica

Brian May, que foi o principal guitarrista da banda de rock Queen, está perto de concluir seu doutoramento em Astrofísica, 35 anos após ter abandonado os estudos para se tornar músico. A tese do doutoramento intitula-se «Velocidades Radiais na Nuvem de Poeira Zodiacal». Após apresentar a tese ao Imperial College, de Londres, ele terá de esperar a aprovação para então receber seu diploma.

Conservadores e progressistas na academia americana

Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty (Stanley Rothma, Robert Lichter, Neil Nevitte)

This article first examines the ideological composition of American university faculty and then tests whether ideological homogeneity has become self-reinforcing. A randomly based national survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities finds that liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins, and the differences are not limited to elite universities or to the social sciences and humanities. A multivariate analysis finds that, even after taking into account the effects of professional accomplishment, along with many other individual characteristics, conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats. This suggests that complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study. The analysis finds similar effects based on gender and religiosity, i.e., women and practicing Christians teach at lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.

(via Gene Expression, onde se encontram mais tabelas retiradas do artigo sobre filiações partidárias)

Monkey see, monkey do

Two More Things to Unlearn from School de Eliezer Yudkowsky, no Overcoming Bias:

I suspect the most dangerous habit of thought taught in schools is that even if you don't really understand something, you should parrot it back anyway. One of the most fundamental life skills is realizing when you are confused, and school actively destroys this ability - teaches students that they "understand" when they can successfully answer questions on an exam, which is very very very far from absorbing the knowledge and making it a part of you. Students learn the habit that eating consists of putting food into mouth; the exams can't test for chewing or swallowing, and so they starve.

Much of this problem may come from needing to take three 4-credit courses per quarter, with a textbook chapter plus homework to be done every week - the courses are timed for frantic memorization, it's not possible to deeply chew over and leisurely digest knowledge in the same period. College students aren't allowed to be confused; if they started saying, "Wait, do I really understand this? Maybe I'd better spend a few days looking up related papers, or consult another textbook," they'd fail all the courses they took that quarter. A month later they would understand the material far better and remember it much longer - but one month after finals is too late; it counts for nothing in the lunatic university utility function.

Many students who have gone through this process no longer even realize when something confuses them, or notice gaps in their understanding. They have been trained out of pausing to think. (...)

It may be dangerous to present people with a giant mass of authoritative knowledge, especially if it is actually true. It may damage their skepticism. (...) [P]erhaps, you could teach the habit of thought: "The ideas of received authority are often imperfect but it takes a great effort to find a new idea that is better. Most possible changes are for the worse, even though every improvement is necessarily a change."

Burro velho não aprende línguas

José Mário Branco é aluno de excelência

Aos 65 anos o conhecido cantor José Mário Branco voltou à Universidade e teve uma média de 19,1 valores no 1º ano, no ano lectivo de 2005/06 no curso de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa. No ano passado, o cantor foi o melhor aluno desta universidade - já está no segundo ano -e foi agora um dos estudantes distinguidos com uma das Bolsas de Estudo por Mérito, atribuídas hoje na Reitoria da Universidade de Lisboa (UL). Teve a segunda melhor nota desta Cerimónia de Entrega das Bolsas de Mérito e de Louvor.

Chilling effect

SOCRATE'S PORTUGAL by Manuel Falcao

The portuguese Prime Minister presides over a Government which persecutes people who criticize the way the country is ruled or who make jokes about the Prime Minister himself. In the last months high ranking civil servants have been punished either because they joked about Mr. Socrates university degree (altough the alleged joke was made in a private conversation) or because they allowed public criticism over the health policy and its Minister, Mr. Correa de Campos. In these last weeks important industrialists said that some of the sponsors of a technical report about the placement of a new international airport - which contradicts Mr. Socrates decision - wished to remain incognito because they feared retaliation from the government in contracts with their companies. In general there are worrying signs of political harassment by over zealous officials, but until now none of the ministers or the prime minister himself have condemned what happened. Instead, the Prime Minister decided to persecute in Court the author of a Blog that led and first hand released an investigation about the academic degree of Mr. Socrates and the way it was obtained. All the national press followed the leads in that blog, and some of the newspapers digged deeper than the blogger. It was clear there were contradictions between Mr. Socrates official CV and the University archives. Following the investigation, the private University where Mr. Socrates obtained his degree was shut down by Government decision, in the middle of an unexpected turmoil.

Freedom House; Reporters sans frontièrs

Eu gosto mais de death metal, não se arranja nada para mim?

Man gets sick benefits for heavy metal addiction

A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis enable the metal lover to supplement his income with state benefits.

Roger Tullgren, 42, from Hässleholm in southern Sweden has just started working part time as a dishwasher at a local restaurant. Because heavy metal dominates so many aspects of his life, the Employment Service has agreed to pay part of Tullgren's salary. His new boss meanwhile has given him a special dispensation to play loud music at work.

"I have been trying for ten years to get this classified as a handicap," Tullgren told The Local. "I spoke to three psychologists and they finally agreed that I needed this to avoid being discriminated against."

(via Hit & Run)

E também de jogos de computador violentos. E de me vestir com roupa preta (oh, my sweet Satan...). E de escrever pequenas narrativas que incluam personagens notáveis pelos seus traços de personalidade sádica. Obsessivamente viciado em todas elas, e, para mais, toda a gente sabe que são indicadoras de graves distúrbios psicológicos e tendências sociopatas. Então, o governo não me arranja um subsidiozinho? Nem um pequenininho para compensar a discriminação laboral e social de que sou alvo? Nada sequer para apoiar a minha reintegração - sou uma vítima desta cultura consumista das sociedades modernas que me tornou num niilista - ou para evitar que algum evento pressione o meu frágil equilíbrio emocional e despolete toda aquela raiva para com o mundo que tenho perigosa e freudianamente reprimida dentro de mim? Olhem que eu ainda faço algum disparate e uso aquele C4 que tenho ali guardado.

Adenda: Crazy for work de Nima Sanandaji

Razões psicológicas para dogmas e crenças

Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die de Gregory W. Lester

Because beliefs are designed to enhance our ability to survive, they are biologically designed to be strongly resistant to change. To change beliefs, skeptics must address the brain's "survival" issues of meanings and implications in addition to discussing their data.

Because a basic tenet of both skeptical thinking and scientific inquiry is that beliefs can be wrong, it is often confusing and irritating to scientists and skeptics that so many people's beliefs do not change in the face of disconfirming evidence. How, we wonder, are people able to hold beliefs that contradict the data?

This puzzlement can produce an unfortunate tendency on the part of skeptical thinkers to demean and belittle people whose beliefs don't change in response to evidence. They can be seen as inferior, stupid, or crazy. This attitude is born of skeptics' failure to understand the biological purpose of beliefs and the neurological necessity for them to be resilient and stubbornly resistant to change. The truth is that for all their rigorous thinking, many skeptics do not have a clear or rational understanding of what beliefs are and why even faulty ones don't die easily. Understanding the biological purpose of beliefs can help skeptics to be far more effective in challenging irrational beliefs and communicating scientific conclusions.

Evolução das distribuções de Linux

(da autoria de Non Plus X, descoberto via Linux and Open Source Blog)

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(Adenda 01/08: Com a publicação da versão 7.6, o domínio do Non Plus X passou para GNU/Linux distro timeline)

Teorema da linha de apoio técnico

Se não conseguir resolver o problema, a culpa deve ser do cliente

Eta Carinae (NGC 3372)

The Carina Nebula: Star Birth in the Extreme

In celebration of the 17th anniversary of the launch and deployment of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers is releasing one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble's cameras. It is a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina Nebula where a maelstrom of star birth — and death — is taking place. This image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The Hubble images were taken in the light of neutral hydrogen during March and July 2005. Color information was added with data taken in December 2001 and March 2003 at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.

Livre mas rentável e inovador

Open-Source Software: Who Needs Intellectual Property? de Michele Boldrin e David K. Levine

«The market for open-source software—uncopyrighted, freely reproducible computer programs—is not well understood by economists. A central source of surprise is that innovation can thrive in a market without traditional intellectual property (IP). But as we argued in a 2005 unpublished paper, “Perfectly Competitive Innovation,” as a matter of theory there is no reason to believe that monopoly power through IP is needed for innovation. The market for open-source software is the poster child for this perspective.

First, understand that the market for open-source software is a classic example of a competitive market. It is characterized by the voluntary renunciation of copyright and patent. Buyers are entitled to make their own copies, modified or not, and sell them. “Free software” in this context means “free as in freedom, not free as in beer.” There is also voluntary renunciation of trade secrecy: the original creator publishes the source code—the “blueprint” for producing the software—along with the software itself. Some open-source software has the further requirement that as a condition of use, buyers make their modification available under the same terms. The open-source movement has been called everything from a virus to socialism—so it may or may not be surprising to hear it called a model of a fully competitive market. Yet that is what it is, as much so as the market for wheat. All purchasers of software can compete with the seller and one another, and often they do. (...)

The presence of profitable firms such as Red Hat—not to speak of IBM—in the open-source industry suggests that it is a viable concern and not a charitable or altruistic activity. In their 2004 paper “The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond,” Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole documented some of the financial benefit to individual developers of contributing to open-source projects. For example, the team of programmers that developed the Apache web server are ranked according to the significance of their contributions and hold other jobs. Work by Il-Horn Hann et al. shows that the salaries the programmers receive in these other jobs are heavily influenced by their rank within the Apache Foundation. In other words, the “expertise” model at Apache is much like that in academia—the programmer writes software in order to receive recognition and financial payment for the expertise he demonstrates through his published product.

Examination of particular individual developers reinforces this point. Torvalds is a multimillionaire, and Bram Cohen, the developer of BitTorrent, recently received $8.75 million in venture capital for his open-source project. These figures and the success of open-source software also teach us something important about the (expected) payments needed to get smart people like Torvalds or Cohen to develop innovative software. It is unlikely that Torvalds originally wrote Linux with the aim of becoming a multimillionaire. Still, he must have hoped for some revenue stream when starting his work. His current wealth is probably higher than he expected. Still it is four orders of magnitude less than that of Bill Gates. Hence, at least in the case of Torvalds, the opportunity cost for writing innovative software is not in the tens of billion of dollars, but just in the millions. This is worth keeping in mind when someone claims that without the huge monopoly rents through IP, innovators would not be innovating. Finally, it is possible to imagine that the open-source industry is not a real industry at all. Perhaps it exists only because it is able to free-ride off the innovations created in the proprietary part of the industry, in which the monopoly power of copyright plays a key role. It is certainly true that Linux is a knock-off of Unix and that OpenOffice Writer is a knock-off of Microsoft Word. But this means little, because practically all software, proprietary or not, is an imitation of some other software. Microsoft Windows is an imitation of the Macintosh, which is an imitation of Smalltalk. Microsoft Word is an imitation of WordPerfect, which is an imitation of WordStar. Microsoft Excel is an imitation of Lotus 1-2-3, which was an imitation of VisiCalc. And so on. (...)

Probably the most innovative program in the last few years is BitTorrent, a program that decentralizes and vastly increases the speed at which very large files can be downloaded off the Internet. It is commercially successful in the sense that 50,000 copies a day are downloaded. It is also sufficiently innovative that it is now being imitated—by Microsoft. BitTorrent, however, is open-source, and according to its website, author Bram Cohen maintains the program for a living.

The final point to emphasize here is that the market for software is not unique. Innovation and competition unprotected by patent and copyright have gone hand in hand in other industries, from financial securities to fashion. The message of open-source software is a message for all industries: IP not needed for innovation here»

Métodos de ensino para as ciências

Physics By Induction: The Genius of Learning Science The Proper Way de Lisa VanDamme

«It seems that science is not taught in the public middle schools today--it has been replaced by... hands on "experiments" which are really pointless diversions. At the high school level, most students are exposed to some science, and most are required to take a physics class. But these physics classes generally suffer from a serious [methodological] problem.

Let me give you an example of this problem, and then I will explain it. The following scenario will probably be familiar to many of you. It is half-way through the semester, and your physics teacher is going to discuss Newton’s Laws. You come into class, sit down, and the teacher begins to write on the board: “These are Newton’s three laws of motion. #1: Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it. #2:...,” and so on. No explanation is given as to what observations, integrations, or discoveries Newton made in order to arrive at these laws of motion. No account is given of the long history behind Newton’s laws of motion--of the earlier theories that were refuted or were accepted and refined.

This method of teaching is extremely rationalistic. Scientific knowledge is presented as a series of commandments rather than as conclusions that have been reached by a laborious process of observation, experiment, and induction. If taught physics this way, a student’s grasp of the principles is necessarily detached from reality.

This approach to teaching physics also fails to provide students with a real understanding of the scientific method. If they are not exposed to the way in which a great scientist makes observations and then integrates them to arrive at an innovative conclusion, then they will not understand how science is done. Like the writing process, it will seem like an innate gift of born scientists, and they will never understand that they too can learn the process by which new discoveries are made. Because students are not learning the scientific method through real, historical examples of scientific discoveries, they usually have a few classes within the physics course devoted just to the scientific method. But the way this method is taught reflects the same rationalism. Students are told that the first step in the scientific process is to, “Choose a hypothesis.” Not a word is said about the process of observation that should lead you to a hypothesis, so the implication is that the hypothesis must be chosen on a whim or divinely inspired. Again, what they leave out is observation, integration, induction.»

O restante artigo comenta o sucesso da VanDamme Academy.

Relação entre paradigmas científicos

This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.

Research & Node Layout: Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans (mapofscience.com); Data: Thompson ISI; Graphics & Typography: W. Bradford Paley (didi.com/brad); Commissioned Katy Börner (scimaps.org). Visit the Information Esthetics site to order a free print.

(via SeedMagazine)

Dois errados fazem um... errado

As reacções de António Costa e do governo português ao relatório norte-americano que apresentava, entre outras coisas, indícios de abusos das forças de segurança e tráfico de seres humanos em Portugal foi muito interessante. Não reconhecem legitimidade ao departamento de estado dos EUA para avaliar o respeito pelos direitos humanos noutros países e António Costa vai ainda mais longe, apontando que os EUA têm muito com que se preocupar internamente em termos de direitos humanos. Este tipo de respostas espontâneas acabam sempre por gerar problemas se forem analisadas mais de perto. É que os responsáveis portugueses podiam simplesmente ter dito que 1) não tinham lido o relatório e, portanto, não se iriam pronunciar antecipada e precipitadamente, 2) tinham lido e não concordavam (apontando evidências que contradissessem os resultados da avaliação) ou 3) tinham dado início a um processo de averiguação para apurar se os factos apontados se confirmavam, garantindo que seriam tomadas medidas adequadas se necessário. Em vez disto, preferiram simplesmente desautorizar qualquer relatório externo que contenha dados verídicos apenas porque é proveniente de outro país.

As duas consequências mais evidentes são que, a partir deste momento, ninguém no governo poderá criticar qualquer aparente violação dos direitos humanos noutro país que não Portugal (os EUA, por exemplo), coisa que, aliás, António Costa teve a exímia capacidade intelectual de conseguir fazer exactamente na mesma entrevista em que também afirmava que nenhum país tinha legitimidade para julgar outro. A outra consequência é que se o governo está realmente a falar a sério - se não estiver, a única razão para descredibilizar o dito estudo é ocultar conhecimentos que possua sobre o que realmente se passa com os direitos humanos em Portugal, o que, no mínimo, levanta algumas suspeitas - deixará de poder apresentar-se como defensor internacional dos direitos humanos dado que assim como o Estado português recusa a avaliação externa (afinal de contas, a avaliação da actuação de um governo feita por si próprio é infinitamente mais isenta e fiável...) qualquer outra entidade soberana pode reclamar o mesmo e não reconhecer autoridade a Portugal, ou a outro país, tendo o governo de dizer que está de acordo com essa decisão, o que o obrigaria a ser condescendente com estes crimes mesmo que os seus parceiros em política externa o pressionem - ou seja, que, no fundo, reconhece a si mesmo e aos outros autoridade zero para discutir o que se passa noutros países que não os respectivos. [Não vale a pena ter acessos de ingenuidade, os governos nunca são coerentes com as suas declarações por isso isto não vai acontecer] O panorama dos direitos humanos em Portugal também não sai mais reforçado já que se efectivamente existir algum problema, o governo só iria responder a análises feitas por si próprio (os guardas não precisam de ninguém que os guarde, a lei é para regular a acção do povo) ou de organizações não-governamentais.

Atacar o mensageiro é muito fácil e satisfaz pelo seu conteúdo emocional que, não respondendo à veracidade das premissas envolvidas no assunto, o desvia para outro mais atractivo e simpático mas que é totalmente irrelevante para o facto em causa. Seja qual for a verdadeira razão do governo para rejeitar o relatório de forma tão imediata - populismo nacionalista/antiamericano ou disfarce - tal comportmento não pode implicar nada de bom. Talvez as pessoas que costumam orgulhar-se do papel que Portugal supostamente representa no mundo, em termos da defesa histórica de certos valores civilizacionais (por exemplo, a abolição precoce da pena de morte) encarados como absolutos, devessem considerar seriamente as consequências destas declarações e a aparente inexistência de qualquer reacção visível de contestação.

Steve Jobs Commencement Speech