According to the report, many girls with extremely high aptitude for math exist, but they are rarely identified in the U.S. because they veer from a career trajectory in the mathematical sciences due to the low respect American culture places on math, systemic flaws in the U.S. public school education system, and a lack of role models. — American Culture Derails Girl Math Whizzes, Study Finds

archive and screenshot: http://bit.ly/info/3zJitA
via: skepchick

Shocker: girls are actually quite good at math, but our culture thinks math is stodgy and gross, so girls shy away from it. We all knew that, but nice to see it actually demonstrated…

Continuing the theme of turning healthy snacks into deadly artery bombs, an apple was sliced, battered, and fried. What emerged from the oil was something so delicious it made Mother Nature weep at her own incompetence in the face of what man hath wrought. — Skepchick: Critical Thinking at its Finest

“You know that sign in the lobby that says improve everything we touch? Please don’t.” — Francis S. Blake, CEO Home Depot

Context: speaking on how Home Depot has had so many initiatives that it wasn’t succeeding at any of them. Source: Home Depot’s total rehab, pg 2. Retrieved from CNNMoney.com on 25 Sep 2008.

Reverend Professor Michael Reis, Director of Education at the Royal Society has recently advocated the “teach the controversy” approach to creationism in schools.

The author goes on to point out the flaws with said “teach the controversy” approach. Unfortunately, while I entirely agree with the author’s argument against teaching the “controversy” of evolution vs. creation in a science classroom, I don’t think the Reverend Professor is actually suggesting that we do so.

The original BBC news article says:

Rev Prof Reiss, a biologist and Church of England minister, said he now believed it was more effective to engage with pupils’ ideas about creationism, rather than to obstruct discussion with those who do not accept the scientific version of the evolution of species. ((emphasis mine))

It seems that he’s not advocating the active teaching of the controversy, but rather encouraging science teachers not to shut down the discussion when students bring it up.

Reiss himself is quoted in the same BBC news article:

“My experience after having tried to teach biology for 20 years is if one simply gives the impression that such children are wrong, then they are not likely to learn much about the science that one really wants them to learn.”

Reiss seems to be arguing that it would be more effective for science teachers to address the controversy when it arises, because failing to do so merely alienates (rather than enlightens) creationist kids. This makes sense: if a creationist kid challenges evolution, it’s a teachable moment. The instructor has the opportunity to address the controversy head-on, which is far more likely to engage and convince the student than attempting to invalidate the student’s beliefs.

As Reiss says (from the same BBC news article):

“I think a better way forward is to say to them ‘look, I simply want to present you with the scientific understanding of the history of the universe and how animals and plants and other organisms evolved.’”

Put another way, instructors need to acknowledge creationist students’ beliefs, and use them to advantage in opening their minds to learn about evolution. Nothing Reiss says suggests to me that he’s advocating acknowledgment of creationism or ID as science.

That’s quite a different position than “advocating the ‘teach the controversy’ approach”.

SQL statements in Python

Wrong way:

curs = connection.cursor()
curs.execute("SELECT col1, col2 FROM atable WHERE id = " + id_var)
curs.execute("""
    UPDATE atable SET col1 = %s
    WHERE id = %d" % (new_value, id_var))
""")

Both statements make SQL injection easy. What if idvar or newvalue were ; SELECT * FROM atable ; --?

The first .execute uses string concatenation, the second uses string formatting to accomplish the same goal.

Right way:

curs = connection.cursor()
curs.execute(
    "SELECT col1, col2 FROM atable WHERE id = ?", 
    (id_var)
)
curs.execute(
    "UPDATE atable SET col1 = ? WHERE id = ?", 
    (new_value, id_var)
)

This way, the database driver uses binding to pass the values where the ‘?’ characters are in the statement. The driver takes care of checking for safety and proper datatypes, quoting and escaping characters as needed. This entirely avoids SQL injection.

SQL statements in Perl

Wrong way: $sth = $dbh->prepare(”SELECT col1, col2 FROM atable where id = $id_var”); $sth->execute();

Avoid variable substitution, concatenation, and sprintf.

Right way:

$sth = $dbh->prepare('SELECT col1, col2 FROM atable where id = ?');
$sth->execute( $id_var );

Use the ‘?’ prototype in the prepare call, then execute with the variables, in order, to bind to the prototypes.

More accomplishment is good, right? Unfortunately, most productivity systems don’t adequately address the concept of opportunity cost: the notion that if you decide to do task A right now, you’re also deciding not to do task B, C, or D right now.

Productivity, to me, is not about how much you get done, but about how much of the right things you get done. Put another way, productivity should be about managing opportunity costs, not merely about managing time.

“Section 8 of Senate Bill 200 is a wide open door for any judge to censor anything that condemns homosexuality, including Scripture,” Colorado State Rep. Kevin Lundberg said.

Many Christians fear that one day the Bible will be considered illegal in America.

“I do believe that the Bible is banned, under the plain language of this new statute,” Steve Crampton, general counsel of the pro-family Liberty Counsel, said, indicating he believes that day is already here. — “Censoring the Bible? It Could Happen in CO“, CBNnews, retrieved 2008-Aug-20.

Could there really be such a bill under consideration? Fortunately, the State of Colorado posts all bills under consideration by the Senate in PDF format: Bill 08-200 is no exception.

This whole fiasco appears to be much ado about nothing: the bill in question basically prohibits owners of businesses (not churches or private associations, mind you) from doing things like posting “gays not allowed” signs.

Specifically, Colorado Senate Bill 200 is an Amendment to existing law that adds “SEXUAL ORIENTATION” to the list of things which cannot be discriminated against legally. Currently, the list includes race, gender, and religion.

The section (Bill 200, Section 8) in question amends Colorado Revised Statute 24-34-701 (summary), which currently prohibits only the owners, operators, etc. of “place[s] of public accommodation [e.g. hotels], resort[s], or amusement” from publishing, distributing, etc. an material that discriminates against any “disability, race, creed, color, sex, marital status, national origin, or ancestry”. It also forbids the same from refusing service to such people.

The new bill only adds “sexual orientation” to that list.

This in no way impacts or censors the bible. It only means that hotels, amusement parks, and other public places of business can’t post discriminatory signs, or provide other kinds of material that limit what someone can do based on sexual orientation (or race, sex, creed [religion], etc.).

How does such nonsense get published? I think the key to answering that is in the article itself: “Many Christians fear that one day the Bible will be considered illegal in America.” But just how well-founded is that fear?

Not very, as it turns out. As of 2000, 76.5% of US claims “Christian”, while only 0.4% claims “athiest”; what are the chances that someone could successfully censor the holy book of over 3/4 the US population?

It’s as if H.P. Lovecraft, returned from the dead and speaking by seance to Larry Wall, designed a language both elegant and terrifying for his Elder Things to write programs in… — Matt Olson, asr

And people wonder why I love Perl. ;-)

What’s next, the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment? Jiminy.– DaringFireball

I can’t tell if he knows that “Buy n Large” is the pretend company from Wall-E or not. Were you kidding, John, or did you really think someone was trying to brand a compass direction?

The search for static security - in the law and elsewhere - is misguided. The fact is security can only be achieved through constant change, adapting old ideas that have outlived their usefulness to current facts. — Henry Miller

correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. — Mr. Fred, from Our Corner, by Annie Besant; as quoted in DENIED ASPIRATES.

Mr. Fred is pointing out that all use of language is, in a way, slang — a choice of words that marks one’s class. Interesting point.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” — Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find / They’re blind to own failings, others’ skills

So from 18 to 66 percent in two years — in what had seemed until very recently a relatively old and stable market. In short: people who care about computers, at least insofar as “caring” means “spending over $1000”, are switching to Macs. Interesting. — John Gruber, Daring Fireball: Sixty-Six

Yes, that is interesting. However, there’s a lot of buried complexity that just doesn’t come out in the statement above, or the article from which it comes.

First, the “PC market” in general is very hard to define, especially for people who really care about their machines. Purely anecdotal, of course, but most people I know who care deeply about computing build their own machine from parts¹ — those numbers are not counted in the PC market-share analysis.

Second, while Apple’s growth in a market segment ($1000+ PCs) is impressive, it’s not very useful information when it comes to observing trends in the overall market. In that regard, I think Mr. Gruber is on the nose when he says:

a simplistic “overall PC market share” number has never been a good metric for gauging the Mac’s success because the “overall PC market” includes millions of commodity-level low-end machines that Apple neither tries nor wants to sell. — John Gruber, Daring Fireball: Sixty-Six

I’d take it a step further, though — I think that the metric is poor because Apple isn’t really a PC company. Apple’s computer products, from design to the way they’re marketed, is so wildly different than the rest of the industry that I’m not sure Apple really even belongs in the set. What you buy from Apple is less computer and more experience.

1. Those that don’t, though, do seem to buy Macs.

1. Download the MySQL Linux sources

2. Unpack them to your cygwin home directory:

   $ cd ~ ; tar xzf mysql-5.0.51b.tar.gz

3. Configure and install:

   $ cd mysql-5.0.51b
   $ ./configure && make && make install

4. Check the above for errors. If there are none, continue.

5. Download the DBD::mysql distribution from CPAN

6. Unpack this into your cygwin home directory:

   $ cd ~ ; tar xzf DBD-mysql-4.007.tar.gz

7. Build the makefile

   $ cd DBD-mysql-4.007
   $ perl Makefile.PL --mysqlconfig=/usr/local/bin/mysqlconfig –testhost=127.0.0.1

8. Make, and optionally make test — note that ‘make test’ may produce some failures, but DBD::mysql may still work

   $ make
   optional: $ make test
   $ make install

9. You’re done!

Enjoy!