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Science Fair Exhibits: Fair Game For Censorship
Jake_Man writes: "A rather intelligent young lady had her science fair project regarding racial preferences amongst adults and children yanked after being on display for an hour. Not only is this building tremendous confidence and self esteem in a young lady interested in the scientific field, it's just more of the "if we don't talk about it, it'll go away" mentality to which our nation's school children are subjected everyday. What a great way to help children learn to think for themselves ..."
Something else that should be taken into account is that children are more likely to judge beauty by what is more important in their lives. Mother's are always beautiful to their young children and Dad can slay dragons. If the school is over 90% white, then the children have white parents. The white Barbie is more like Mom, so it must be prettier. Adults, on the other hand, have grown up (hopefully) and learned to base beauty on other criteria.
Shouldn't background and the past taken into account as well? Hypothetical example: person A was put down all their live, whenever they picked up a book, drunken mom said "put that down, it's for geeks". Person B had supportive parents who encouraged her couriosity and paid for her private schooling. Both apply for a job, and perform equally well on all tests administered. Who deserves the job?
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Y is a vowel in times that it sounds like either an "e" or a "I". For instance Sky. In the word You "Y" is a consanant. Sorry.
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
> The alternative would of course be to make the book a part of the school curriculum. There it can be discussed with children and they can see for themselves what is wrong with the arguments given in the book. All the mysticism surrounding a book disappears and it just becomes another lesson from history - one that we all know we should not forget.
Of course it would not work. You seem to think that by arguing with a neo-nazi you could make him change its mind.
Go back on earth.
Last discussion I had with a neo-nazi ended with:
"You think too much. You are dangerous. When we'll take over the country, you'll be in the first we'll kill" (translated from french, but verbatim).
Ban them. Squish them. Marginalize them. You cannot talk with those people. We should learn from history.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Wow. We have come a long way. And I can't explain what's really driving it, except for the media's need to provoke anxiety in order to sell ads.
Actually, it may be that society has a more feminine perspective today. In the past there were many dark corners that women did not approve of. Now it seems that those dark corners are being first illuminated, then sanitized. I am pretty confident that fire will be illegal within my lifetime. For civilian use, I mean. If the Philadelphia police want to firebomb a building full of weirdos, that's different.
I'd say that given the level of attention it got and the amount of discomfort it caused, her science project was a complete success. Indeed, I doubt she had imagined that it would be nearly as successful as it was.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
You are underestimating your conformity. Do you drive on the right side of the road? Why? Do you spit in people's faces? Why not? Do you wear clothes at work? At home? In the pool? Do you watch any television? If so, do you laugh at any of the same things as the laugh track? Do you speak English? When a friend experiences pain (death in the family, loss of job, etc) do you comfort him or her? When your child hangs out with kids who smoke and then decides to smoke when you tell him not to, is he thinking for himself--or conforming to a different "authority figure"?
Some of these things are innate to being human. Some are socially acquired. In any case they do not necessarily equate to "thinking for yourself". What the previous poster was saying was that, in order to function in a group, you have to be using the same protocol as the rest of the group. But as you hint (although not clearly) conformity and free-thinking are actually perpendicular. Person A may conform because that's the way they were raised. Person B may conform because they've analyzed the protocol and are just emulating it "on the outside". Real people are a combination of both.
Feel free to spout on about how non-conformist and free-thinking you are. The very fact that you want to communicate with us (and are succeeding) points out that you are less different than you think.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
I still reject the idea that a truthful statement...or a provocative statement...is worthless. Maybe her science wasn't MIT-level, but her conclusion is anything but worthless.
Useful information does happen to come from non-scientific inquiries. I know that's hard for many of us (including myself) to accept sometimes, but the scientific method is not the be all end all of making observations...
> The only real way to handle bad ideas is to challenge them with better ideas.
Sure. Challenge them with your ideas, while they challenge you and your relatives with baseball bats.
Now, let's have a public debate on why paedophilia is good (okay, maybe we should need the consent of one of the parents, but beside that, it looks really fun.)
You also said:
> Furthermore, isolating a group of bad-ideas-supporters does not help to win them over.
> So really, all censorship does is impede debate
This is definitely not proved. There is no debate of any sort with those guys. They would win, because they don't give a fuck about what you think.
Do the fact of beeing able to talk about the "church" of scientology enable USA to "win them over". Did you saw any debate there ? In france, there is something called a 'droit the reponse' (right to answer), that can be used when something slanderous is said in a newspaper. The newspaper have to publish this. The Front National (french wannabe nazi party) uses this systematically. Each time an article says anything about the FN, they send a very verbose 'droit the reponse', in order to get newspaper space. Where is the debate ? Nowhere.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Teachers can be very two-faced, displaying the enlightened, human persona to the outside world while acting as a petty and cruel dictator within the school. I would say that this is the norm rather than the exception. To be fair, teachers get this way partly through dealing with children over a long period of time.
I once talked to a Las Vegas Jail Officer at a party. He was a very nice guy. Hearing his war stories, though, I became aware that he does not show his 'nice guy' side to inmates.
I haven't seen much explicit political message from teachers. They do share an implicit philosophy of unquestioning subservience to authority.
There's slavery in Sudan right now!
Don't know about America, but there is slavery in at least Europe, Southeast Asia.
It's not legal, but it is quite extended.
Young foreign women are carried into the country and forced into prostitution. They are held in subhuman conditions and they are not paid. They are passed from whorehouse to whorehouse every several weeks.
They may have known they were going to be prostitutes, but they came expecting to earn 1st world money.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It seems that the folks posting here have discipline and authoritarian control improperly lumped together as one thought. I always thought discipline was the idea of self control. You know, the "discipline" to no wack down someone who is speaking ill of you. I guess self control would be the word I am looking for to be equivalent to discipline. You can tell immediately about children whose parents didn't instill proper discipline - these people are ready to fly off the handle if you say something negative at them. These are the types that shoot co-workers, co-students, and anyone else who pisses them off. They have no control or check on their emotions.
But lets also make it clear that discipline has no basis in good morals or bad morals. You could say trained killers are disciplined individuals. A better example though is a good airliner pilot. There are many examples of airline pilots running head first into the ground and the tapes showing the methodical sequencing of engines and control surfaces to attempt to bring the plane into normal operational parameters. These people's rational side control their emotional sides. Thats discipline. Discipline arrives only from steady and continuous training. Do you let your child throw tantrums and act up in public? You may think you are being non-authoritarian, but what is actually happening is a training process. The training process does not instill discipline over the child's emotional state. When older that child will probably act like a big baby.
Authoritarian controls instilled into a child would be something on the order of a child not stealing MP3s because the FBI would break down their door and haul all their computer equipment off, instead of the child/person realizing, hey, thats theft of intellectual property and artists are losing money. The world would be a better place if children were taught the basics of right and wrong, and then allowed to make their own decisions about it, but instead we rely on our authoritarian structures to make sure children and adults stay within the lines. This has great psychological impact down the road for our entire society. We begin to do things because we have too. Habits form and habits make for dull minds.
I probably will get modded to -3 for the intellectual property theft thing... but hopefully I have made sense to some folks here.
TurboD
I did snow avalanches. Paper-machee mountain painted white, and a scoop of white gravel pushed off the top. I put Lego people on the slope to show how an avalance might kill a person. I think I got an A.
<br><br>
Then there was this one kid who brought cow eyeballs from a slaughterhouse in a Tuperware container. Nobody complained, but I think the FBI has been watching him ever since (5th grade).
Ah, but isn't it possible that being subjected to arbitrary rules and discipline actually encourages critical thinking? I wonder if I'd be as independent as I am if I were raised in some ideal environment. Where are kids going to learn what tyranny and censorship really mean? From a textbook? Much better to let them learn first hand what it's like to have your freedom suppressed, and schools are very good at this.
If you read The Diamond Age, there's a rather nasty teacher who's employed mainly to teach the girls that the world is not full of nice, rational people.
Dude,
Anybody that puts their mouth on Clarance Thomas before Natalie Portman deserves to be eaten themselves first.
- jafiwam
You comment that Boston has a serious problem with racism then go on to blame that problem on the micks.... does anyone else see the irony here?
I suppose because I'm Irish then I'm also a drunk who dresses in green all the time and mutters about "me lucky charms"?
- Toby
My second blunder was a year or two later in late 1978, when I tried to build a computer from an 8080A chipset that Radio Shack was selling. I know it was late 1978 because around that time I got a TRS-80 for my 14th birthday. Even if I hadn't made any mistakes with the wiring, I didn't understand the concept of fan-out very well, and most of the pins on the 8080A have a TTL fan-out of one, and needed bus buffer chips. Oops. I know I got an Honorable Mention on this one.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Initially, the school bureaucracy deferred to those who might have been uncomfortable.
Nowhere in the Bill of Rights does it say anything about the right to not be offended. However, the Constitution of the United States SPECIFICALLY guarantees your freedom of speech. Oh, wait, children don't have rights, I forgot.
FP
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Actually, latin people are represented quite well in baseball. I think baseball and football are the two sports that carry a good mix of the races. Basketball tends to be heavily black, hockey tends to be heavily white. But you know what? I could care less. I just wanna watch the people who are good. If blacks can play better, then put on blacks. If whites can play better, then put them on and listen to Reverend Al complain about it. But that's a different rant. :P
I don't, but it's highly improbable that a black person would have Thielen as a last name.
So Goodchild sez, he sez:
"All these care-free hippy children who can do whatever they please is a very bad trend in today's society. Kids need stern discpline from their parents, not friendship! To treat your child as an equal is to guarantee that they will become dysfunctional adults with no real understanding of how to properly behave in society."
And the proof of his thesis is that awful, un-American Open Source software movement. All those Linux programmers who give Jim Allchin sleepless nights full of worry about the fate of our Beloved Republic, are obviously the spawn of all those commune-living, free-love-sharing, pot smoking hippes from the late 60s.
If Stallman's parents had whupped that boy like he no doubt deserved, we wouldn't have to worry about people giving away software to the detrement of major American software corporations.
Encouraging your children to think will just cause problems for everybody later in life. Next time the kids ask why, just tell 'em, "Because I said so, that's why!" and beat them mecilessly for their impudence.
That'll learn 'em!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Your experience is not unique to the UK. Here in the US teachers are also employed by the government, and exhibit the same sort of stupidity. Some people, actually alot, think that just because teachers work for the government doesn't mean they will indoctrinate children with pro-government views. I think this is a very naive view. Sure, some won't (your experience of 2 out of 30 is about the same as mine was), but the majority will. The best way I heard someone explain it was through this discourse: A: "Would you send your children to a catholic school?" B: "No way" A: "Why not?" B: "Well, I'm not catholic. I don't agree with catholic views so why should I send my children to be taught by catholics?" A: "Then why do you send your children to be taught by government bureaucrats, if you don't want them to be taught the government point of view?" This dialog very naturally extends to why should I have to pay for government schools then if my children don't go to them: A: "So, you choose not to send your children to catholic schools since you don't agree with their view. How would you feel if the catholic school forced you to pay towards their tuition, EVEN if you send your children somewhere else?" B: "That's crazy!" A: "Then why do you think I don't want to pay taxes towards a public school, even if I don't agree with the views they teach, and I send my children elsewhere?" B: "Oh."
--------- "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." P.J. O'Rourke
you know I would say that trying this test on 3 billion people is not enough to infer what she did either , cause you know that the other 3 billion people in the world could react very differenty
come on, think about it she is 8 not a fucking paid scientest quit looking at the wrong and see the right
geez some people
That's pretty sad. We are raising a son, 3 years old now, my goal is to prepare him for homeschool type courses for junior high years, and lead him into a Junior College for the high school years. Public High Schools are ridiculous. Second rate education, and a constant social clusterfuck. Why not just attend JC where you can choose your courses, and pursue your intrests at a collegiate level?
Thinking: "Thielen" sounds German, maybe Scandinavian. What are the odds she's Black? Whether or not she is Black, questioning a double standard in this case is still a valid point. The subtext being that race relations are not only not a topic for a seemingly well-designed (at least at that level) sociology study that did not produce a tendentious or otherwise questionable result, but that they are not a topic for Whites. Seems like a good thing to bring up that question.
I wrote parts of this stuff
This is why universities have tenure.
Excuse me? She shouldn't be having a race dialogue at the age of eight??? Do you suggest she wait until she and her peers are 18 and have solidified their prejudices and stereotypes? Really - the time we should be addressing sensitivity (race-based, sexual orientation-based, etc) is when they are young.
And, there was no dialogue taking place. It was a project that could have generated some much-needed dialogue in that community...but instead the project was removed from display to prevent such dialogue from happening. So, instead of talking about the topic of her display like we might have been, we're bitching about whether or not it should have been censored. Schoolhouse censors win.
The fact of the matter is, the school didn't want to deal with the issues that surround an examination of racial bias in their community.
Let's stay on focus people.
People's arguments should be about the censorship issue, not racism (or sexism if you were to replace black/white with men/women in the article)
AC comments get piped to
Only black people work at McDonalds
Does it include upper ranges or just those facing the public?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
One way I can contribute to social change is by educating the young, and wait for the old people to die off.
I know one way to accelerate the change.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I think this is her webpage:
http://www.thielen.com/users/brianna/
or simply http://www.thielen.com for her faimily's page.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Yeah, and my kid just got her science project list, to which she could choose "which do people prefer, coke or pepsi" and "can people tell the difference between cheap frozen pizza and expensive frozen pizza?" The umpteen other options were equally lame to bother with, unless maybe you're 6 or 7.
Bleah. 15 yrs old and in 8th grade and these are the choices. Last year the probability stuff, mendelian inheritance and so forth with genetics with some livestock we were breeding was rejected. Before that, the laser beam stuff was given low scores because the teacher was convinced I did the work (I don't have TIME dangit!). Give the kids some credit... encourage them to THINK on their own. I don't always like what my kids end up thinking, but sometimes it is absolutely amazing that their brains can and DO work as teens and I've had enough of a school system that has dumbed down things to the point where my kids won't even be qualified to ask "ya want FRAIYS with that?"
Grrrrr. just venting. I'm just glad this will be the last year here for the 'mandatory science project' crap, and sad that I won't be able to eat any of those frozen pizzas we got for the lousy "experiment".
--rio
from the state that finally decided that evolution would be ok to present as a theory again
must I?
The other option is that one of them looked better than the other in a given dress.
Do these pants make my butt look big?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Even if I'm playing pool and put a little english on the Ball?
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
I can see yanking it if it violated one/some of the MESA policies. I don't think its fair but after all, school is not now nor has it ever been a democracy.
But somehow I think that the sentence
"We believe that the science fair is not an appropriate forum for such a complex issue."
falls a little short of the mark. Last time I checked, Sociology was still a (complex) science.
Assuming the project conducted fairly and as acuratly as possible, pulling it (IMHO) was a bad idea. This kind of behavior will get a school or organization nothing but bad press everytime. (hey, maybe some good did come out of it after all!)
Anyway, whether people want to admit it or not society as a whole does have some problems, and sometimes young minds are the ony ones to see them. They should be encouraged to point them out, and try to correct them, not hide ignore them and hope they go away.
When will we ever learn...
RA7
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"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
I think you are correct.
:)
Reading the original post again, if I parse it this way: "People who present themselves as free thinkers or are perceived to be free thinkers can in reality be more conformist than most", I would agree. In other words, don't judge a book by its cover.
But I took the word 'nominal' to be redundant, which is where I erred. I see now why you focused on the word 'can'.
Regarding the approach issue, I then went on to try to make a clear distinction between an act of conformity and an act of free thought, which I think is relevant, as an aside at least.
Of course some are proud of this, I'm sure.
However, it is clear from most of the posts here that no one has realized that the experimenter was an 8 year old girl. If she honestly came up with the experiment herself, doubtless of its absolute or not so absolute scientific perfection, she has the making of a future scientist. Her project should not have been canceled. Its so obvious, and yet everyone misses it who posts some silly comment about "no scientific basis". So many posts are judging this little girl's experiment at the level that she must have been a 28 year old sociologist with a PhD who already believes she has all the world's answers. Its grade school folks. She is not a slashdotter and think she knows at all. She took what she thought was a good guess and investigated. We call that creativity. I'm sure several of the other projects were just as wrong, but they didn't involve race, and they were not pulled.
What I even find more appaling about people who agree with the project pull over grounds of scientific correctness, its clear that the project was not pulled by the school because of scientific error. Instead it was pulled because of possible offense to someone, whether or not the fears were founded. That makes for some pretty deep wrongness, considering we are the country of free speech.
Finally, it seems that the know-it-all's here have no separation on the views of discipline, thought processes, and authoritarian control. Its amazing to me that such a group of people that perceive themselves to be great thinkers don't have the *discipline* of basic scientific knowledge and fact surrounding them. That trully scares me. It also proves a long standing assertion of mine -- slashdotters are just appliance operators. Heh, don't get me wrong about my own socialogical database, I don't know jack, but I do know the difference between discipline, free thought, and authoritarian control. I can also realize the difference of a 8 year old grade student and a 28 year old PhD professor, as well as the obvious reason the girl's project was canceled.
TurboD
Well, I don't know about inherently evil, but I've always thought the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine was original sin. After all, how many parents have to teach their kids how to be bad?
Maybe you should stop apologizing for a system that clearly doesn't work
It is clear that the American educational system isn't working, but is it really the fault of an "arbitrary and micromanaging schedule imposed by an 'authority' figure"? As one who was raised in the American educational system and is now part of what most Americans would likely consider a rather hyper-authoritarian (not to mention "standardized") one, I'd have to say there's something to be said for it. At the very least, Taiwan consistently outperforms American students in the maths and sciences.
So you go out and get a gun and kill the popular people. And we have all the boo-hoo-ing and the wringing of hands and national press about this quiet young outcast lad who inexplicably went nuts.
It's not inexplicable, people. I was involved with an underground newspaper myself, for the same reasons some other repliers here have mentioned. The "outcasts" will be heard somehow, either by smoking across the street from the school, or writing editorials about the bullshit in the school newspaper or whatever. If you keep the lid on the pressure cooker too long, it will explode. So, don't make the kids conform. You have to let the pressure off somehow. And since we can't have our music or our video games without censorship . . . .
Hey, our first amendment has been cut off, let's move on to the second.
Do not touch -Willie
to be fair, u just described me in every detail except the hair.
No, I must have been sick that day. What did you tell that person? I wouldn't completely dismiss that idea, by the way. Objectivism tends to feed on parental opposition. It's impossible to oppose Ayn Rand without sounding just like one of her villains.
Dude, you missed the point entirely. The other side of this coin is that these "censors" were reacting to immense pressure to never offend anybody, anywhere, ever, no matter what. Otherwise they might get sued into oblivion by the offended party and come out the other side of a lawsuit ostracized as racists. It is more than a little ironic that two of the drivers of censorship in this case are institutional authoritarian conformism and (the chilling results of) politically correct hyper-activism.
It seems to me that the important lesson here is to parents:
YOU are responsible for the process of developing your child into a free, thinking adult. Forces outside your home will do their best to whittle your progeny down to a TV hypnotized semi-concious consumer-droid. If you want your child to grow up to be a free adult, the job is yours. May you succeed.
The harm to this child will depend on the support she receives from her parents. If she has been given a strong enough a world view to resist Barbie-and-Ken America (seems like she is off to a good start) then this will become an incident that will strengthen her.
See Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Because of the name. Take Thielen and do some quick searches on the net for it. You can pull up a half dozen "homepages" for people with the name thielen, all white, and a page of some guy doing geneology i beleive says its from the netherlands, but i dont completely understand the language(i know a little germnan, and this is close but not quite).
m e_n.htm
[1] http://members.tripod.com/~Evert/homepage/frwelco
I helped found an independent underground paper in high school also. We had real writing about real issues, unlike the fluffy, asinine official school paper. After the first issue came out the administrators 'ordered' us to cease and desist. There wasn't anything terribly controversial in that issue - just an op-ed denouncing Jerry Falwell or something. I did some investigation, found out that court precedents were on our side, and we continued to publish until we got bored with it. Administration was constantly harassing us though - calling us into the office and threatening us with suspension, etc. He held our ground though, and were on the verge of bringing the ACLU into it.
I also wrote a libertarian column in the student section of the local (not school) newspaper. In two columns I spoke out against the war on drugs, saying it was immoral, a failure, and counterproductive. This was around 1984-85, when such talk was very unpopular. Anyway, my English teacher went ballistic over the columns, pulling me into a room and screaming at me, throwing papers at me, etc. He then called my dad and freaked out. Dad (also a libertarian) told him to stick it up his ass. He then called the local newspaper and said I wasn't allowed to write columns for them anymore. Thankfully, being the defenders of free speech that they are, they told him to stick it up his ass as well. They did start running a disclaimer at the end of all columns that said 'The views expressed in this column are the views of the writer, and not necessarily those of his/her school.' Duh.
So, school was a miserable, miserable experience for me. I hated that shithole.
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IMHO, The child in question behaved quite responsibly, and with a maturity some adults could learn from. Like most of us, she sees that, whether it should or not, race does matter in today's society. Rather than trying to take sides, she conducted an experiment to quantify that phenomenon, and then presented her findings.
In response, the adults present removed a perfectly valid and useful science project from the fair.
As you state, children need discipline. That is, when a child does something irresponsible or wrong, they should be corrected. In this case, the child did something responsible and right. The exhibit was certainly controversial, but that does not make it wrong. It seems to me that they pulled the exhibit down because it was controversial. By doing so, they taught her that talking about race relations is wrong. They taught her, and all the other children there, that being controversial was wrong.
If we teach our children that being controversial is wrong, we raise stupid little sheep. And I, for one, refuse to raise mutton.
If the adults acted responsibly, they might point out the exhibit, and use it as a starting point for a discussion on race relations. This is certainly a topic worth discussing. For my money, understanding that we don't live in a colorblind society, understanding why, and understanding what we can do about it, is much more useful to an emerging adult than remembering which shape on the map represents Belgium.
Instead, they tried to further the illusion that we do live in a colorblind society. They taught the lesson "If you ignore the issue, maybe it will go away". I don't think any of us here are stupid enough to believe that.
--The basis of all love is respect
OK, I'll fly in the face of apparent near-unanimity and suggest that taking this project down doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me, given the age of the children we're talking about. How happy would you be if your black 8-year-old walked up to another child's science-fair display, discovered that her peers overwhelmingly prefer white Barbies, and concluded that other kids like the white kids better than her? And later, when the news spread and the playground begins to self-segregate at recess? Sure, taking down the project is censorship in the technical sense, but so is keeping children out of X-rated movies. I agree that it's a shame from the point of view of the girl who did the experiment (which sounds like better science than anything I saw judging an eighth grade science fair recently), but it's not hard to imagine that leaving it up would have hurt more kids worse. We manage how we present complicated information to children, that's a huge part of the process of raising them. If this school district is really trying to ignore all race issues, in all grades, then that's probably bad, but I think they're within both their rights and their responsibilities to think about how topics like race, drugs, sex, war and religion are best broached, including deciding that a second-grade science fair, where they're already confronting the tricky subject of the scientific method and the nature of knowledge, isn't the place for some of them.
Based on this, The Boulder Valley school district web page is here. The public officials have all sorts of contact information, etc. Some even have email addresses.
Now remember that we would want intelligent discussion about this, so make sure that if you choose to communicate with them, to cite the original web page, and to use nice words. Personal attacks should be avoided, since most of these folks likely do not have a government issued flame retardant Web suit yet.
yes, the School has a web site as well, but it seems better that you send any comments to the Public officials, since it is part of their job description to occasionally be on the hot seat.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I prefer that which makes me happy... all these things could make me happy, I don't favor any of them... I might have had previous positive/negative experiences relating to them, but that does not preclude the realm of future possibility.. so I don't have a strong preference for one and against another...
sure... it strikes me odd that one could have such a strong preference for one kind of a person or another so far as to abstain from a particular kind of contact with them
when there is no sort of historical connotation I find it incredably shallow... when there is one I do think it *borders* on racism
have you ever dated/danced with/kissed a black girl? why not?
What is there to complain about? If you do something that is either illegal, or someone in power in the school district disagrees with it, they have every right to punish you. For example, you don't have the same protections against unreasonable search and seizure in U.S. highschools as you would have as an adult in the U.S. Several of my friends in highschool got busted just because they were picked out of a crowd of people and searched.
Also, a case that is on the Supreme Court docket is one that involves a kid getting punished for wearing a Marilyn Manson t-shirt that was critical of Christianity, while at the same time not vulgar. He got in trouble on the grounds that the t-shirt was controversial, and therefore disruptive to the learning environment. The school district has won that case and has been held up on appeal, so far.
So its only logical to extend the "controversy==disruption" argument to the subject of racial profiling. So, really, folks, don't act all surprised. Schools don't have to honor most of the constitutional rights that are otherwise afforded to American citizens.
Or perhaps someone in power at the school is close to the police force, who knows?
Is your company running tools written by ma
Well it is science in that she came up with an idea that was testable, then tested it. That is the core idea of science. For a 9 year old it was quite an impresive bit of work.
Science does not prove anything, it comes up with a hypothosis and then looks for ways to show it is wrong.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
When I was in HS and did a science project, no one had to approve. I just showed up the day of the fair with my experiment. I chose to use something related to biology, which I was taking at the time, because we got extra credit. My biology teacher never even saw my project (but I did get the credit ;).
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
Officially, the school district condemns censorship. As the district decrees, students' constitutional freedoms include the right to free expression and free inquiry.
Later, the director of elementary education argued, "A science fair is not the way we choose to discuss race relations."
Freedom of expression applies only in an approved forum? I guess they amended the First Amendment...
"I want school officials who are willing stand up to the politically correct whiners. I don't expect the people running a school with my tax money to put up a crucifix because someone complained. If your job is running a school, that includes standing up to a certain about of adult idiocy as well as student idiocy.
So I want those officials out. If they wanted a life without lawsuits and with no conflict and argument, they can get another job. " We don't pay those people enough to deal with shit like this! The typical school superindent has enough problems trying to teach 80 kids with 40 books without worrying about whether this kid has a proper platform to make a political statement at her science fair. If you went to the DMV and asked for a vanity plate that says "GODSUX", or "FUCK ME", you'd get turned down. Is that violating your right to free speech? No, because giving you a place to express yourself isn't their job. It's to tag your damn car. If you decided you wanted to make a statement by hanging out naked in the lobbies of large business buildings, you'd get arrested. Because the businesses aren't violating your right to expression. It's the same thing here. You can't expect a school to allow something like this to stir up all kinds of crap, because they're the ones who have to clean it all up. You're just going to go in, make a huge mess, and slink out the back. It's not their job to give you a place to express yourself, and they're not infringing on your rights just because they don't.
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
This girl should be commended, She performed a real scientific experiment, she came up with a hypothosis and figured out an inovative way to test it. She then documented her findings.
It is my understanding that most Science fair experiments are rather dull and pointless.
She should get an "A".
Erlang Developer and podcaster
...but are her conclusions flawed because her methodology was??? I don't know if I would say her conclusions are flawed at all.
If I base my conclusion that 2+2=4 on astrology, is my conclusion wrong? Nope.
From what I understand, the girl performed her barbie test on all of 15 adults and 30 children. This hardly seems statistically enough to infer what she inferred so I wouldn't call it a complete science project. However, it is an interesting basis for further investigation.
Still, who can blame her when she is surrounded by spineless, politically correct drones intent on denying that the world is not perfect?
Thanks for the legal update. I was using a very broad definition for the word "criminal" and wasn't trying to be legally correct. My original point was that equal protection under the law also means equal enforcement of the law.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I had the same experience. For my 6th grade science fair I made a demonstration on how chemical batteries work. It did not involve me making a battery, I only drew a poster describing how they worked. I did the entire project the morning of the science fair and I got this big First Place trophy. It was no fun because it was meaningless, it was also the last science fair that I attended.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
As most conservatives are quick to point out, the K-12 education system is under local, not federal, control. So it's hard to see how you can blame the breakage on the federal DoE.
What percentage of local schools budgets are derived from DoE funding? Do you have any idea what strings are attached to said funds? And what, pray tell, do you think is the impact of the DoE on the educational standards in college curricula that are used to train local school teachers and administrators?
The DoE and their ilk are a plague on the education of our children.
I had almost the opposite experience, at least in high school. My Lit teachers especially tried to stimulate discussion and prodded the discussion along by bringing up controversial points. When it seemed that the whole class was in agreement, they would bring up a dissenting opinion.
One teacher even had a list of books that she planned to teach from her last year. All of them condemned by the school district (Steppenwolf, naked lunch, and a few others I can't remember right now). She felt that it would be worth it to go out with a bang.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Did anyone else notice the interesting quirk? This is very similar to the study (with Barbie dolls) done that "showed" that segregation was causing racism. I don't know if that conclusion follows from that data, although I tend to accept the conclusion anyway... but it's interesting that there was another study involving black Barbie dolls.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
No, hopefully she'll learn that the soft sciences are off limits to intelligent people, and study physics or chem or something where political correctness does not yet trump truth.
That's because her Dad (a physicist) designed the experiment. 'struth.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Actually, traffic offenses are generally not criminal offenses in the US. Speeding by more than X MPH above the speed limit can be a criminal offense. There are at least five kinds of offenses within the US, not counting civil torts: administrative, traffic, disorderly, misdemeanor, and felony. I'm sure a lawyer could cite many more. Only misdemeanors and felonies are criminal offenses.
there is no free lunch. when you express unpopular ideas in public, it costs you. sometimes your reputation, sometimes it can cost you your life. it's not a theoretical universe.
;j
why would heinen disallow a paper called "the holocaust conspiracy"? there is an opportunity here for the class to learn something, which is the point of school in the first place. refute the thing, point by point, and have an open dialogue with students. it wouldn't have to degenerate into ridiculing the writer. elementary and high-school classes are probly the *best* place to explore diatribes and claptrap. where else will kids be able to see this stuff? with the help of a good teacher, light of reason should illuminate classroom discussion at any level. but it's not a theoretical universe.
the science project shouldn't have been pulled, of course. mebbe it hit a little too close to the bone. mebbe there is a problem with race relations around here. what are they going to do, hide the symptoms and hope the disease clears up on its own? sometimes that works.
i'm getting vertigo
I was going to reply to my own post but you saved me the trouble. Well said.
And my post that touched off this thread got a FLAMEBAIT rating... my first ever! I'm so proud.
That's a cool story. Is the whole thing on the web somewhere? I think we need a web site for these things that would contain contact info for the administrators involved. Then every year, on the anniversary of the incident, hundreds of geeks could call the responsible officials and ask, 'do you still think that was a good idea?'
Actually, you can acheive statistical significance with such a small sample. Using the limited data available from This AP wire version of the story:
She dressed up a white Barbie and black Barbie in two different colored dresses. She asked 15 adults at her father's workplace which doll was prettier.
She then switched the dresses and asked 15 more adults. The doll wearing the lavender dress -- regardless of the doll's skin color -- was deemed prettiest by both groups.
Then, When she asked fifth-graders at Mesa Elementary, all 15 in one class picked the white doll. In the second class, after the dresses were switched, nine of the 15 students picked the white doll.
So, we know the following:
# of people (of 15) picking the White Doll
---------White+Lavender---Black+Lavender---Tot
Young...|..9 or 15......|....9 or 15.....|..24
Old.....|..8 to 15......|....1 to 7......|..??
Now, let's make some assumptions:
First, let's assume that Lavender is actually prettier, and that the 6 students that chose the black doll did so when she was wearing lavender. That means that we have:
# of people (of 15) picking the White Doll
---------White+Lavender---Black+Lavender---Tot
Young...|......15.......|.......9........|..24
This indicates a statistically significant main effect for doll color. A two sided chi-square (corrected with Fisher's exact test to accomodate cells with expected values less than 5) is significant p=.015.
Testing for a main effect for the adults and an age x doll+dress interaction would require knowing the cell values for adults, which are not reported.
What this means is something else entirely. According to the AP article, her conclusion was I discovered that most grown-ups liked the lavender dress on the black or white Barbie. On the other hand, kids mostly liked the white Barbie. Only six kids liked the black Barbie. Which is really just a statement of the results.
This could mean:
- that the kids are racist
- that adults are racist, but are able to supress racist feelings when they are in a study
- that adults really like lavender
- that black barbies are less common and therefore less preferred
- that black barbies are simply white barbies in a different color and look odd, as would a white person who's skin was dyed black.
- that she presented the dolls in a fashion that would encourage the kids to choose the white one, but would encourage adults to choose the lavender dress. (People have a tendency to choose the alternative on the right)
- Something else
Regardless, this doesn't speak to the issue of appropriateness. Personally, if I were a teacher, I'd use this as a golden opportunity to discuss prejudice and the importance of treating people as individuals.I think that more remorse could have been expressed. I doubt that this particular explanation will get a sympathetic hearing with the collective judge.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
The majority of our schools are designed to produce people who:
I'm sorry, I don't see any of these as bad qualities. Punctuality, organizational skills, honesty and respect are all amiable work-skills. What is the alternative, eh? Workers who:
Can a student be turned into a Metropolis-esque factory-working automoton because they went to public school? Or is it due to the fact that they didn't succeed in said school and have to find menial jobs that suit their education level? Keeping in mind, however, that all facets of industry must be populated, from the lowest janitor to the highest CEO someone has to fill those shoes. Even if somehow, everyone could be an open-minded, super-intellegent and tolerant person, we would still need janitors and factory workers.
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No the game never ends when your whole world depends
crazy dynamite monkey
I would only disagree with you slightly. Any question should be asked. However, many questions shouldn't be answered in the confines of today's experimental abilities. So, from your example, the question of race and intelligence may be a very good question, but we don't have enough information to answer it yet.
Or, the question of how long can a human infant survive underwater is a very good question, but active experimentation on this would be seen as bad by most people. However, there may be a way (advanced simulation) to answer it later.
But we still need to find questions we'd like to answer, since just knowing the question opens up many avenues of research and advancement.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
To be honest, I got rid of the issue.
But I made very sure to put nothing defamatory in it. The closest thing was something like, "People need to look at a whole person before they judge. Not just at the clothes they wear, but at who they are as a person, as a whole. Judging by appearance alone, especially at this time in our lives, is not only reprehensible, but sometimes unforgivable."
And I also commented in the article on the "Goth" and other cliques, without naming names, and said they were guilty of the same thing. None of them complained.
I even knew some of the peple who complained, the "popular" crowd. They had to ask for help with some of the big words. No kidding.
The "popular" crowd, and to a much larger extent, the well to do parents, honestly felt tht it was their right to be judgemental. And what scared em the most, was that I knew for a fact that these parents and the Administration were on very good personal terms. (ie, Country Club Buddies, etc.) So they wanted the paper to be feel-good, by whatever they had to do.
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My parents are teachers. So are all their friends. I have been surrounded by teachers of jr. high school to high school level all my life, and I can tell you that they are people just like anyone else. There's no "government indoctrination" at the hands of these "government bureaucrats," because they are as diverse a population as mechanics, librarians, doctors or anyone else. Just because you work for the government doesn't mean you are brainwashed by them! Where's the brainwashing infrastructure, anyway? When are the meetings where teachers get Taught What To Say By The Feds? They answer to the principal, who answers to the school board, who is elected by the local voters.
Schools have plenty of problems, but this isn't one of them. Unless my parents and the dozens of other teacher friends of theirs I have met socially are part of some vast conspiracy...
First off, she's 8... now much did you know about statistical validity when you were 8? Yes, her sampling is statistically invalid -- I doubt it was even random. It's not like she's up for a Nobel prize.
Second, let's stop using the term "scientific experiment." It was clearly an experiment. However, "scientific" is open to question. I'm not her teach nor am I a judge in the science fair, so let's move on.
People seem to miss a few things with respect to her inference ("hypothesis".) She supposes people choose the white barbie because "that's what they always see." That's marketing -- ala. Behold the power of cheese. That's not race related. And then changes the clothing on each and asks a different set of people. I don't see how much that's testing an race preference.
The only problem with the whole mess is that the teacher allowed her to proceed with this as her project. The teacher did know what her project was, right? What if she had chosen to perform microwave (oven) radiation exposure experiments on 30 people? [I had to settle for some russian research on the subject *grin*]
I'm not sure what you're trying to say...
If you're suggesting that it indicates the political-correctness paranoid of the authority - you're wrong. Miss Thielen was NOT saying anything bad about black so that her exhibition got pulled out.
No, she did an experiment which suggested some bias attitudes among the children. The results may not even be accurate as the experimental method was probably too crude or unscientific. But the school authority got so scared of any slight hints of such attitudes that they had to pull it out. If you are trying the play-the-victim game and pretend being suppressed by the so call "political correctness", this is NOT really one of those situations.
But of course, it is possible that you are simply stating an estimation of the situation. I can imagine that if Miss Thielen is black, the school probably can't pull out the exhibition without causing an uproar from the minority community.
Um, did you happen to look at the Raven's team, and in all sports in general? The ratio of African Americans and white people is pretty damn good IMHO. One could argue there are *more* African Americans in pro sports then in any other profession, save for perhaps Golf.
Now, if your talking about *more* African Americans in sports than whites, well your comment would seems more fitting. Asians/Latin people in American sports seems non-existiant. But I cannot say if there is none of those races in pro sports or not, mainly becuase i've never seen one in that profession.
When I watch basketball, which is occasionally, I see a good mix of black and white. To say that their are more African Americans then white people in the NBA and pro sports is unfound, unless you have other info you'd care to express.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
Christ, and I thought Boulder had enough ambigous racism encoded into the society - I dont see more than 5 african americans a day as is on the university campus, now middle school kids are told its bad to think about stuff like this.
I gotta move back to NY
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How long have you been listening to the world's famous?
'Bout six weeks.
Six weeks!
I founded an independent newspaper in high school because the organ of the communist party - oops! the school paper - had experienced some, um, questionable editing that made the administration look better than the reporters had intended. We ran stories on all sorts of things, including race relations - occasionally the principal had us over for a chat, but because we were independent ("underground"?) and didn't use school funds, nobody could do anything to us.
I know not every school district is as pro-free speech as mine (Ann Arbor, MI) was, but still this is the right approach - if you get silenced by your publisher, become a publisher yourself.
sulli
RTFJ.
The Congressional Censure of a Research Paper: Return of the Inquisition?
Kenneth K. Berry and Jason Berry
Skeptical Enquirer, volume 24, #1
On July 12, 1999, the United States House of Representatives took an historic step toward censorship of scientific findings when it voted 355 to 0 to condemn and censure a scientific publication because the members disagreed with the findings and believed that they would have a negative effect upon citizens' thoughts and actions.
The paper, published a year earlier in the American Psychological Association's jouirnal Psychological Bulletin (July, 1998), by Bruce Rind of Temple University, Philip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman was titled "A Meta-analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples." This paper was basically a review and analysis of fifty-nine previous research studies of the consequences of sexual molestation of children.
The congressional members found some of the findings personally repugnant, particularly the conclusion that some molested children grow up to be normal and a small portion are seemingly little affected by this experience. The members, especially Rep. Salmon (an Arizona Republican and a sponsor of H.Con.Res.107) believed that the findings would not only encourage pedophilia among United States citizens, but the findings could not be true. The Representatives' thinking appeared to be a demonstration of what Donald Watson (1993) called "Autistic Certainty" ("I would not believe something that was not true; I believe this is not true, therefore this must be untrue").
The article goes on for two more pages.
The point is -- just because something scares you or makes you awfully uncomfortable -- doesn't mean you have a right to censure findings. If the findings are incorrect, let the scientists deal with it, correct the results, and publish an article with opposing findings. However, legislation should have no right to censure something just because it doesn't sit well with their views.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Yeah, heaven forbid indeed. She should wait until she's at least 45 and fairly curmudgeonly before venturing into experiments in social science. We don't want the next generation to get any ideas about questioning the status quo, do we?
I mean, come on! I would be proud to have a daughter asking the tough questions at an early age - more power to her! That's an admirable trait in anyone, and if people are uncomfortable when someone questions these issues, then perhaps the problem lies with those who are made uncomfortable. Why can't kids talk about race, anyway? Adults obviously can't come to grips with it, so nobody else is allowed to try?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Why not? Are you assuming that this little girl is too stupid to understand the idea she is trying to test for?
Race dialog can happen at any age and the fact that she recognizes it as a problem is a sad indication of the state of race relations.
Regarding her being over her head; She had good methodology, a sound hypothesis and she gave her results. She drew a conclusion based on her results. That was what she was supposed to do, follow the scientific method. No, her results are not conclusive by any means, but her research could be expanded on to ask different questions, better thought out questions. She showed intelligence and inginuity, even if she lacked the ability to appreciate that her results might be flawed.
www.rdex.net
So speaks a close-minded, negative and conservative person. Do you follow the old "spare the rod, spoil the child" idea as well? Treating children the way you described is a recipe for neurotic, diffident children. Children need guidance, yes, but they are not stupid. Take the time to explain why they should or should not do something. They will get the message. In this particular case, there was absolutely -no- reason for the child not to feel proud of her work. Discrimination is a fact of life, and the sooner a child can come to terms with that reality, the better. Far better for a child to learn about prejudice through a controlled experiment than to be taunted or attacked because he or she is "different"
With the definition of "racist" left, I'm sure, to be set by the Ministry of Friendship, or whatever that translates to.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
This stands apart from most science fair projects I have heard of because she had a sample of data and she attempted to draw conclusions from it. This was a valid attempt at using what kids are taught as the "scientific method". It sounds to me like it was a pretty good elementary science experiment for an elementary school student.
I would rather see this experiment than the demonstration of a vinegar and baking soda volcano any day.
All your events are belong to us.
So at what age do you suddenly gain rights? 16? 18? 21? I've seen some extremely smart 10 year olds with a far better grasp on reality than many adults.
It's not a black and white kind of thing; That's why it's a diffucult problem that will require complex or imperfect solutions. The important thing is to note that it is also not an intellegence thing as well. Young children are not even *capable* of abstract thought so any discussion of the abstract will be lost on them. When was the last time you talked about an issue in the abstract and tried to simultaniously understand how someone who can only comprehend concrete thinking will take it. In this case it is very important to understand the audience. For Example: there is a lot of money going into teaching very young children the importance of the food pyramid and eating right. The diets of young children should actually be the responsibility of the parents to decide. WHAT!!!! those dictators! EVIL! It turns out that you can tell a child that vitamins are good for them, and oranges are good for them because they contain vitamins and then watch in horror as they scarf down hoho's at the very next meal. You have to tell them to eat oranges. You have to give them the oranges and take away the hoho's because they can't process the information yet. They can't apply what they learned to their own behaviour.
Oh yeah, we'd better not tell children about death, it might upset them. Come on, you can't hide everything. It's safer for people to know that the world isn't perfect...
No one is talking about the world being perfect. Loss, and hardship are actually very important for child development. But.... what messages are the children going to pick up from this? It may not be the same one you would hope they will.
The above poster is right (and there is plenty of scientific psycological research to back it up) about children being mentally different than adults. That tends to get overlooked on slashdot a lot. (because of the age of the audience here?)
I wish more slashdotters would RTFM when it came to childhood development and research before posting about it.
I just don't feel the solution is as simple as people think.... And i do feel very sorry for the girl who had her project pulled. She learned a very real and very harsh lesson.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
"The majority of our schools are designed to produce people who:
Show up on time
Organize their day according to alarms and bells
Do what they are told
Respect authority
In other words, they are designed to produce factory workers. No joke."
It's that the same as prisons?
(actually there are quite a few books that deal with prisons in terms of kindergarden schoools)
and to get more offtopic, I'm dubious of the factory work bit because here in Houston we launch undercover investigations of prisoners getting jobs, like bus drivers...shezz...
Can't have a prisoner take away the job of an 'honest citizen'....
Sterling
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
But did they censor all of the exhibits for which there was more than one interpretation of the data?
And if it's a bad/useless experiment, then shouldn't it simply not get a ribbon, or get an F grade, or whatever? Why remove the exhibit?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I hope you don't take what I said as gospel - I'm sure a lawyer would see all kinds of errors in it.
Dunno if I can parry that particular bit of biting reparté, but I'll try. You're simply ugly...
So it's perfectly legal for a private company to search your house? Or, to separate my example from trespassing, it's legal for a private company to access my personal information? Don't people sue companies (i.e. DoubleClick) for violating the 4th Amendment?
As for rights of guardianship, where does that come into question? The poster stated that an 8 year old has the same rights as a 30 year old. Under that stance, there are no "guardianship" rights. If that's the case, then the 8 year old has access to the 4th amendment as well as the 1st.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Thats a very interesting point! I didn't think of that. If I remember back, there were a fair number of people at school who also thought that many of the rules were stupid. It didn't seem to turn too many of them into scientists though :) But I guess it must influence their modes of thinking later in life.
Thats the second time I've seen somebody recommend 'the diamond age'. I think I'll get hold of a copy and read it.
Only as long as you don't take what _I_ say as gospel. :)
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Libertarianism isn't a form of conservative. It's got just as much in common with liberalism as it does with conservatism. (The liberal wants government to regulate the economy but not morality, the conservative wants government to regulate morality but not the economy, the libertarian wants government to regulate neither. I'm a libertarianish leftist; the two are not incompatible.
wanted (and got) warning labels on records.... a liberal Democrat (Al Gore's wife)
Bullshit. First off, the Gores are born-agains. Second, they're moderate-conservative, not in any way liberal. Howard Zinn is a liberal. Noam Chomsky is a liberal. Barney Frank is a liberal. The Gores aren't even close. Third, the vast majority of the PMRC Washington Wives contingent was the wives of *Republicans.* (Susan Baker, etc.)
wants to shut down shows like MTV's Jackass... a liberal Democrat (Lieberman)
Bullshit. See above. Lieberman is conservative-authoritarian, like most Democrats these days.
backs the RIAA in their persuit of Napster... a liberal Democratic appointed DoJ
Bullshit. On the vast majority of issues, Clinton's to the right of Nixon. He's not even remotely liberal.
etc...
Democrat != liberal. These days, the Democrats are conservative-authoritarian, with a few old-style liberals around. Us pinkos have moved on to the Greens and the New party. There are alot of liberals who vote Democrat, but that's just because they've been brainwashed by the right-wing corporate media into believing that the Democrats differ substantively from Republicans.
A liberal will support free speech. We always have, and we always will; it's fundamental to being a liberal. Anyone who does not support free speech is not a liberal. Moderate, conservative, or authoritarian, depending on how far out they are and their econmic views, but the support of free speech and personal rights are part of the definition of liberalism.
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
Comments before this I can't really disagree with.
>Much of the violence in TPB was gratuitous, and
>I think it dampened the 'message' and the effect
>of the themes the author tried to convey.
I disagree here that the violence was gratuitous. I studied the book in college, with a Lithuanian Eastern European history prof. It should scare the crap out of you to know that the Painted Bird was a dead-on accurate portrayal of the region. Most people consider the book to be based on the real life experiences of Roman Polanski during the war.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
You've gotta be trolling. What about the "human rights" of the victim?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Semmelweiss was the physican who discovered that infant mortality could be greatly reduced if doctors would wash their hands between each delivery. The good doctors of the day would have no such restriction on their freedom for a nonsensical "germ theory" and persecuted Semmelweiss with all their power. Wegner, who developed the theory of continental drift, was greeted with laughter and scorn, not applause.
Now a school girl conducts perfectly good research into atttitudes regarding race, and she is persecuted as well. Unfortunate, but not surprising, as the scientific community is not always ready for science that disagrees with their comfortable notions.
Actually, the young lady did some interesting social science research - I wonder if the difference between adults and children is that adults know that they are not supposed to give an answer that might appear racist. Of course, there is no shortage of racist adults, so maybe the children identified with their own race, while the adults gave the groupthink acceptable answer.
Most science fairs allow social science and biophysical research, and if social science doesn't discuss important issues (that are sometimes controversial or uncomfortable) then why do it? The judges that pulled the project should be ashamed of themselves.
After all, it's not supposed to be a cargo-cult science fair.
I really don't think that there are any deeper conclusions you can draw from such an experiment. It is set up in the form of a scientific experiment, but the raw data is meaningless in itself and so subject to different interpretations as to be useless in forming other conclusions.
It might be interesting to hear the result, and entertaining to speculate on their meaning, but it's not real science. There are far too many people who treat such things as real science, and it's a bad trend that should be discouraged.
Okay, maybe that's not their motive here, but discouraging political statements camoflaged (intentionally or through ignorance) as science does help explain to the children what is and isn't science.
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If the person you mention is also a physicist (as was mentioned in the article) then you are correct.
Where's the beef?
This hardly seems statistically enough to infer what she inferred so I wouldn't call it a complete science project
Three words: she's a kid. She's not at the level where she can truly understand statistics, standard deviation, mean, normalizing, etc. It's an elementary school science project, not a doctoral thesis. For elementary school projects, you can only expect elementary science.
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I don't know where you went to school but ethical approval is nothing more than pre-censorship in this case. Ethical approval is meant to protect the subject from dangerous chemicals, surgery, severe emotional effects etc... There was nothing dangerous to the subjects here. The only danger was to the status quo at the science fair.
Her experiment was scientific. Whether she had a sample size needed to infer for the general population is not up for debate here. Her conclusion that her peers prefered the white Barbie is a fair conclusion based on her results.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
So what evidence do you have for the fact that adults picked the black barbie about 50% of the time and not 90-100% because they all wanted to feel politically correct. Second why did adults pick the barbie in the lavander dress most often when she was black?
(a) like the lavender dress Exactly my point, adults were more likely to see through the skin color in the equally attractive barbies and pick the one in the prettier dress.
(b) I find white women more attractive than black women (which has nothing to do with racial preference), In a sense that was probably the point of the study, "Do people view whites more attractive than blacks."
(c) I'm only 8 years old (in the case of the children) and I have no preference in women. Ever hear of the Oedipus complex? I actually think that little kids would prefer the barbie that looked most like their mother (thus white or black). Anyhow 8 year olds do have crushes on girls (or boys) and thus sexual preferences.
to all the posters who are subtly calling the OP a racist: read this article in Salon. It says, "The school's enrollment is about 93 percent white, 3 percent Asian, 3 percent Latino and 1 percent black, according to the district," suggesting a heavy white majority and minimal black population in the area. Try looking up the father's name (David Thielen) on a search engine, I believe he has his own domain and website (I did not spend too much time looking at it, but it was a David Thielen from Boulder, Colorado, so I assumed)
The majority of our schools are designed to produce people who:
and I say, things haven't changed much. most work environments also force these 'values' on their employees.
freedom of thought and expression went out in the 60's. and the 60's are long gone now, aren't they?
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
if this were "Science" in the adult world, it would also be a controversial study. Not because it's wrong to ask people about preferences, but because there's not enough detail in the study to understand *why*
Those are excellent questions for someone reviewing or judging her project. Perhaps you're right that sociology experiments at an elementary school should be held to a higher standard than typical kid stuff with tadpoles or rock collections. But the decision still should be based on scientific merit. Call over the blue ribbon panel and ask them to find flaws in her reasoning.
Science should be judged on its science, not on administrative policy.
No wonder they yanked it, there's no reason to have a high-level race dialogue among second graders.
Do you have kids? My five year-old (kindergarten) asks me questions about race all the time.
"Dad, why do only black people work at McDonald's?"
"Son, that's not true. That's just because the McDonald's we go to, there's more black people that live around there." (and we drove to another area of town to show him that all types of people work in fast-food.
"Dad, why do only black people sing rap music?"
So I proceeded (with great hesitation) to show up a picture of Eminem.
I read somewhere that the average five year old asks 200 questions a day. I'm not about to stifle his inquisitive or critical thinking. For example, we've been reading the old Narnia books, and he asks me what "slaves" are. And I explained that many years ago, it was okay to actually own people, and how wrong that thinking was.
I think it's enlightening and refreshing and I'm glad I can treat him like a little person, instead of a mindless drone. (And in case anyone is wondering, his biological father is African-American, and his biological mother is white). One way I can contribute to social change is by educating the young, and wait for the old people to die off.
At 8 years of age, the young lady is more likely in the second grade.
The book did ask a question. If you believe it's the musings of racists or anybody else, that's a different story. If the conclusions are easily refuted, then great! We have a better answer to a valid question.
Now, I might agree with the statement "It's too bad that the media gives so much attention to bad science." For example, that statement "You only use 10% of your brain" is still thrown around with absolutely no merit.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with this. Who are you to dictate to me what constitutes being a criminal?
Is a speeder a criminal?
If I run a red light on a deserted road at 2am, am I a criminal?
The next argument I often hear is "Well, no. You're not a criminal just for breaking the letter of the law. But there IS a common sense issue. Some things are just accepted as wrong because it's common sense."
I have to disagree with this as well. Different people have different morals and different values.
Example:
Two women visiting NYC from (I believe it was either Holland or Norway) northern Europe were shopping downtown with their children. They went into a store and left their children (in baby carriages) outside the store.
The result? They were arrested for child abandonment of course.
The part of the story that a lot of folks from the US don't understand is that this practice is fairly common in a lot of Europe. From their perspective, why would one need to bring the child in?
They come from a different culture - having different morals (and experiences) is a crime?
--
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Light him on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life
The Painted Bird was an excellent book, and I half agree/half disagree with you. I think there's plenty of early high schoolers who can handle the book. I think in an advanced class it is entirely appropriate. They study Huckleberry Finn after all, which depicts some pretty awful things about race in the 1800's. For a less advanced class I think it would be inappropriate, because the main themes would be overwhelmed by the tremendous violence in the book.
I would hope that most would read The Painted Bird, especially Americans. We have no real concept of nationalism here in this country. Heck, even Canadians are more familiar with nationalism because of the problems with relations between French and English speaking provinces.
Kozinski's book is probably worst-case. Nationalism gone as wrong as it can possibly go.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The words you are looking for are orthodox and doctrinaire, repressive also comes in handy but conservative spawns a misunderstanding of what is going on.
Teachers in US public schools teach a mixed up grab bag of leftist claptrap that has demonstrably failed to educate children but if you want to change to proven techniques (phonics instead of look-say, english immersion instead of bilingualism) you are labelled a philistine, a barbarian at the gate.
The conservatives in the US are horrified at the k-12 educational system.
DB
Heh. Just to play Devil's Advocate, I don't see much support for your thought in that post.
Don't get me wrong, I agree. My explanation may as well include the post quoted above. I am not, however, about to set my threshhold to -1 and count all the good arguments vs. rhetoric-recitals.
my friend, you stand in a sewer and complain of the smell.
I must admit I'm not an expert in all this. I've been an engineer, a scientist, a research director, and of late have judged elementary school science fairs for the past 4 years.
But I'm also a human being.
The experiment performed by the young lady in question echoes the original performed by Dr. Kenneth Clark and his wife back in the mid 1950's. Dr. Clark was an African-American psychologist, teacher, and activist. His goal, as I understand it, was to reveal the extent to which young African-American children based their own self worth upon their relationship to "white" culture.
Dr. Clark's experiment was also a key element in the historic Brown vs. Board of Education trial.
The experiment was a positive thing, not a racist one. It revealed an unfortunate truth which needed attention.
To call the little girl's experiment "racist" is a knee jerk reaction of the third kind. If everything that might possibly offend someone were removed from elementary school textbooks, all our kids would be studying three-page pamphlets.
My heart goes out to the child and her parents. I hope a way is found to convince her that she's done nothing wrong and everything right. If she's learned anything it's that the designers of the wheels of bureaucracy still don't uinderstand the concept of "round".
That's what the consolation ribbons are for. ;-)
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Put simply, pish tosh.
Not true, since juvenilles are not held to the same level of responsiblity as adults (most of the time). If you have a full Right, you must also bear the full Responsibility.
Regardless of what most nerds think, the world is not black and white. There are whole swathes of grey as well.
See above. If they have lesser Responsibilities, they have lesser Rights.
No, I don't miss the abortion debate. I've found that some people stand on one side, some people stand on another side, and neither group will jump ship for the other side. I'm tired of trying to convice them.
Oh, you mean I missed out on the debate? No -- I've done my duty, fought my battles, and I'm retired from the war.
Oh, and I'm not parroting the Constitution, I'm parroting the Bill of Rights. Get your historical documents straight, you nimrod.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Wasn't that the government's excuse for the Chicago 7 trial?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
*chuckle* What makes you think that I am not? 8)
--
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Light him on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life
Oh please, the left doesn't just want socialism, the right doesn't just want a free market. If life were only about economics then your comment might just make sense. The left wants that mush-headed self-esteem programming in between handing out condoms and allowing 15 year olds to get abortions without parental consent. Like it or not, you have to defend that crap or the orthodox PC types are going to kick your butt all over the place.
For myself, I'm a libertarian, but that's just me.
I wouldn't even buy that. The K-12 teachers pretty much slurp down any of the pap handed down by the education colleges and the leftist think tanks but they become 'conservative' only when innovations from the right come out (phonics, english immersion).
It's a crock to say that they are conservative when their acceptance of change is so one sided.
DB
The conservatives are concentrating on fixing things for the kids while the liberals are concentrating on fixing the system.
If you fix the system, it can take years for the improvements to filter down to the kids. If you pull the kids out of dangerous, broken schools and put them into better ones, the kids start getting a better education immediately.
Think of the children, not the bureaucrats.
My copy is roughly 20 miles from me at the moment, but if memory serves, they covered a LOT of variables including attempting to control for socioeconomic status, educational level and so forth. Also, a lot of the data was gleaned from national studies *not* done by them, but ones often used as standards in the field.
Get a copy and play with the numbers, perhaps. There's a lot of detail in the book -- more than necessary for somebody like me who's not a statistician.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The comical thing is that it is often the radical religious-right wing Christians who are blamed for this stifeling of speech.
... a right wing religious nutball, Orin Hatch
... every Libertarian i know
....
Being one myself - okay, Libertarian, which is farther to the right - I'd like to remind folks who exactly it was that..
wanted (and got) warning labels on records.... a liberal Democrat (Al Gore's wife)
wants to shut down shows like MTV's Jackass... a liberal Democrat (Lieberman)
backs the RIAA in their persuit of Napster... a liberal Democratic appointed DoJ
led the charge to have the government shove its nose into Microsoft's business... a liberal Democratic appointed DoJ
gave out private information from people's FBI files because they were political enemies... the liberal Democrat White House
now.. who is it that...
is backing Napster in their fight against the RIAA
against censorship of library and school computers
while i'm not saying that the right-wing is right - and they are certainly not when it comes to things like drugs
lets not be quick to believe that its going to be the right wing religious nuts who take away your freedoms.. it is, and will always be the liberal Democrats..
They talk over you if they dont like what you're saying and say that you should not be saying things like nigger, faggot, or Jew bastard... that's just not allowed and should never be allowed...(unless you meet their criteria.. which is, you're one of them)
they are the ones who take your freedoms away from you - in the name of "The Children(tm)" - and tell you to just eat the shit sandwich because your going to eat it and if you don't you'll be called a racist, a bigot, or a child molester.
or even worse..
they'll call you a conservative Republican.. the worst name of all to be called.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Exactly. I wish I still had the link, but I read that in Florida they are pushing for the death penalty for an 11 year old boy. That child better be protected by the first ammendment also.
You have a good point which is obscured by the fact that you sound like a drooling reactionary or a troll.
Children are children. Absolutely. They simply do not have the same rights that adults have. Most importantly, parents have the right to tell their own children what to do. Parents usually know more than their children about everything. At least until about fifth grade, when this edge starts to degrade.
But the facts of this case are not a "do whatever" parent. This is not about a lack of discipline. It sounds like the girl's father was actively involved since the adults she used in her sample were her father's coworkers. The problem here is the fact that the school, rather than use this to properly educate people about the difference between sociology and "hard" science has decided to use censorship as a tool to suppress inquiry into a topic which makes them uncomfortable. The school has government fiat to supercede the parents' right to control their child? This is "in loco parentis" gone too far.
If there is an obvious academic issue with this science fair project, then they are being fair. Probably among a group of elementary students this project was only notable for having a hot button topic. I would guess the project requirements were vague and non-specific, and so cancelling this girl's good-faith effort to do her job as a student is not about "discipline" it's about cowardly American educators.
I do not have a signature
The mistake here is not in saying that preferences is discrimination. Preferences do make for discrimination, no questions about it. They're just two words for the same thing. The mistake is in assuming that discrimination is bad. The word can be used perfectly innocently (I discriminate when I go grocery shopping, buying the cheapest food of decent quality that I can find.), but as soon as you use it in the context of race you're suddenly an evil human being.
I am highly discriminatory in my preferences for women. I discriminate against black women and highly towards asians. I'll admit this and I don't think it makes me evil. Outside of sexual attractiveness, I like to at least think that I don't let the race of a person affect how I treat him. Preferences for women based on race is racial discrimination: but it's not necessarily bad.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
That bright young lady will learn a whole lot more from this project than she figured on. She's smarter already.
you: What are these?
me: Smartning pills, $5 each
you: They taste like rabbit pellets!
me: You're getting smarter already.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Well, the First Amendment doesn't neccessarily apply to an 8 year old. You don't get Rights until you can accept the Responsibilities that come attached to them.
Unfortunatly, our criminal justice system has shown that you have those 'responsibilities' from about age 10 on, with their insistance on prosecuting mere children as adults. If a 12 year old can be sentanced to spend the next 20 years of his life in prison, he better damn well get the Bill of Rights.
.sig: Now legally binding!
is that kids think white people look better in lavender dresses!
-- Thrakkerzog
how do you know she wasn't?!?!
A better way to put it might be: some questions shouldn't be asked *yet*. The Bell Curve and every other book that posits a biological link between race and performance is jumping a couple of steps. We need to account for all of the social variables first, and we just don't know enough about how much unconcious expectations play a role in shaping a person's performance on a variety of tasks (although we know that they do). Only when those variables are nailed down should people start looking for biological causes.
You only have to be right once to make paranoia worth it
Never mind that the "food pyramid" itself is built on bad science. But it sounds so nice and simple!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
You have yanked my chain so fscking hard, I am going to have to sit down this evening and write a god-damn dissertation.
illegitimii non ingravare
Why doesn't that have anything to do with racial preference?
It does have to do with racial preference, but possibly very little to do with discrimination outside of sexual partners. Unfortunantly, I don't find either blondes or black women attractive at all (with a very few exception either way where personality made a difference). That's a racial preference. I like very pale skin and either very dark (black) hair or natural flame red hair. I find tans repulsive, and very tanned women actively repulsive... living in Florida, this makes for an interesting dating life. :)
But, the key here is: what exactly was the question? If sexual preference was a factor (even "which do you find more attractive" could bring that in as a factor), then things become far more complicated than simple racial discrimination: although I don't find black women sexually attractive, I don't discriminate against them in functional ways any more than I discriminate against Dave, a friend of mine, just because he's a man, and I don't find men sexually attractive.
And despite years of Mattel saying otherwise, Barbie is made to be the mainstream model of female sexuality.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
My Bad. I shouldn't have said RTFM but perhaps RTFSC? (source code) Read the research. Read it. Don't just listen to what other people say (like your parents did?) and look for reasons that the research may be invalid. You would be surprised at how often correlated data is construed to be causial data in research; Nobody questions it either. Don't just buy a book and raise your kids. Buy all of the books (or I guess lease them hahaha! :) with as many different viewpoints as possible. Read each one thinking that it may be correct. Then decide what to do. Most people here only really understand one view.
Nowhere in my post do I advocate "shielding children from the real world" nor do I believe that these problems should be ignored. You may not believe it but sometimes a countering argument provided to you on slashdot will not be in diametric opposition (read: evil) to yours.
Hiding all truth from children is unhealthy. So is bombarding them with "reality" in an effort to make them fit to live in an ugly horrible world. "Reality" is complex and subtle and children will come up with simple explenations for complex situations. You must understand that.
There are no bunnies on my lawn, even a few rats; I am happy. I'm sorry you aren't (and I know that doesn't help you).
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
VERY commendable post.
I'd only add this point:
The very fact that certain agendas are "protected" by using PC to censor the opposition, doesn't that more or less prove that the Emperor Has No Clothes?
Think about it: If an opinion can't stand an open debate, doesn't that prove it's falsehood?
Those who advocate shutting people up with censorship, and stifling learning with political correctness are only hurting their own cause. It makes their cause ILLEGITIMATE in the minds of those who DO think for themselves.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Do you imagine that someone has gotten around to teaching her sampling and what numbers constitute statistically significant sampling?
Lesson learned, if it is politically sensitive, you will get suppressed, science be damned. You would have loved Lysenko.
DB
As others have already said, how do you know she isn't.
...barely hidden bigotry showing under your hood...
dickhead
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
In the UK however there is a long and unpleasant tradition of deference to authority and to ones social superiors. Couple that to the fact that the UK has always been on where animals are loved and children barely tolerated and you can see that children who think independently will be hated for that. They also make life harder for teachers and that makes them unpopular with the teachers.
I suggest you think independently but keep your mouth closed unless you can see a clear advantage to yourself in speaking up. It is frequently an advantage to be considered stupid and asking arkward questions when it embarrasses your teachers labels you as a trouble maker.
If however you have the courage and strength to stand up to these people I wish you good luck.
You might however consider forming a school skeptic society with a charter that explicitly forbids suppression of independent thinking. If the school forbids it form an extra curricular society.
Think of rights of guardianship as being similar to a durable power of attorney. The child has all the rights, and the state cannot deprive them of those rights, but their parents have the legal authority to conduct affairs on the child's behalf, often against the child's wishes. This is where the concept of "emmancipated minor" came from.
Your other example is completely bogus.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
The Bill of Rights is comprised of the first 10 ammendments to the Constitution, and both were published concurrently as a single document. As such, get your historical facts straight before you call me a nimrod.
The law is a matter of black and white. Interpretation of the law is where the grey areas are both created and dispelled. That process, by the way is set forth in the Constitution. Get your facts straight before you call me a nerd.
And if you hadn't noticed, both the 7th and 9th ammendments make it clear that common law otherwise remains in effect.
But I'm obviously shouting at a wall, here.
I have served honorably in the US Navy. I know exactly what rights I gave up to do so. I have held high clearances and dealt with matters of national security. I know exactly what rights I gave up to do so. And I know that you are wrong when you state that the law requires responsibilites in exchange for those rights - read the Constitution, this is not at anywhere in the document. Nowhere is it stated that these rights have a minimum age requirement, or that you must do such and so forth to be granted these rights. By committing a criminal act you may place yourself in a position where you may be judicially relieved of certain rights. Don't confuse due process with individual responsibility. Due process is in and of itself a right in this country.
These are rights of citizenship, which most of us have received as a birthright. That is why the abortion debate is difficult, as it poses the question of when an unborn child attains individual rights separate and distinct from those of the mother. I agree that the debate itself is pointless as both sides are hopelessly intractable, I simply wanted to point out that this is the exact legal point you were attempting to avoid.
You're wrong, but you have a right to express your opinion.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
"I'm not agreeing with the director, but I think the official answer would be 'the proper forum is in Social Studies, during our unit on Race Relations.'"
p -water experiment. I guess that one would be viewed as "classic science".
Life is a paragraph, not a dictionary.
To call the young girl's experiment sociological and relegate it to a Social Studies class misses the point in my opinion. Her science fair entry possessed all the attributes of the scientific method. You're right in that it wasn't a how-long-does-it-take-hand-soap-to-dissolve-in-ta
The point, though, is: Was the experiment performed with the purpose of offending? Was the original experiment performed by Dr. Clark in the 1950's intended to offend or illuminate? If I knew the experiment at issue was being performed by the child of a neo-Nazi, then yes, I might be suspicious that the purpose was more to prove a point than to uncover facts. But does that really apply in this case?
To argue whether an 8 year old girl can execute an experiment which will conform to and be accepted by the larger World scientific community as "valid science" is absurd. The purpose of the science fair was to encourage scientific enquiry and the following through of a process. Even experiments which are done poorly are allowed into science fairs. No, the issue has nothing whatsoever to do with science or racism or anything even close. It has to do with fear. Fear on the part of the staff at Mesa Elementary School. Nothing more than that.
I recall an incident when I was in school where a boy was sent home for wearing a tee shirt that looked like an American Flag.
Must we return to those days?
I don't have to defend any "crap", in fact if it's crap I refuse to do so.
However, the example you cite of reducing disease and unplanned pregancies amoung teens with free condoms, and preventing parents from forcing pregnant teens to carry the fetus to full-term, is not "crap", but astoundingly simple good sense.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The Constitution and Bill of Rights are separate documents. The Constitution is dated 1787, the Bill of Rights is dated 1789. I still say you are a nimrod.
If the law is black and white, there would be no need for interpretation. Again, the world is not black and white, but shades of grey. So you're not a nerd -- you're still being a literalist.
Don't shout -- you'll damage your voice.
I'll admit to being wrong when you admit to being wrong.
The Constitution is absolutely silent on the matter of pornography. There is not one mention of "pictures of nekkid ladies" in the whole damn thing. Does that mean that pornography is not protected?
The concept of Rights and associated Responsibility is not a constitutional matter, rather a philosophical one. You have the right to Free Speech. You make statements to the effect of "Bill Gates screws goats", and do it as a newspaper columnist in the New York Times. Bill Gates may sue you for libel, and you can't claim Free Speech (or Free Press) -- you have to take responsibility for your actions.
You have the right to bear arms. You do NOT have the right to shoot people indiscriminately. If you shoot somebody in a fit of pique, you must bear the Responsibility.
If you're 12 and make death threats against the President, you do NOT have to bear the full Responsibility. Your parents may bear part of it, you may spend some time in JV -- but you don't go to Federal Prison as an adult might.
BTW, thanks for serving our country.
I'm not sure what you mean here -- the abortion debate is mainly about at what point a child is considered "alive". If the child is "alive" at conception (this is what I believe, BTW), at no point after that does the woman have the legal right to murder that child. Roe v. Wade judged that during the first three months, the woman and her doctor have full control over whether to abort or not, the second three months, the State may regulate concerning health matters, and in the third, the State may disallow. There is no argument on whether the child has separate and distict rights -- the Texas law was overturned on citation of the 14th amendment's Due Process Clause.
You're wrong. But,then, most people are...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Wow, we can use that argument? Excellent! Then:
You argument is wrong. Completely wrong, utter nonsense. You're wrong, and, might I add, smell funny.
If the parent can act on the child's behalf, against the child's wishes, then the child can (according to you) appeal to the court on the basis of Constitutional Rights, based on that child having full access to those Constitutional Rights, even as a person might sue DoubleClick for violating their 4th Amendment.
However, a child cannot appeal to the court. Thus, a child does not have full access to Constitutional Rights.
How is this argument bogus?
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
PS. The one thing everyone agrees on is that public education in America is less than optimal, regardless of your political affiliation.
The two most common things in the Universe are dark matter and stupidity.
No, left and right refer to a political shorthand derived from how the french were seated in their parliament. It never was purely economics and all your moaning isn't going to change history.
As far as disease prevention using condoms, the failure rate for condoms is not exactly advertised prominently in sex-ed and it's quite defensible to prefer that your children take a safer route than safe sex. BTW: do *you* know which venereal diseases are not blocked by condom use and which are?
As for pregnancy, I have no desire to have any future daughter of mine get pressured into having an abortion because it is 'inconvenient' to the future career of some bastard. Beyond that, the link between breast cancer risk and abortion is pretty convincing in the studies that I've read and the politicized nature of abortion facilities means that they don't have the health safety supervision that other medical facilities have. In my book, that pretty much takes it out of the black and white 'astoundingly simple good sense' box that you glibly put it in.
DB
I think it's odd your on slashdot. Your not a new user either.
I've seen the news reports concerning this -- I have as yet not formed a rational opinion. The easy way out is "They do adult crime, they do adult time!", but that's not neccessarily justice.
Did that 12 year old push somebody out of a window, assuming they'd just bounce back like Wile E. Coyote? That's not adult thinking -- that child needs some kind of intense therapy (and their TV taken away).
On the other side, if there's a child who seems to have no moral compuction against tossing their kid sister out of a window, well now... it could be we happened to catch a John Wayne Gacy in infancy. Let's not let this kid roam the streets.
I happen to believe that we are born with the notion of right and wrong, and some people are born with a predeliction for choosing "wrong". We call those people sociopaths, and they MUST be kept outside of society.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
The conservatives are concentrating on fixing things for the kids while the liberals are concentrating on fixing the system.
If you pull the kids out of dangerous, broken schools and put them into better ones, the kids start getting a better education immediately.
I can't disagree with that, but it's only a short-term win. I think you need to look at the long-term too. Yanking everyone out of the public school system will distroy it.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Denying debate, history, or ideas and ideals only sparks more controversy and the issues at hand are never resolved, just smoothed over until they rise to the surface again.
I don't disagree that it was an excellent book, and I do think that there are many early high-schoolers that can handle it, but in an English class (not even a real Literature course), I think that it was inappropriate at that level. Just because the students in the course are more intellectually advanced than their peers, at that age, emotional developement isn't always on the same scale. I can safely say that a good 15-20% of our class was not prepared for that book, and I remember it creating quite a furor among the parents of those students (one girl in particualr ad trouble sleeping for some time after reading certain parts). There is a difference between assigning a book for study in order to educate, and doing just to scare/disturb your students (which seemed to be this teacher's aim, given a lot of the other evidence). I also think that Huckleberry Finn wasn't nearly as disturbing, but still had a strong impact on the topic of race relations. Much of the violence in TPB was gratuitous, and I think it dampened the 'message' and the effect of the themes the author tried to convey.
I think it is a book that should be read by those who can take it objectively, and handle it. The writing itself wasn't very good (IMHO), but the ideas and themes are somewhat important, but you get the sense from reading it that the author had some tremendous problems.
As for Americans' sense (or lack thereof) of nationalism... that is a another story, and shall be told at a another time...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I would not say that i just accepted this. I was proud of my F and I still am. It stands as a reminder to me that just because you can jump through hoops, that means nothing in and of itself. Before this happened, I really looked up to this teacher, since then I have had a hard time trusting or accepting anything a teacher said. After this experience I no longer cared what kind of grades I recieved and probably had an unhealthy lack of respect for authority. In retrospect I am quite shocked that this ever happened because the class was an advanced placement class and the teacher was brought in specifically for this class. Makes you wonder how many times this kind of thing happens huh...
project than I and my classmates used to do back then. I did a volcano that didn't explode because somehow I thought that any old liquid could replace vinegar. The girl right next to me did one on the planets. Well all the planets except for Jupiter that is. "Oh crap. That's ok," she said to me, "I'll just try to cover up the place where it's supposed to be when the judges come around."
---
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
From reports I've heard from friends who've travelled in the third world, places like Ghana or Nepal have a lot of non-schedule-oriented citizens.
This doesn't do very well for Development, but neither are they nations of criminals.
i think school can really be what you make of it. i had a lot of teachers who didn't go the distance to make learning come alive for their students, but i also saw that all my fellow classmates didn't care at all about learning. what are these teachers supposed to do?
i also had several teachers who, once i showed them that i wasn't just another warm body in a seat, really opened up to me and taught me far more about the world than i could've imagined at the time. even now, _many_ years later, i'm still thankful for how they helped when they did. but i _know_ for a fact that they weren't like this to everyone... because most people just didn't care.
didn't any of you people ever show any initiative in school yourselves? maybe it wouldn't have been such a robot factory kind of place for you, too. maybe you didn't know everything already.
It wasn't for a science fair, but that year I built
my own with an 1802. CMOS has infinite fanout for itself . . .
However, two big problems:
1) I got the bright idea to save a chip by putting the gates (quad bilateral switch. 4066? 4016?) bwtween power and the toggle switches, rather than between the switches and the bus. This of course shorts the bits of the data bus with "up" switches together, and htose with "down" switches together. No wonder the other guys used 8 rather than 2.
2) My wire-wrap CPU socket was defective. After rebuilding it another summer, and spending days with voltmeters and fequency counters, I came down to a couple of (critical) pins with enough conductivity betwen them to be force the cmos signal level. I confirmed this after disassumbly. (how in the devil do you get a semi-short in a wire-wrap socket?)
I never built it again; i had access to more powerful machiens to use, and there wasn't anything left to learn. But I still have the parts, and if my daughters ever show any interest . . .
hawk
The director of elementary education argued, "A science fair is not the way we choose to discuss race relations."
If a scientific forum isn't the place to discuss race relations, then what is? A riot? A lynch mob? If a young girl can't take a mature, scientific look at a major problem in our society, then how on earth is it supposed to be discussed? Please, oh please, can someone who agrees with this school director explain to me what is a more appropriate forum to discuss the issue than a (somewhat) scientific study? Sheesh...
---
"...not only because it destroys the child's self esteem..."
Clearly the family should have a lawyer letter sent to the school demanding a written apology and retraction otherwise there might be irreparable damage to their dear daughter's self esteem, implying that might be worth a princely sum. Then let's see the bureaucrats slither out of that one.
I wrote parts of this stuff
"Some questions should never be asked." The context was a discussion of that book, "The Bell Curve", and I almost laughed out loud until I realized the person saying this was serious. Then I almost hit her.
I find that striking people that disagree with me is an effective way to prove my point. It's much easier than yelling.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Your acceptance of this comes close to being as bad as her original crime. You need to say something. You need to say something now. Really.
Oh fer cryin out loud ya moron. Shut it.
Did I like not being one of the more popular kids in school? No. Did I like dealing with the (luckily few) teachers who didn't treat me in the most fair manner? No. But being in certain situations that may have been less than desirable gave me valuable experiences in life that give me the confidence to be the person I am today.
These types of incidents, whether they be school-sponsored censorship or peer-generated angst, are of little significance. What is important is what we take away from the experiences. I feel my job as a parent will to give my son the same support my parents gave me throughout my childhood and young adulthood, not try to eliminate obsticles. That way when he becomes a man, he will be able to deal with crap appropriately and get what he wants out of life.
The girl in the science fair story learned an extremely valuable lesson about the world in which we live. I'm sorry she had to learn it at such a young age. Hopefully her parents will teach her to not be discouraged, to press on, and continue to adjust her course so she can continue to persue her interests and express her views.
--zawada
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
>Is a speeder a criminal?
Yes.
>If I run a red light on a deserted road at 2am, am I a criminal?
Yes.
>They come from a different culture - having different morals (and experiences) is a crime?
It can be.
Leaving aside such issues as absolute morality and natural law, here is what I was trying to say:
The law is the law. If you break the law, you are defined to be a criminal. I'm not making any judgements on the merit of any law, nor whether any crime, however trivial, must be punished. You are reading more into the word "criminal" than I ever intended. My point was that we need equal opportunities, not equal results.
If you are going to take this extremely relativistic attitude towards "criminality" than you should follow it to its logical conclusion and become an anarchist, since you seem to be arguing that a person is accountable only to his or her own moral judgement. Recall that I said "criminal" not "morally wrong".
Otherwise, join the rest of us and work to reach a common ground of justice and equitability.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Does anyone actually think that schools are teaching independent thought? In the past week I've been told by three separate teachers that I'm (this is a quote) "thinking too much" when I make a sensible suggestion that isn't in their textbooks. Anyone with different views is just an annoying pest in their views. OK, I admit, I've had two teachers so far who didn't have that attitude. That out of maybe thirty...
The biggest thing that people aren't allowed to have views on is politics; science is a close second. I don't think GM crops are evil; do I get to write a dicsursive essay on that? Nope. Too radical. Although flaming GM is fine. Do I get to suggest that the school stops using iGear? Nope. Although one group got to explain to senior management why closer supervision of internet access is good.
Of course, all thic could be because in the UK teachers are employed by the government, who don't want them to produce a bunch of people who might not vote for them. No, of course not. They're just concerned for our wellbeing -- after all, dangerous ideas might damage our fragile little brains.
>The other side of this coin is that these
> "censors" were reacting to immense
> pressure to never offend anybody, anywhere,
> ever, no matter what.
Do you think they'll learn anything about this,
now that they're getting lots of attention, all over the world, from people who they've managed to offend?
It looks like their plan has backfired, and they've offended far more people with their intolerance and ignorance than they ever would have offended with a hands-off approach.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
...is thinking that our school system wants kids to think for themselves.
The majority of our schools are designed to produce people who:
In other words, they are designed to produce factory workers. No joke.
I prefer "melatonin challenged", myself.
Best Slashdot Co
- The adults are going to know something's up when a little girl comes up to them with two barbie dolls and asks them which one they prefer, this may be the reason for the 50-50 split.
- My preference in barbie dolls doesn't necessarily reflect my racial preferences. Just because I pick a white barbie doll in a lavender dress over a black barbie doll doesn't mean that I don't like black people, it just means that I (a) like the lavender dress, (b) I find white women more attractive than black women (which has nothing to do with racial preference), or (c) I'm only 8 years old (in the case of the children) and I have no preference in women. (b+c applies mostly to guys, but the article didn't specify).
Regardless, I still don't think the project should have been yanked, not only because it destroys the child's self esteem, but also because it promotes the "if we ignore it, it will go away" mentality, which is wrong.> The only ones my schools ever required prior
> approval for were the ones involving animals,
> dangerous chemicals, or high voltage.
Psychological experiments on humans were allowed? Especially "tricky" ones where the adults should have been notified, ethically, of the possibility?
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
"Rational thought is pretty rare these days, even in prestigious universities. We live in the TV age now, and people think by linking images in their brains." Truer every day. Just see the Moon Hoax thread...
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
Hmm... I too was the editor of my newspaper in high school and -- no offense -- I have to suspect that there's something you're not telling us. If the gist of your column were truly "Get to know a person before you judge them. Don't judge based on appearances alone." then I can't see how it's at all possible that you managed to generate 150 complaints.
Personally (and believe me, I speak from personal experience) I think it's somewhat more likely that you wrote an editorial making fun those who did wear Tommy Hilfiger, or Abercrombie, or whatever, or at least phrased your argument in such a way that it managed to piss "those people" off. (Of course, you probably would have considered me one of "those people" but, the fact I was the editor notwithstanding, I can't imagine ever complaining about an editorial in the school newspaper unless it was really juvenile.)
It's not so much that I'm doubting you as I'm doubting that we're getting the whole story. If you have the text of the editorial, I know I'd love to see it.
I know I'm posting AC (at work and without password) but regardless, I hope you'll respond.
-tf
Children are children, and need to be treated as such. It is wrong to assume that a child is entitled to the same sorts of rights and privledges as you and I. In fact, it can be very dangerous to do so.
A child does not have the same refined understanding of the world, and important subleties are frequently lost on them. Not only is it not "wrong" to significantly restrict what our children have access and exposure to, it is extremely negligent to abdicate the responsibility for protecting them from situations they aren't prepared to deal with.
All these care-free hippy children who can do whatever they please is a very bad trend in today's society. Kids need stern discpline from their parents, not friendship! To treat your child as an equal is to guarantee that they will become dysfunctional adults with no real understanding of how to properly behave in society.
did anyone happen to ask these people that "Could" have been offended? did anyone actually ask them cause if they aren't then why was it REALLY taken down? Could it be because the administration of the school is insecure about there own ethnicity? As far as I can tell NO ONE has complained, just my thoughts Jon
I look at it more philosophically than literally in my original post. But taking the Bill of Rights literally, does
mean that Mom can't check under Junior's bed for dope and Playboys unless a judge okays it? I don't think so -- at least, I'm not willing to tell that to Moms across the country. YOU tell 'em that.
But, since you're in favor of 8 year olds getting full Constitutional rights, then you're okay with 8 year olds going to jail for shoplifting candy? If they can claim the rights, they must bear the responsibility as well.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
>--that 99% of what is ascribed as free
> thought in the 60's was just following people who were insane.
One of the general rules in life is that there are few groups as rigidly conformist as those that fancy themselves nonconormists: not only to you refuse to conform to society's norms, but you do it in *exactly* the right way, and hold *excactly* the right opinions.
I know a "granola" type who really is a nonconformist among the type: she's a capitalist. She gave up on her engagement to an anarchist not because of their differences, but because of the death threats (to him) by other anarchists over theologicial (?) differences . . .
hawk
Apparently, the father of the little girl is Dave Thielen, known for stirring up some trouble himself. For example, here is a copy of the page he used to pretend to sell absentee ballots on ebay last November, and it seems that perhaps the apple has not fallen far from the tree here...
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
The great thing about slashdot is that there's enough of us here that there's sometimes even a person close to the story.
Take this case. The school in question is in my backyard. In 25 minutes, I'm walking down there to pick up my son from the class of the teacher who runs the science fair. Small world, ain't it?
A point not mentioned by Mr. Talbott that may have some bearing on the case is that the principal of the school is an exchange principal from Australia who has been here since early January. I think that standards are different there than here, and that may have been a factor in this case.
I didn't have a chance to talk to the organizer of the science fair today, as for once I didn't have to ;-), but if anyone is interested they can drop me a line and I'll see what I can find out.
Regardless, the school doesn't look traumatized ;-).
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
write to him at SGarnett@BHFS.com. I did..he has no clue what all the fuss is about.
.......Ya doesn't has to call me Johnson!
Listing of email addresses of Boulder, CO Mesa Elementary School staff including the principals secretary
Just in case you feel the need to exercise your free speech.
the girl performed her barbie test on all of 15 adults
From the article: "She asked 15 adults which Barbie they preferred. Then she switched dresses and asked 15 other adults the same question." That's 30 adults, not 15.
maybe the beef is that the guy is after some publicity even if it means dragging his daughter through the mud
I do believe this is the daughter of David Thielen, author of numerous columns in Game Developer as well as the (in)famous game _Enemy Nations_. Sounds like troublemaking is in their blood...
I do not disagree that learning about the Holocaust is a Very Good Thing(tm) for all high school students. I disagree with the presentation of the topic, and the fact that a year of an English course ends up nearly entirely devoted to a historical subject, and that anyone even exhibiting any new/original/different thoughts on the topics would be graded down.
I do think that there was plenty of approprate subject material to teach a class from regarding the issues that she was trying to teach. For example, my paper was based on Leon Uris' _Mila 18_, which would have been a far better curriculum book than _The Painted Bird_ (Jerzey Kosinski), which is (as I said in my previous post) not a book that one should be forced to read, but one of choice. _Maus_ was at the Museum of Modern History around the time that I was in this particular class, and I agree that most books concerning the Holocaust are disturbing (especially the good ones), there are several portions of _The Painted Bird_ that I would never force anyone to read (notably the travails of Stupid Ludmilla), since there are better, more topically relevant sources for Holocaust education.
The biggest problem wiht situations like this is the presentation. It would be difficult to argue against exposing our students to the ideas, but the material used for that purpose and how the teacher presents the material and themselves.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Did you ever do the "Do animals react differently to sulphuric acid when they are being electrocuted" experiment?
What a great way to help children learn to think for themselves ..."
American schools do not have any intention on helping children think for themselves. This is not due to some conspiracy or intention it is because if children think for themselves it poses problems for the administration. As with all institutions the primary goal is to protect the institution itself and threrefore it's leadership. For example schoolboards, superentendents (sp) and principals make decisions that are going to protect their jobs and their reputations first and if there is room for teachers and students after the fact great. This is not because they are bad people it is just how you survive. Therefore, unless the students are in line with the administration they are a threat to it. At a very real level students are commodities. To most schools as organizations the individuals are not important, their test scores, gpa, particpation in student orgs,etc.. are what is important because those are what are used to validate and ensure the survival of the institution. That is why we see so many policies that fly in the face of educational research such as high stakes exit testing. This kind of testing gives a medium for the schools to validate their existance even though it shows that it forces teachers to teach to the test rather than actually content.
--Nothing makes a good technical man angrier than to have some incompetent nitwit with a check book telling him how to do his job.--Robert A. Heinlein
Well if 15 people and 30 children isn't enough, maybe they should let her try it on more. But no, they don't want to know about it so they throw it out instead...
Um, for an 8 year old kid, I think that was a good sampling to do. You think her parents would let her talk to 1000 adults and 1000 children? That's a lot of mileage on the ol' SUV.
------
James Hromadka
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
I did a conservation-of-momentum project involving a 30-06 rifle fired into a suspended log (pendulum) and measured the maximum extension swing of the log. With this experiment, I didn't have much to actually display except some tables, and of course, the 30-06 which sat in the gym all week.
In all my science fairs I was never allowed to just go off, do something, and have nobody look at it until it made it to the science fair floor. Surely some teacher must have been told "I plan to study racial bias in children" and had the option to say "Go ahead." Where is the commentary from that teacher? I refuse to believe that it got all the way to the science fair before somebody suddenly decided that it was in the best interest of the children to remove it.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Absolutely !
Also, being 8, she should know that dresses colors is a sensitive topic
What a silly girl....
The word "I" isn't capitalized in many poems, or emails.
The first word of every sentence doesn't always have to be capatalized:
"i860 Boards are annoying."
And every english word must have a vowel: pfft i say.
Or hmm.
English would be the wrong language to try to pick examples from to break the sig.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
...because you aren't thinking very logically. Let's say, for the sake of argument that you are right, schools intend to produce children meeting those characteristics. Let's further assume that they succeed. How does that rule out children thinking for themselves?
For instance, I consistently show up on time and am relatively organized. I have no discipline problems in my recent history (legal, work, etc). My wife doubly so. Yet both of us routinely hold opinions differing from that of the majority. Neither of us is a factory worker.
Good discipline and free thought are not opposites. Nominal "free-thinking radicals" can be just as conformist, within their subgroup, as a military academy.
PS: Note what I did NOT say: "Good discipline causes free thought."
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
When I was in the seventh grade, my teacher asked us to do a persuasive paper on Flag-burning and the constitution. She told us that her husband had been in vietnam and that she was very passionate about the flag so if any of us wrote a paper that upheld flag burning as free expression, we would be given an F. I thought she was challenging us, so I wrote just such a paper. I recieved an F. The horrible thing was that not only was she interested in censoring flag burning, she was wished to censor those who disagreed. Censorship in schools is common. This little girl is by no means alone. What a terrible lesson to teach children.
She's only a child. I'm more impressed with her ability to come up with such a non-standard hypothesis, carry out an experiment based on it and draw conclusions from her hypothesis.
Her statiscal sampling could have been better, but seriously, this is a school science fair. I doubt she is planning to publish her findings in a peer reviewed journal or anything.
I wasn't saying that _all_ members of that generation defined themselves that way, but it certainly is a strong trend. To point out a specific counterexample is irrelevant to my point.
For that matter, the people who made the original decision might have been older or younger than the Baby Boomer generation, but my point still holds: A lot of people do not practice what they preach with respect to freedom of speech.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
the AP article said the school is about one percent black. assuming the school is 500 children (the size of all the elementary schools in my area), then there are 5 black kids, which generally isn't enough to form a support group. if a school is 20% black, then all the kids can live in their own black culture, but with only 5 kids, they pretty much have to do everything that the white kids do. now they're walking through their gym and they see a very well planned experiment that shows that they are not liked by kids their age. ouch.
if they had a bunch of other blacks to fall back on, it would be better, but that's gotta hurt.
That was a required book for my "Search for Meaning in Literature," as a Jr. or Sr. in high school. And it was far from the most disturbing . . .
But anyway, the German teacher was a frustrated 60's leftover. She ran (not led) the "Foreign Language Association" whose sole activity seemed to be inserting "social justice" units in other classes [read: complain about evil right wing regimes while justifying the same beahvior from the left.] For quizzes, her students were required to right letters demanding the release of (what she deemed to be) political prisoners. Fortunately, she left the school to go on a "cross-country anti-nuclear tour" with her husband in their old volkswagen hippiemobile.
She once tried to explain to me that the only reason we dropped the bomb on Nagasaki was to see if it would go off (for the history-impaired, it was the first bomb at Hiroshima that was the untested type; the Nagasaki bomb was the same type tested in New Mexico).
Anyway, I usually found that disagreeing with the teacher's view was an easier way to an A than agreeing. One notable exception was when I argued in a major paper that *not* dropping the second bomb would have been morally indefensible. . . .
hawk
I trust the young girl has learned to fall into uncomfortable silence when she finds herself in the company of people of color.
illegitimii non ingravare
She performed the same experiment on two groups of students. Results: Adults tended to choose the Barbie wearing the lavender dress, regardless of skin color. But only six of 30 children picked the black Barbie, regardless of dress.
Prehaps the adults were being politically correct by picking the doll based only on the dress whereas the kids were not smart/devious enough to recognize what the girl was trying to test for
This type of censorship is more common than most people seem to think. For example:
my highschool had an art exibit a few years ago. Every single object was a student's work of art. the exibit was left up in the main lobby for a few weeks. however one sculpture was conspicuously absent, the hate room. This 'room' was a 3 sided structure designed to remind people of the futility of hate. It was the best work in the show, and the most moving work of art i have ever seen. however after 2 days it was moved to a back corner of a computer lab, and taken down 3 days after that. The administration's reason was "some people might feel we are glorifying hate." Needless to say that none of the people who decided this had ever been in 'the hate room'.
distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes!!!
I was recently a judge at a high school science fair, and I saw very similar projects. Sure, they did more work and research, but they almost all had the same fundamental flaw: too few samples to base a solid conclusion on.
No, of course not! Don't be an idiot.
The idea that you can prove the truth or falsity of something by merely refering to how people talk about it is the worst kind of postmodernist balderdash. (Okay there might be exceptions, like sentences that refer to how they themselves are talked about. But I'm talking in general here.)Female Prison Rape in NY
I don't want my taxes to be used on this stuff. Who the hell are you to force me to support it ?
..
PS.
Nelson Mandela was a terrorist and basically not much different than your typical soviet-supported "revolutionary" yet you don't see people mentioning that
I wonder if the young Miss Thielen had been a black girl whether the teachers would have been so hasty to pull her project...?
Their district's elementry science fair guidelines are here. Says specifically they could watch and observe people. I remember specifically that my science fair projects were alowd to deal with people at upper grade levels, but elemntry level was totally fine; my brother's fifth grade project was comparing you tasting abilities normally vs with your nose pinched, since taste and smell are interlinked.
Mod point free since 2001
Based on the fact that the article describes the children as students and the fact that the morning news mentioned her school population was 92% white, it would not by unreasonable to assume she used students at her own school and thus probably had few black children in her sample.
If a student selected one white kid and one black kid and concluded that blacks were more violent because that one black kid had been suspended for fighting, would that be OK too?
Or concluded that all geeks are homocidal maniacs because one chosen at random met all the published warning signs?
I'm not saying that taking the exhibit down was the best choice; it would have been better to use it as a way to discuss better scientific thinking. But really, this kid is offending and insulting lots of people with data that is essentially meaningless. Why bother?
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Normally I dissaprove of replying to sigs but yours is really really wrong. The rule that the word "I" is always capitolized has no exceptions to it. Same thing with the first word of every sentance and that a english word must have a vowel (does not count celtic words that are spelled using english letters.) So even the exception rule has exceptions.
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
Yeah, the sample size is too small for good statistical results. But we're talking about an 8 year old here. The fact that it occurred to her at that age to have something resembling a statistical sampling is impressive. I've seen way too many science fair projects by people 10 or 12 years old who seemed to think that a single data point was adequate for each of the samples.
As far as the "teachers" go, they've probably been frightened into political correctness in everything they do. What they did was a bad thing, but they probably get punished when they don't react this way, too.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
Herbert Marcuse was wrong when he wrote this 30 years ago and you're wrong now. Fuck off and die.
Oh, so it's NOT a FACT that schools can get their asses sued off for this sort of thing?
And all these racial-descrimination lawsuits that schools have lost millions of dollars over are just my imagination?
Whew! That will come as quite a relief to guys like this Principal, who can now relax and let kids display whatever they want at the science fair without any fear of legal liabillity whatsoever!
Thank you for your valuable legal advice.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Where such treaties conflict with the constitution and it's inclusive ammendments, for such cases the constitution is supreme. Hate speech or free speech? Who decides? All parties involved are free to form their own opinions and proceed from there.
The problem is the message that it sends to a minority, seeing this display through the eyes of the average 8-year-old child. The large banner over the display asked "Does Skin Color Matter", and it appears that the conclusion is "in terms of acceptance from your peers, yes. yes it does. don't even bother trying to fit in, because you can't."
I will say this one more time: even if the display seems perfectly valid through the lens we are currently looking at it, if it is something that school can loose a lawsuit over, the principal is right to yank it. It's not a violation of free speech, it's a decision not to provide a forum.
The kid can stand on a street corner shouting the "N" word at the top of her lungs, for all I care, but the school has the power (and the liability) over what gets displayed at an event which they sponsor.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Actually, in TINKER v. DES MOINES SCHOOL DIST., 393 U.S. 503 (1969) the supreme court ruled that "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." which would suggest that the First Amendment most certainly does apply to 8-year-olds.
The original posters point was that school is designed to produce mindless drones who follow orders and never think.
:-)
IronChef pretends that the message really was that we should raise a generation of criminals, and proceeds to argue against crime, instead of the actual point of the original post.
The most amusing part is when he tells us to "Think, dammit", while arguing vehemently agains teaching kids to think for themselves
Initially, the school bureaucracy deferred to those who might have been uncomfortable. The morning after the censorship, Thielen met with the school's principal, a teacher and the director of elementary education. They told him they removed the exhibit because it might make students of color uncomfortable.
I've always felt uncomfortable with the way Americans fictionalize the story of Christopher Columbus, being a hero, doing so much for the country. HELLO. Christopher Columbus was a rapist and a murderer, yet school officials still teach such wonderful things about him.
In order to please the public people often try to hush the situation without having to address the problem. Sure it may have made someone feel uncomfortable, the story noted however the problem was with the children who may not have known how to differentiate between race, something they will not know because of people like the teachers whose fears may have misguided their actions by yanking the project. If you don't speak about it, hushing the problem will not solve it.
We have the same problem out here in New York with an art gallery titled "Yo Mama Last Supper" which depicts Jesus Christ as a naked black woman. Well the mayor says "Its foul and tax payers should not pay their tax dollars to have this shown" who the heck gave him the right to choose for me. We've had about 3 ticker tape parades for our sports teams and I surely didn't want my tax dollars wasted on that, so where was he at that time.
People only speak when its convenient at most, and until that mentality of "If you don't speak it, its not a problem" is broken we won't learn right from wrong. The parents of that little girl should sue to prove a point being her first amendment was broken.
No discrimination allowed
"When I was a Buddhist, it drove my parents and friends crazy, but when I am buddha, nobody is upset at all"
My point isn't that she did it wrong, that her sample was too small, or she didn't know enough statistics to manipulate the data and get a good result.
My point was that her hypothesis included assumptions about the reasons why people did things, and the experiment couldn't gather data on it. It is psuedoscience, like much of psychology, economics, and sociology, an offense against true science which knows its own limits.
The experiment could have been done on a national scale by renouned sociologists or psychologists working with trained statisticians, and it still would have been psuedoscience as long as the people who did it claimed to gain insight into why people chose one doll over the other.
Far too many opinions and untestable theories based on subjective assumptions are stamped "SCIENCE" and thereby given more respect than they should.
---
I agree with sulli's post. I too was a student-editor, of the Carmel High School newspaper. I too was called into the principal's office on a number of occassions -- once for "allowing" a student to review the band "cycle sluts from hell". Another time for reprinting a pro-life article, which oddly, was about the Vietnam war and not wanting to shoot people, but which was misinterpreted to be anti-abortion. I stood by everything published, regardless.
But there are two points. First, don't back down if you have reason to think that you are operating within the law. I never did. I was told these "black marks" would go on my "permanent record." It never impacted me, and if it had, I may have had a good legal case against the school. So know the laws, know your rights, and act intelligently.
Second, don't forget that there is a great history of independent, student-run newspapers. They're often called "underground" newspapers, because the authors remain anonymous. Usually to avoid censorship by a school administration. I ran not one, not two, but THREE such newspapers back in high school. I distributed them late at night, walking onto the open campus around 1 a.m. and shoving the things though the vents of the student lockers. I never published anything libelous. I tried to stick to the facts, although on articles clearly marked as opinion pieces, I did let the writers have some room to vent. Don't limit yourself to school-sponsored publishing. There is a whole other world out there. You just have to create it.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Where I went to university, if you wanted to do human research, you had to prove that not only would it not cause undue distress on the subjects but also that the experiment would directly benefit the subjects. There were, of course, ways around this but the girl in this case made no such claim that her research directly benefitted her subjects. As it stood, her experiment should not have been cleared by a university ethics board (which, of course, it wasn't, nor should she have been required to).
--
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
It's got me curious -- her hypothesis is on whether white people will prefer the white barbie, but the article only breaks it up as adults versus children. I'd be very interested to know if she asked both white and black children, and if so, whether black children preferred the black barbie regardless of dress. Wouldn't that demonstrate racial preference from both directions? Why must we always assume that racism equals white people not liking black people?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
You're simply nuts.
The provisions in the Bill Of Rights restrict the Government's power over the citizenry. Parental rights are long established under rights of guardianship, and are not in any way in conflict with the Bill Of Rights.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
In this case, the principal saw something that looked like it could have created and unwelcoming environment, and had to make a judgement call.
If the study had been "a demonstration of the rapid oxidation of gasoline, cotton, and wood", and consisted of a burning cross, the judgement call would have been an easy one.
In this case, the line was a little more blurry. It's not helping the debate that we are only seeing one side of the debate here. We don't know what the display looked like, or what the reaction was like during the one hour that it was on display. For all we know, 8-year-old black girls were running out of the room crying, emotionally hurt by the display.
Without more actual facts (as opposed to the raving of one angry columnist), I am inclined to give the school the benifit of the doubt.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
In today's society, there are several taboo subjects that you absolutely can't broach except in the most somber of ways. Race relations are one; race in America is such a hot topic that there's an entire culture which has sprouted up around the issue, and race is the godhead of the culture. If you want to approach the godhead, you have to make a ritual out of it to put an Orthodox rabbi to shame.
What was this young lady's offense? Apparently, not following the rituals. She foolishly thought that it was acceptable to talk frankly about subjects without simultaneously holding them in reverence; that it was acceptable to think without arriving to the same conclusions which we're indoctrinated to arrive at; that it was, in short, acceptable to apply the reason God gave her to a problem which tickled her fancy.
Heavens to Betsy. She forgot to venerate the great godhead of modern social life, the bogeyman of racism. And here I thought the First Amendment meant we don't have to venerate anything we don't want to, and there's nothing the government can do to compel our worship.
It sounds to me like the teachers didn't approve of her topic regardless of what her message would be. A childrens science fair is no place for predjudice on the part of the educators present.
Had she been older and sent out a report for peer review showing how children prefered white Barbie dolls the study would be published. Mattel would use it to justify dumping Skipper in favor of adding the Barbie DSL Firewall and Router for the Barbie Dream House.
In short her science was sound. Her method correct. Her experiment somewhat visionary in its simplicity yet important in it's results. She deserves credit for her RESEARCH. Her teachers can go to hell. If this girl ever wants a job in real science she'll have no problem finding one.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
How many schools would have enough courage to stand up to professional troublemakers like Jessie Jackson?
I hooked a 9v battery to a bunch of different rocks that I'd picked up off the playground, to see if they would demonstrate electroluminescence. I threw it together in 3 hours or so. It got a ribbon. I then had incontrovertable proof that science fairs were complete BS.
I think you misread the article. The majority of adults preferred the purple dress regardless of whether it was on the white or the black doll. If the adults had been acting towards political correctness the results would have been skewed towards preferring the black doll regardless of the dress. Now since we don't have the raw data, we don't know if 13 out of 15 adults liked the black doll with the purple dress and 8 out of 15 liked the black doll without the purple dress. which would show up to the the child as 20 out of 30 for purple dress and 10 out of 30 for no purple dress. While atthe same time showing 21 out of 30 liked the black doll and 9 liked the white doll. Which would show a bias towards the black doll irrespective of the dress color. Which woudl then support your political correctness hypothesis. On the other hand she could have had 10 out of 15 in favor of black doll purple dress and 10 out of 15 for white doll purple dress. In which case you get 20 for purple dress. And, 15 for black doll and 15 for white doll. This would support an adult preference for the purple dress regardless of doll color. Either way is valid data. The child's conclusions may be arguable depending on the exact data, but I am still impressed with the 8 year old's data and conclusions. (It probably helped that dad has a PHd in Physics and could help her stay true to the scientific method.) Dastardly
I live in boulder and have judged other elementary science fairs there. I saw the project before it was removed (although I wasn't a judge at mesa). This was hands down the best science fair project I've seen in a long time (at that level).
hypothesis was clear and testable
methodology was clear, simple, and tested the hypothesis
data was well tabulated and presented
conclusion was valid and didn't overreach
topic was relevant and current
It could have used a larger sample size, but it blew away all the chemical volcanoes
No, but it is a crisis of reason, an academic travesty, and a triumph of idiocy. The constitution is good, but it is limited to certain arenas. This battle is important, but will probably not be decided on constitutional grounds. Nor was the Kansas decision to 'de-emphasize' evolution in the schools reversed on constitutional issues - it was the fact that academic leaders and parents spoke out.
No wonder they yanked it, there's no reason to have a high-level race dialogue among second graders.
I'm for science for the sake of science, but making any inferences on such limited social science data is dangerous, especially considering there has been extensive academic studies already done on the "doll preference test" (and cited in Brown v. Board of Education).
This girl obviously was in over her head. While I commend her for the process used to undertake such an examination, I have to wonder why she was pursuing a social science project in an elementary school science fair.
it's just more of the "if we don't talk about it, it'll go away" mentality to which our nation's school children are subjected everyday
Right sentiment, but wrong source. While I agree that in many ways America's schoolchildren are treated with this as an implicit assumption, this project would have caused a similar response (either being pulled or with people asking that it be pulled) regardless of forum. Americans cannot talk about race relations, anywhere; we don't want to admit that there is any current racial prejudice and some of us would like to conclude that America has never had serious racial inequities. (Ever hear the phrase "past injustices" used to explain away current disparities and why nothing should be done about them? It's part of the same cop-out.)
I sometimes wonder if America couldn't use a "truth commission" ala South Africa, not that it necessarily has been a great boon to interracial relations there either.
For the sake of the rest of this thread, please re-read what he wrote. He did not use the word "mick" and there is no irony involved.
The fact of the matter is that during the early 19th century the Irish were an opressed ethnic minority both in the United States and in England. One prevailing stereotype (that originated in England) was that the Irish were "apelike" and the "missing link." The perpetuation of this stereotype allowed the reigning upper class to feel better about themselves and keep the Irish from getting good jobs or obtaining power. This view of the Irish coupled with the fact that power was held mostly by Protestants led to extreme discrimination. Since the Irish were Catholics, they were looked on as "papist pigs."
It is no suprise then that the Irish American population, faced with competition over limited resources with other ethnic minorities (namely the blacks), were inclined to fight for any resources they could get their hands on.
The fact that blacks were used as strikebreakers (since they weren't allowed in white unions) against the Irish between the 1840's and 1860's did not help race relations between the two ethnic groups at all, and in fact the racist sentiments have persisted into the present day.
This, by the way, has not been a personal attack on the Irish either, merely an explanation of the current state of race relations between two ethnic groups.
Andrew
Should people really have some sort of right to not be offended? For an example of offensive pictures, you can go to goatse.cx. If somebody drew that picture on the side of a large building, and you had to walk by that picture every day, do you have the right to complain?
An experiment like this NEVER would have made it to the exhibit hall in any of the schools I went to. They would literally present students interest in the Science Fair with a list of like 20 "experiments" to do.
You got your Hypothesis and Procedure handed to you in purple and white mimeograph. The point of the science fair was not to perform experiments, but to present them properly on posterboard. "Hypothesis must be printed by hand on an unlined white paper 8 1/2" x 5"" or somesuch bologna.
When you got to the actual fair, there would be rows and rows of "Bean plant bends toward light" "Neither Tide nor All is a better detergent" "Metal conducts, wood does not" experiments. Then, in the part of the room closest to the stage were the private and upper-class neighborhood school's experiments, which gleamed with copper and smelled of lemons or potatoes.
But they were still the same assembly-line science, these kids just got their Hypothesis out of one of those newfangled photocopy machines instead of mimeo, and labeled their steps with pre-gummed lettering instead of Sharpie(tm) marker.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
>Well, the First Amendment doesn't neccessarily
>apply to an 8 year old.
Put simply, bullshit.
You either have rights or you do not. Rights are not priviledges, they are not granted. Unless and until you violate the law and consequently have your rights revoked by a court of law, they remain.
An 8 year old has the same rights as you or I do. Effectively more, as many juvenile crimes have few lasting penalties.
Before you parrot it, maybe you should read the Constitution.
Or maybe, start with the Declaration Of Independance, which states "WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...", which pretty concretely indicates that Rights are present from the moment of creation.
Or did you somehow miss the whole abortion debate?
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
The problem is, the proponents of some really bad ideas do not engage in rational discourse on the subject, so there is no way to show the fallacies of their position in rational debate. Take Holocaust deniers as an example. Nothing you can say can disuade them from their perverse view of history. They are committed to an *idealogical* view that has no basis in fact. Their tactics are to simply spew endlessly about their position without regard to rational argument, in the hopes that enough non-thinking, ill-educated people hear their call and latch on to their viewpoint. In such cases, and in certain venues, I can't help but to think censorship is the only real way to deal with it. If I were a teacher, I would probably prohibit any of my students from writing a paper that denies the Holocaust, becasue if I allowed something like that, I would be forced into a position of having to rip apart the paper in front of the class in an effort to demonstrate that fallacious reasoing behind the arguments. This would only lead to ridiculing the student who wrote the paper, and that wouldn't be good for anyone. Elementary and high-school classes are not the place to cloud discusion with idealogy-based diatribes and pseudoscientific claptrap. In general, kids that age are not mature or sophisticated enough to handle the subtleties of epistemology and logic such discussions usually raise
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Isn't it ironic that the previous generation definted themselves in terms of rebellion against authority, and now that they're in charge, all they do is give people reasons to want to rebel against authority. Power corrupts whether you're a fat, old white guy in a hidden smoky room or an idealistic young hippie out to change the world.
And it's amazing how fast the Bill of Rights gets thrown out the door when an ideology anywhere across the political spectrum feels threatened.
Note to people in charge of the world:
People of different races have a right to be treated equally. Regardless of genetic makeup, a person deserves the same rights as anyone else.
However, that does not mean all people _are_ equal. Nor does it mean that people of different behaviors have a right to be treated equally. If you are a criminal, you deserved to be punished. If you are not a criminal, then you deserve to be left alone.
It's amazing how hard it is for people to understand this... and I'm not talking about only racists. At least the racists are honest about it. It's amazing how often members of the "diversity" crowd are as narrow-minded and prejudiced as any sheet-wearing hick or Neo-Nazi.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I was trying to find the bright side to this, but couldn't really. But I did wonder what conlusions or new hypothesis you could develop.
The kid expected find out that people were biased due to skin colour. She finds out that the kids are, but the adults aren't, instead going by the nicest dress. But then the project gets pulled for no good reason by the school. She could develop the following opinions:
As a child, people naively may exhibit prejudice, but they can learn to lose them.
8 year olds have no dress sense but it becomes far more important later on.
Then the realisation that other people's appearance is still important, just not as making sure that you look as good as possible.
People in authority can be identified by their dress sense.
Which still doesn't mean that their decisions make any sense.
And so the child can be prepared for the change in prejudice as she ages, into subtler forms, and also to question authority. Maybe the influences will combine to produce a new, visionary kind of authority figure (with, nonetheless, good dress sense).
Children do. They have just as much right to have the same privileges as anyone else, if not, they need more. Just because they drool or can be annoying, doesn't mean they don't have rights. They are tomorrow's adults.
That is why you guide children and help them understand what is going on, not leave them in the dark or brush them off. Adults are responsible on how a child should be reared, cared for, and educated.Kids need stern discipline from their parents, not friendship!
In the years of a child's life, the adult is the smartest, bravest, most amazing person in their eyes...they listen if you just tried. You get respect by giving respect, right? But to take away there curiosity and quizative nature and rule with an iron hand?I think not.
The young girl and her science project is the very essence of a child's curiosity and it needs to be nurtured. Unfortunately, not all children have this opportunity to express themselves for fear of being repremanded and/or made to feel that what they think is not important.
Gezz, hasn't anyone looked carefully at what a kid has to face in today's society? Kids are very interesting "miniture adults." A childs fascination about the world and how they wonder about everything around them is amazing... we could learn a lot from these little people :)
There is an important lesson here.
It's about a child who asked a question and challenged the people around her to give her an answer.
It's also the important role her father (a responsible adult) played by supporting her decision to go ahead with the project and standing up for her when school officials decided otherwise...
It is unfortunate the teachers couldn't see past the color of the dolls...but she did and made others see too...pretty darn powerful.
This is sad day for mankind if a child couldn't ask "Why?"
"It takes a whole village to raise one child." Old African ProverbIn a school that is 93% white, you can expect a good deal of censorship over that kind of thing. Look at this: Official Mesa Elementary School Webpage.
Is it a significant enough statistical universe to generalize ?? Hardly. Does it show early trends ?? Certainly does. So her data could use a few thousand more points. . .if she was a collegiate-level researcher.
For an 8-year-old, this is outstanding performance. This kid shows promise, and already thinks "outside the box". . .
Any 12 year old that's old enough to rape or kill is old enough to pay an adult penalty--up to and including death. Those cases you're referring to aren't about shoplifting or joyriding a car. Is a tragedy, yes, but there should be no coddling of youthful violent criminals. These aren't kids who erred along the way--they're just plain evil to the bone for whatever reason.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
(b) I find white women more attractive than black women (which has nothing to do with racial preference)
Why doesn't that have anything to do with racial preference? Is it purely pathological (i.e. instinctively and inexplicably more attractive) or psychological (i.e. psychologically -- a race preference). If it was only pathological could you identify that trait in yourself at all?
I have a Ph.D. in economics, and I'm still not clear on the science/social science split.
When a distinction is made, it tends to be using "social science" as immunity from the scientific method.
I am a scientist. I research the choices made in human behavior, but I'll fight to the death over the scientific method: it's an either/or proposition, not something you can finesse.
So am I a scientist or a social scientist?
Shouldn't this be a Katz story?
How you say things is often more important than what you have to say.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
How do you explain the Boston Celtics?
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
If any item ever deserved a mandatory warning notice, it would be "The Painted Bird".
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
She is 8 years old and the way I read the report it sounds like she did a more scientific study than some of the people who were in my college Psychology class.
I would like to read her project to see what the hypothesis and conclusions were, exactly. But it sounds very well done for someone who isn't even into middle-school yet.
:)
In elementary school, I did a science experiment involving taste. I made 100 mini-muffins, divided into combinations of artificial flavors and colors. For example, the red muffins might be blueberry flavor and the yellow muffins might be chocolate (or whatever). I asked people to eat them and tell me what flavor they tasted. I had dozens of test subjects and they ALL guessed the wrong, "obvious" flavor (red = cherry, blue = blueberry) except my friend Michael. kids are st00pid.
cpeterso
Yeah, the first Amendment gives us free speech, but the way laws and our constitutional rights are applied does not depend strictly on what the Constitution says but rather what the Supreme Court has interpreted it to say and mean, including additions it has added such as the balance test on free speech. In interpreting the 1st Amendment the Court has established the idea of "special places," such as schools, where rights don't necessarily apply as they would in regular life. Now it's been a while since I sat in law class, but I do remember that things such as free speech and probable cause for searches work differently when dealing with a school situation. Before you all start quoting the Constitution and claiming this all as an outrage it might be good to check what's happened in the 200 years since that document was written and how that applies to schools and free speech in general.
--
Jacob Grabczewski
- jacob42@home.com -
Jacob Grabczewski
- jacob42@home.com -
"The higher you are, the farther you fall." - Hetfield
To bad this was a lesson my principle in high school had to learn the hard way. :-)
In my experience, I have seen students have their projects thrown out of fairs. However, this was only done when the project clearly violated the published rules of the fair and there was no way to correct the situation. The best example of that would be where a student killed all of their test animals, in violation of LD50 (Lethal dose to at most 50% of test subjects). We have had projects that were distasteful and completely unscientific - one even made light of the Ebola virus - but we would never think of eliminating a project based on content.
It is a disgrace that this child's work has been thrown out simply because it made someone uncomfortable. Whoever made that decision is clearly interested in politics, not science.
depends on population fraction. so if she was at her local grocery store and the 60 people she sampled were out of 200 then i would say her cofidence interval is pretty small. plus lets not forget that she is a kid developing analytical skills. i know you probably had at least two classes in statistics at the age of 8 like me but not everyone is as lucky as you and i.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
This is a wonderful post, but I have one (nitpicky) problem with it.
I don't believe that those who deny that the holocaust happened should be recognized as a particular "side" of an argument. As of right now, I question whether they should be allowed to voice their message. This rings of censorship, I know, but allow me to explain.
That the holocaust happened is a matter of historical fact. Even those who deny that the holocaust happened, know that it happened. Their motives for denying it are not in the interests of historical revisionism. They deny the holocaust as a method of furthering anti-Semitic propaganda and legitimizing their hateful speech. I believe (please note that this is an opinion, IANAL) that speech of this kind is NOT protected under the first amendment as it is false/untrue, and has the potential to incite violence. I equate this type of speech to yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre.
I realize that this is a double edged sword, but with so many things in life, as in art, it's all a matter of where you draw the line.
Andrew
From what I understand, the girl performed her barbie test on all of 15 adults and 30 children. This hardly seems statistically enough to infer what she inferred so I wouldn't call it a complete science project.
:)
I would...
Actually, it was 30 adults and 30 children.
Now, Stat 509 was a long time ago, but, as I recall, there were two sets of statistical analysis equations; one set for a sample size smaller than 40, and another set for a sample size greater than 40. (Both broke down for exactly 40.)
Since her sample size was not 40, it is possible for the results to be statistically valid.
Although, being 8, I doubt she applied either of these set of formula.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I was an editor for my High School newspaper. As such, I was allowed to write a column every month.
My column in October of my senior year was about appearance. I was constantly put down and insulted because I did not wear Tommy Hilfiger, or Abercrombie, or whatever. So the jist of my column was "Get to know a person before you judge them. Don't judge based on appearances alone."
The day after the paper came out, the Administration got 150 complaints. From parents and students, saying I was, to quote, "A bitter young man, out to ruin people's lives" and "A sore loser, because I was poor".
I, and my Journalism Advisor were pulled down to the head principal's office, and berated for 2 hours. I had to put an apology in to people I offended with my column. I was told all my columns for the rest of the year would have to be reviewed be the Administration beffore they could go to print, and that if my columns didn't start being more upbeat, discussing the football team and the "normal people", I was going to be removed.
Normal people. He meant the popular people. The ones who treated me like shit, I was now TOLD to revere in a public forum. More proof that the public school system has it's head so far up it's ass it has to unzip to speak.
And don't talk to me about the Hazelwood act, I got that thrown at me too... Hell, the principal wanted to suspend me until the next issue with the apology came out.
-------------------------------------------------
The study showed that adults prefer lavender to whatever other color(s) were presented. This shows enculturated bad taste. They've also been enculturated to pretend not to notice skin color.
... also popular it seems in Colorado. Oops, that wasn't a toy?!
The kids on the other hand went by a naive appreciation over-all aesthetic effect - the lavender didn't match the darker Barbie so well, perhaps. Most likely all of the dresses were originally designed to compliment pale skin. Or the kids favored a doll that served the traditional doll function of being believable as a standin for their own future child (or in the case of Barbie: future self), this being a beautiful possibility to a kid, and most of the kids in Boulder being pale. One African tribe gives a woman a doll at marriage, which is given the name which is to be transferred to her first baby later on, and stands in for the child until then.
Dolls and school are both about pretending: learning to pretend to be adults. The older people in Boulder have obviously been well schooled. This in a state that voted for a man who pretends that there's no global warming, who pretends that he won the presidency, who favors federal funds for schools teaching 'creation science' - in our virtual present, we don't need science anymore, just engineering to remove the unsightly refuse so we can get on with our pretend individuality with our pretend SUVs and our toy guns
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Censorship is not an effective means of dismantling a meme. It's short sighted, and in many cases can only fan the flames. Censorship removes an idea from debate, as the author of the article has noted.
Removing debate is dangerous in a free society. In North America, our participation in any sort of public debate is minimal, and doubt is often frowned upon. Doubt in free-trade warrants the label of a protectionist. Doubting America's motives abroad (ie. Vietnam, Iraq, Chile etc.) is un-American. The very same for my own Canada as well.
My solution to racism and other bad ideas is to not censor them. The onus is on us to prove why they are bad ideas. Censorship is lazy, if we really feel strongly about an idea, then we should be prepared to discuss it, prove or disprove it.
There will always be idiots who feel like denying the holocaust, or putting blacks beneath asians on a bell curve. But let the unpopularity of their ideas shine. Let them feel free to make asses of themselves.
Furthermore, isolating a group of bad-ideas-supporters does not help to win them over. Censorship merely ignites them with more passion, convincing them that the government is against them, because of the Zionist conspiracy or some other nonsense.
So really, all censorship does is impede debate, which harms the good ideas and decent common narrative that a culture should have. It isolates instead of healing, it's a bad habit to get into (what if an unpopular idea, like democracy, or socialism, or whatever someday proves correct?)
The only real way to handle bad ideas is to challenge them with better ideas.
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
Next you'll be claiming that if you're old enough to be drafted, you're old enough to drink alcohol.
Will Lisa Simpson be the next Hitler?
Sorry to hear it, get some help.
Maybe she will learn about discression, and the way that social politics work. In the future, that could prove to be far more important than the science lesson
Hiding a problem does not fix it. As a kid I tried to push my toys under the bed when Ihad to clean my room, it only worked untel untel they started coming out the other side.
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Its easy to silence one person. It is very hard to stop a distributed attack.
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
Seems to me like Whitey-Barbie was more appealing to the youngsters because Barbie is always white on the commercials and on the merchandise/branding. When Barbie is all of the sudden black, she must seem to a child to be some sort of off-barbie toywise. Sort of like a green C3P0.
12 year olds are stupid. They can have difficulty internalizing concepts such as conscience and social responsibility.
Sure coddling and an absense of real consequences can cause minor delinquent behaviours to escalate, but condemning a child cause he's still too stupid is wrong.
It's better to be able to confront the truth rather than try to uselessly hide it. A child would be better off fully aware of the situation and how to recognize it and its implications -- for instance, to know that racial discrimination *does* happen, and how to intelligently judge when it might be occuring.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Do you prefer women with dark or light hair? Short or tall women? Serious or funny? Surely you're being hairist / heightist / personalityist....
Having preferences is always the same thing as discrimination? Ouch...
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
I happen to be taking a law class right now, focusing on (among other things) consitutional law. Last time I looked at the Consitution (amazing how many people invoke the Constitution of the United States in normal discourse when they haven't read it, or read it well), which was about three hours ago, there are no stipulations as to age in any of the amendments that are commonly referred to as the Bill of Rights.
As an example in which it is explicitly stated that minors, and further minors as students, still have full and equal access to the BoR, see the US Supreme Court case TINKER V. DES MOINES SCHOOL DIST., 393 U.S. 503. (the text can be read here among other places). (As a historical sidenote, my mother was friends with the kids in question, back in Des Moines in the mid 60's.)
So in short if a 1st grader wishes to say he thinks the school's administration is wrongheaded, and does so in a manner that is not inciting to riot, constitutionally he is completely free to do so. If the administration doesn't like that, tough titty.
--
"Overrated" is "overfuckingused".
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I hope you aren't statistics majors. Without knowing more about the results, its hard to say whether or not the sample is large enough. Lots of valid statistics in science is done on even smaller sample sizes.
Ever wonder why schools fail to produce educated people these days? This is an example of why. This girl did a completely rational, logical project, certainly more interesting and MEANINGFUL than the usual HS science fair project. But, because the subject failed the test of "political correctness", this young woman now has to be victimized by "the system". To put it more clearly, calling PC "politically correct" is itself being politically correct. The proper and honest term is POLITICAL CENSORSHIP. The very existance of political censorship in academia stifles free speech, free thought, creativity, etc. IN other words, it stifles the WHOLE PROCESS by which we think and discover new things!!! Unless eradicated, PC will bring down our ability to compete in the world of ideas. It can stop progress, halt technological advancement, etc. Think about the problem of race relations... And it IS a problem. How are we going to ever discover a solution, unless we honestly and scientifically research the PROBLEM? The PC movement doesn't want this problem delt with in an open and honest (and effective) manner because the required solution just MAY be found to be different than what the mostly leftist-socialist agenda that PC serves! Thank GOD I went to high school in the 1980's, when the whole idea of "PC" was just a mild joke instead of a dangerous, paralyzing, runious destructive force that is melting the minds of our next generation of thinkers.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
- Adults (at least female adults): "Which dress would look good on me?" or "Which color of the dress do I like?" This would equate to about 50/50
- Children: "Which 'Barbie' do we get barraged with on TV?" Well...the white Barbie, obviously. You mean there's another barbie?
- Adults might be looking at 'color coordination' and the contrast of brown on lavendar might be more appealing to their senses than flesh-tone on whatever the other color was. Hey, why not? :)
- Children might be exposing the subtle racist teaching of their parents. Hey, you never know. Kids can find out the darndest things by watching their parents' reactions. If mommy backs away a little further when a gentleman of color walks past her, perhaps little Sally or little Bobby will interpret that specific skin tones are more dangerous. Yeah, it's extreme. But you never know.
Of course, insert argument against censorship *HERE*. But can you truly blame the school for doing this? WHAT you may say? A /.er trying to remove blame from the schools? GASP!
Imagine an auditorium with 50 or 100 science projects lined up in a few rows. Let's say Missus Funda Mentalist, Miz Pea Sea, and Mister Ray Cist are looking at the exhibits. We have your usual assortment of science projects. "Do plants grow better in light or darkness," "Will plants grow better in Sugar Water, Salt Water, Regular Water, or soda," "Why does mercury rise in a thermometer." Then..."Do people like White Barbie or Black Barbie better?"
The theory is that white people will like white barbie better. It's an innocent enough hypothesis, and well, it makes sense. The method of testing is simple. Let there be two color differences: the color of Barbie and the color of the dress. You can easily compare the number of people that like the dress compared to the color of the Barbie. After the survey, wow, looks like our friend here is wrong. Adults like both Barbies just fine. But Children on the other hand...children like the White Barbie.
WARNING: INCOMING SARCASM, FICTIONAL SITUATION, AND STEREOTYPES!
Ms. Sea goes over angrily to have a word with the Principal. How dare you allow something like this as a Science Project? Whites and Blacks are equal and I demand that this is brought up at the next PTA! I demand to speak to this child's parents! Well, Mrs. Mentalist and Mr. Cyst hear this and jump in on the conversation. Mr. Cyst goes on to say that of course children should like White Barbie. White Barbie was there first, and there's no room for Black Barbie. Mrs. Mentalist is disgusted by this and goes off to tell her Church Buddies.
This ends with PTA, unnecessary Media Coverage, 'proof' that Whites are liked more by children than Blacks, KKK rallies, Nation of Islam...the school is made a mockery, teachers get fired and the principal gets transferred.
Or, you could just hide the kid's project. And since the media complains before the parents have a chance to hear about it from their gossip buddies, it loses momentum. No grassroots effort is really in place to dislodge the uncomfortable silent acceptance of the race problem as it is. And after a little while, it all blows over and is forgotten about.
If you were a Principal in a school, and have been dealing with race issues for 5, 10, 15, 25 years in a publicly funded school...what decision would you make?
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When i was in the 8th grade, i collected some data on peoples's preferences for a study. I sampled 50 people. When i reported the percentage findings, i multiplied my results by two (results/samplesize * 100 = (in my case) results*2 = x%). When asked by the teacher "how did you get these percentages" and i explained it, she was aghast and exclaimed "you can't do that!!! that's lying!!". Puzzled by her response, i tried to explain how math worked, but to no avail. Her opinion was that you had to have exactly 100 samples to get a percentage out of 100.
The moral: teachers are humans, and aren't always the brightest bulbs in the chandelier.
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
A child would be better off fully aware of the situation and how to recognize it and its implications
Right, and a posterboard display in a crowded science fair is probably not the best environment for "full awareness" and a helpful discussion of the implications of the situation.
Adults are better at censoring their impulses. They know they're not "supposed" to show a racial bias, thus they suppress it. On the other hand, it could be the case that people genuinely lose their racial biases as they get older/better educated. Most likely a bit of both.
I find white women more attractive than black women (which has nothing to do with racial preference)
You lost me here. A preference based solely on race isn't a racial preference? Please explain.
Sounds like someone should do a project involving a survey of the math skills of teachers.
or something like that.
the way I see it, the school district was trying to keep parents from having to answer the questions:
"mommy, what's racism?"
and
"daddy, what's 'racial prejudice'?"
my first inclination is to say that they aren't giving the parents enough credit. These are obviously very important issues, things that need to be discussed with absolutely everyone. It's also a difficult topic for parents to broach. If a child asks you a question such as this (especially becuase of a science fair project), then the project was a *huge* success. It makes *no* sense that such a project would be removed when it's looked at in this light.
Then I fall back into my comfortable little shell of denial and say that the government should be doing more children. Racism and violence are the products of tv/movies, and video games.
ahh, much better. cozy.
Despite the best efforts of the more enlightened and well-intentioned people in our society, descrimination still exists and it doesn't hurt to be reminded of that once and a while and to have our conciousness on the matter raised a little bit. This simple science fair project was in no way racist. It was, from my interperetation of the article, trying to show how some people are still descriminated against, and how that impacts negatively on children.
If we're going to take out all descussion of racism from public schools do we eliminate Civil Rights units from history class and censor books about Martin Luther King, Jr. because they talk about racism? Don't deny an issue just because it makes you uncomfortable; confronting it is the only way to solve it.
--Later, friends--
--Later, friends--
Frogisis, Master of
Do we know what the racial mix of the sample was? I'd be interested to see what ratios are in the sample and population.
Don't bother, he's not worth it...
This would be an outrageous issue if it were challenged in court and supported. It would be a worrisome situation if the school continued to declare that what it did was right.
But if you read the article, you'll be pleasantly surprised to note that, not only did the president of the school board basically condemn censorship in general, but also this is being used to review and revise how science fairs are handled:
People make mistakes. It's good for them to be called to task for it so that it doesn't happen again. But don't go running around yelling "the sky is falling!" because some bureaucrat was a dumbass. Especially not when the others in charge aren't supporting them.
state your thought and then systematically layout the logic to support/explain your thought. Don't see a lot of that on /.
So they choose to segregate race relations discussions. These discussions are different from other discussions and need special controls?
Are they also using only American recipes in cooking exercises, so as to not make French or non-French students uncomfortable? For that matter, don't French language classes make the non-French-speakers uncomfortable?
Okay, I admit it. As a bleeding heart liberal, if I had been in the teachers shoes I may have made the same decision that they made. On the otherhand, I can see the issue from the freedom of speech side too. And, I agree that censorship is seldom an answer to any problem. Tonight, my daughter came home complaining to me, the kids in her school are calling her "white girl" and other "names." I informed her she is a white girl who sometimes wears a tee-shirt that says "Swede" on it. Even though kids can pretend that being white is not a good thing, it is just a difference, like boys and girls are different and that we should be happy that there are different people. I have not raised her to treat people differently because of color or gender or anything but to give each person a fair shake and allow them to earn your respect (or lose it). The teachers did not intend to censor, they wanted to avoid bad feelings from growing and interfering with the educational process in the school. For that, I don't blame them. If one student suffers - but the entire school benefits then more power too 'em. Maybe the kid will learn a lesson more valuable than the science lesson. Maybe she will learn about discression, and the way that social politics work. In the future, that could prove to be far more important than the science lesson. Perhaps, the teachers will learn an important lesson too. That not everything is socially correct and that the fringes are the areas that need the most protection. I am not without my bias' as an adult, I have had a long time to learn them. But I also know that sometimes, my discomfort in a situation is unwarranted and that I need to shed some of my own baggage before I draw conclusions. If I did not confront these issues from time to time, I would shop differently, I would live in a different place, and I would have fewer friends. To me, self-examination has to come before I accuse others. I can not accuse the student of being racist based on what I have read, but equally, I can not accuse the teachers of unfairly censoring her. I do hope that this issue opened dialog on a deeper level though the community and I hope that it does the same thing here on Slashdot. But we need to start by looking at our own issues.
I've never experienced a more white bread ostrich head buried in the sand liberal wannabe town. Yes, I lived there. In the 'In Living Color' 'Men On Film' voice: Hated it.
There is nearly zero racial diversity there, and so many residents think they have the whole thing figured out, like this girl's teachers - just DON'T talk about it.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
"You're too stupid to make an informed decision about what you want to see/discuss, so we'll make that decision for you."
This incident is exactly that; some 'authority' decides what is/is not appropriate for the general public (article doesn't mention if this was a school-only or public fair, but I think that's irrelevant anyways).
Some form of censorship is fine to protect some people (insert you really-gross-and-demeaning-example here), but broad censoring is too limiting; there should always be some option to have access to the uncensored form of the subject. How many times have I cursed when watching a TV comedy special where the language is censored, when they have SAP audio available on that channel and don't make use of it!
AC comments get piped to
Yeah, obviously it's the school district's fault. They're clearly trying to shut down anything remotely race-related and censor it. What evil bastards, right?
Wrong. All they're trying to do is keep themselves from being sued. If they let the little girl keep her science project up, some idiot would have seen it, decided it was racist, or sexist, or Barbie-ist and rallied more idiots to share the news. There would have been meetings, discussions, committees, and probably lawsuits. Angry, overblown speeches would have been made about the evils of racism and how it Must Be Kept Out of Our Schools at All Costs. By-laws would have been issued to make sure kids went to racial awareness classes the week before the Science Fair. Memos would be issued, and teachers admonished. In general, an orgy of useless discord.
So yeah, the school employees are obviously bastards for removing the little girl (who was probably acting on orders from her dad to stir up useless trouble). Clearly their fault.
Whatever.
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
She's eight years old. I'm more impressed with her parents ability to come up with such a non-standard hypothesis and credit it to their third grader.
The adults are going to know something's up when a little girl comes up to them with two barbie dolls and asks them which one they prefer, this may be the reason for the 50-50 split.
Ahhh, but how does the adult in question know how to answer? Do they answer truthfully, or politically correct?
Even the method they chose their answer by is subject to statistical analysis.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
From the article:
I think I see what we're aiming for, here. What we want is to develop the Whiffle Life for children so that they grow up to be Whiffle Adults who are shocked and amazed when they burn their fingers on a stove, and then sue the stove manufacturer for not affixing a warning label to the stovetop.
You know what I think makes "students of color" uncomfortable? Calling them "students of color". Jeez, what the hell's wrong with calling 'em "students"? Crikey, I'm a "person of color", that color just happens to be "extremely pale".
That this child is 8 years old is irrelavant. This is a pretty sophisticated experiment for an 8-year-old, and she should be allowed to present it. Will it make the kids ask questions? Probably -- that's a GOOD thing. Will it make them uncomfortable? Not likely -- do these administrators remember being 8? 8 year olds aren't bothered by much. Witness them causing scenes in Wal-Mart or the grocery store.
Well, the First Amendment doesn't neccessarily apply to an 8 year old. You don't get Rights until you can accept the Responsibilities that come attached to them. The issue here is "should this project be tossed out" and to me, the answer is "no".
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
As a graduate of the Boulder Valley School District system, I wouldn't bet much that they do. Granted, I don't attend Mesa Elementary right now, but from what I've seen of BVSD free expression and free inquiry ARE supported and respected. No filters on the browsers when I was there, you can cuss in papers and keep it to a minimum in class, no books are banned.
In Boulder, there are always enough people with enough power to keep in the government in check. Oftentimes, the only option available is in fact to do the morally right thing, because if the Daily Camera doesn't let you know you screwed up then *some* organization certainly will.
It's funny that this kind of thing gets reported, I think, given that it's a relatively insignificant event. However, it does involve principles worth preserving and definitely falls under the heading of what those in the Denver area would call "only in Boulder."
Sheesh.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Then again, I tend to follow Robert A. Heinlein's definition: if it can't be expressed in mathematics, it's not science.
You drive it into the kids' head that it IS science, and then complain when they put a sociology experiment in a science fair ???
Sorry, but you can't have it both ways. No matter how hard the schools try. . . .
No, the People's Republic of Cambridge is the center of liberal thought. Boston's just that weird place on the other side of the Charles :0)
Hi, Cynthia Thielen is also my grandmother.
... jesus! I've followed my grandmother's political career and I don't know that this has even come up once.
Uncle Dave has never pushed his own ideas onto his daughters in front of me. From what I know of his family, open discussion and individual thought are encouraged. It's ridiculous to say that Dave is using her to push his own agenda. The subject of this experiment has nothing to do with Dave's work or political interests.
As for this being representative in any way of the politics in which my grandmother is involved
____________________
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The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
-nt-
"Freedom in cyberspace'd be fine and dandy if we happened to live there."
How is his status as an author and the son of Cynthia Thielen relevant?
What makes you think that he wants to make this a nationwide issue?
Dave can be an abrasive guy, but he's not insensitive and he's CERTAINLY not a terrible father. When it comes to his children, he thinks of their welfare and mental development before himself or anyone else. I've personally seen him go to great lengths to protect his children. I doubt that this is going to increase his book sales and it doesn't even touch on my grandma's political issues.
Let's not take this thing to extremes.
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The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
I'm this little girl's cousin.
The last time that I saw her family, we did spend some time discussing issues like this and she had plenty of things to say. The idea for this subject may not have been generated instantly out of the ether of her mind, but I seriously doubt that she was coaxed into this. Dave would probably have rather seen her do some kind of hard science experiment.
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The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
Yeah actually that's pretty close to something that Dave would say.
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The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
Just because Dave is a physicist does not mean that he designed the experiment. You'll need something stronger to back up that accusation.
In any case, I've known Dave my whole life and I don't think I've ever heard him talk about physics. He spends more time writing software than on physics. I don't know why his degree has been made into a huge deal.
____________________
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The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
The only people I hate more than Boulder dwellers are rich Californians.
... and she's 8. How old are you?
So I guess that if I brought you two Barbies, one from Boulder and one from Malibu, you'd opt for the one from Boulder?
Dave and his family really aren't an indication of the Boulder mainstream. In fact, I don't even know that there *is* a Boulder mainstream. The city seems to have plenty of strange people.
Anyway, let's not apply invalid inductive reasoning here ok? Enough people are upset that my cousin's experiment wasn't perfect
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The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
The unfortunate thing is that it is so heavily ingrained in the education systems of all developed countries.
My wife is a secondary school (US translation: 'college' maybe?) teacher who has to put up with this sort of crap day in and day out. God forbid she tries to teach some kids free thought, no way. She either:
- Gets slapped down by a senior teacher for not toeing the line, or
- Gets labelled as a 'bad teacher' because her kids get marked badly in external exams for questioning presumptions or attempting free thought
I don't have kids, but geeze, home schooling has never looked so inviting.--
gadgetophile.com
This is just another example of how fragmented the educational system is. The teacher's first instinct was to take it down because it might upset certain individuals. Nevermind that it was done scientifically. They aren't looking at it scientifically. Your concern for the future of the children has to grow when you see teachers acting like the children they teach!
Two scoops of raisins please!
Like meat to the piranha....
Aren't we overreacting to this situation a little? A few teachers got a little overzealous, the parent complained, and the local board is handling it. Everyone seems to be trying to act reasonable and come to a fair conclusion. It seems unfortunate, but not catastrophic, and in some ways it's encouraging. Why the wailing and gnashing of teeth?
I think that you are forgetting one thing, namely that we are talking about a grade school child, we should commend her for at least thinking outside of the traditional valcano/planet model thought process. Besides, we are talking about the People's Republic of Boulder here.
is that Oreos(R)(TM)(patent pending) tend to get eaten black-part first. Carried to a bizzare and irretrievably buzzed extreme, what this means is that in the event of a global catastrophe, in which all (hu)mankind turns to cannibalism, Clarence Thomas will be devoured before Natalie Portman. Meanwhile all grits of any kind will have ceased to exist.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Boston has historically been one of the most racist cities in the US. Because it is a center of liberal thought, though, racism is swept under the carpet. Witness the busing debate of twenty-odd years ago.
The Boston sports teams are not immune to this. The Red Sox were the last baseball team to integrate. I believe the Bruins (hockey) had a black player before either the Red Sox or the Celtics (the Patriots weren't founded until 1960).
Probably the ultimate reason for the racism was the large Irish population in Boston. The Irish had a tendency to racism for the very simple reason that the blacks would compete with them for the same menial jobs (due to the bias of the Brahmins). When the Irish essentially took over the city in the early 20th-century they effectively did all they could to marginalize any black population.
Are we to expect some sort of neoBrownshirt movement that finds, among its growing constituents, intelligent young girls?
Actually, western authorities are now almost as ill-adapted to the decentralization of media as was the Roman church when Guttenberg rendered its scribes obsolete. If the "Brownshirts" do win, it may produce something more akin to the Protestant Reformation than National Socialism. IMHO I think this is the more likely historic model. An Internet-age "Tyndale Bible" (first English translation created with the assistance of Spanish Jews exiled by the Inquisition in Hamburg) could be the response to an "Inquisition" by "The Church" of JudeoChristian Civilization into the "demon possession" of its critics.
If so, this work of greater public access to mythic authority may prove the most important exercise of the information age.
The question that has me hooked, as someone who lives and breaths this revolution is, "Just what form will this 'Tyndale Bible' take and from what sources will it derive its mythic authority?"
The theme of modern quasi-theological censorship is "think only pure thoughts about genes". We may be approaching a future in which Internet publication of the Human Genome is analogous to the publication of the Guttenberg bible. If so, software evolution for the interpretation of the Human Genome may give rise to the equivalent of the Tyndale bible in the post-modern era's escape from quasi-theocratic domination of thought and inquiry. If that happens, expect to see wars break out as the new Reformation acquires religious fervor in defense of, not simply freedom, but complete independence of thought and inquiry.
Seastead this.
This happened in Boulder CO, a firm bastion of the looney left and its PC Police.
Colorado Political Landscape for those who dont live here: Boulder leans far left and houses the Political Correctness Nazis, Denver is purely Authoritarian (Herr Webb and his Do-no-wrong Polizei), and Colorado Springs has Focus On The Family and other religious righties.
Most of Colorado is pretty libertarian and want to be left the hell alone by all those meddling jackasses.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
This reminds me of an interview I heard with a Congressman who was a former POW. Can't remember the name, but he was probably more passionate about the flag than your teacher. He told a rather touching story about getting off the plane after being repatriated, see the flag flying over the the airfield, and bursting into tears. Until then, he hadn't quite believed that he was no longer a prisoner.
Oddly enough, he was adamantly opposed to any sanctions against flag burners. He explained this position with a story from his captivity. He was repeatedly interrogated and bullied with the intent of persuading him to participate in the enemy's propoganda efforts. Once his interrogator showed him a clip of protestors in the US burning the flag. Obviously, he was told, America must be very weak if people can get away with such unpatriotic acts. No, replied the POW. Only a strong nation can afford to tolerate extreme dissent.
This made the interrogator very angry. It was, in fact, the only time the POW ever saw him lose his cool.
__________________
Guessing the colour of somebody's skin from the way their name sounds has to be the most ridiculous idea I've heard for a long time. People marry, get adopted or just plain change their name all over the place. Just among the people I know that are Swedish for at least two generations back, I can find names from all over the world. I'm sure Swedish names are all over the world too, carried by people of all colours.
And just in case you're really far out there -- far from all Scandinavians and Germans are white, you know.
... and if you expect even elementary science, you would probably be disappointed by most elemantary science fair entries anyway.
I used to think for myself when I was a kid in school. I knew how to read at a really young age, I caught on to math exceptionaly fast for a kid my age and I actually skipped kindergarden and went to first grade, making me the youngest student in my class at the time of high school graduation.
Why am I saying this? Because when I was in the first and second grades, I was hyperactive during recess and in class. I used to draw a lot of crap all over my assignments. I had all kinds of ideas about supernatural things. In short, I was a kid who wanted to play rather than learn in class. Actually, that's because in schools here in the U.S., teachers go over the same thing about fifty times, and I caught everything the first time so I got bored.
Anyway, the school psychologist decided that there was something wrong with me. At the time (early 80's) I don't think they classified kids as having ADD but they called it something else. Actually, to this day, I have a report written by this psychologist, several pages in length, which describes my "problems" in fine detail. It even includes something I said to her in the hall about having a magic stick or sword made of earth, fire and lightning or something like that. You know what, I think any kid who doesn't come up with bullsh1t like that should be expelled from school.
The psychologist had my parents get me some pills that were supposed to calm me down and make me pay attention in class. God only knows what was in those pills. One thing of which I am absolutely certain is that those pills actually damaged me. (There are certain chemicals used in some foods (aspertame), and in water (flouride), that have been scientifically proven to cause brain damage.) Those pills made me concentrate because they made me stupid, so I had to actually listen to understand what was going on. For years (up to my junior year in high school), I got bad grades and had a hard time keeping up with the rest of the class. The school system here made me think in a box, and I have spent the last five years or so working hard to make myself able to think for myself like I could when I was 6 years old. This entire situation frustrates me a great deal.
On a side note, I recommend Paulo Freire's The Banking Concept of Education. Actually, I recommend the first sentence or two of that paper. It says it all.
It seems like a good amount for an elementary school science project. Maybe its not the best science in the world, but she's only 8 right?
Yeah, except 90% of the posts would be trolls saying "Katz sucks." And the retard moderators would give them +3 Funny.
You'd think a teacher would've read Farenheit 451. The book is an attack on the very same reasoning that seems to have been used to yank this poor girl's project -- the desire to not have to think too hard about anything. It's so easy to form a knee-jerk opinion to use as an anchoring heuristic of sorts, while completely shutting out everything else, whether consciously or through conditioning.
Once again, we are seeing that teachers/administrators do not know how to deal with a student on an exceptional level of operation.
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At their site.
Best Slashdot Co
She didn't use just 1 person. She used at least 45. 15 adults and 30 children.
:)
The parent to this post sounds like big flamebait to me.
This is the email address for the school board's president.
h tml
SGarnett@BHFS.com
This from: http://www.bvsd.k12.co.us/directory/bv_dirboard.s
Let 'im know how you feel, but take a pointer from the girl's father: be gentle and as forgiving as possible.
It sounds like she was just trying to do some version of the classic experiments that Kenneth and Mamie Clark did with dolls, which provided central evidence in the brown v. board case. Who knows, she may have studied that in class that year; must be an awfully confusing lesson to her now.
--Bruce Fields