Slashdot Mirror
One In Ten Americans Thinks HTML Is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection
sandbagger writes "It looks like technical writers won't be unemployed any time soon. According to a recent study reported on by the LA Times, 11% of Americans thought HTML was a sexually-transmitted disease. The study, by coupon site VoucherCloud, involved 2,392 men and women 18 years of age or older. 27% thought 'gigabyte' was a South American insect, and 23% thought MP3 was a Star Wars robot. The participants were not told that the study was specifically looking into their knowledge of tech terms. They were presented with both tech and non-tech terms and were asked to choose from three possible definitions. 18% identified 'Blu-ray' as a marine animal, and 15% thought 'software' was comfortable clothing."
Penecillin=mozilla...
That not everyone is taking this seriously?
Those Americans who don't know IT terminology are surely not interested in learning it, so I see no job openings for technical writers just yet.
Just another sign of the demise of Slashdot. A clearly fake survey viral created solely to publicize a coupon website makes it to the front page of a site supposedly for people smart enough to know better than to fall for rubbish like this.
Could this any more obviously be a viral scam? No.
And nor could Slashdot any more obviously be a shadow of its former self.
...are more scientifically rigorous.
The article doesn't mention if/how the wrong answers correlate to age or poverty. If you're old enough that computers are still a strange new thing, or poor enough to never have had access to one outside the public library, it's not surprising you wouldn't know those terms.
One In Ten Americans Thinks HTML Is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection
Those who have used it know that it's much worse
20% of Americans have a sense of humor.
It seems that they didn't specifically write these answers, but when in doubt, were forced to pick one of the predetermined choices. For example the "sexually transmitted infection" was one of those. So do not necessarily make the conclusion that when Americans think "HTML", they think an STD.
10% of Americans with Internet access are hillbilly's and/or retarded.
Study confirms that half of all people have below-average intelligence.
...people knew more about cars than they do today. How many here could fix something under the hood of a modern car without looking it up first? Computers and networks have become so commonplace that their inner workings no longer interest most people. They don't have to know what HTML or MP3 is. They look at web pages and buy music online. Why should they care about the technical details?
FTA:
12% said "USB" is the acronym for a European country. In fact, USB is a type of connector.
USB is actually a serial data interface. The connector is just one part of the spec.
MP3 is a robot from star wars? Even my older relatives know what a MP3 is. My grandmother, who doesn't have a computer, wouldn't even come to the conclusion that it's star wars related unless someone asked her "is MP3 the name of an audio format or a robot from star wars." I'm going to guess that this is similar to what happened when someone recorded himself walking around a campus asking "Is Obama a Keynesian (yes, he is)" and people were smugly saying that no the President was born in Hawaii.
Sci/tech press releases are like the autocue in Anchorman, you can put any old bollocks up there and the mainstream media will uncritically print it as news because it's a lot cheaper than having an actual science/tech department big enough to fill that section of the paper/website.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
'software' was comfortable clothing
So corsets are hardware?
That number's way too low.
Those people where given three options, how many of those just filled in something randomly? If they all filled it in randomly because they could not be bothered to think about it 1/3 would have answered STD. So in my opion this research shows 1/3 of americans are to lazy to think about questionaires so they filled in something random.
If it had been an open question and people wrote STD on their own, then maybe it meant something.
I guess it's okay and even amusing to do polls which demonstrate specific knowledge weakness among the people of the US. What's not funny, however, is to show people are actually becoming more stupid than ever before. The cause or the fault, I'm sure has many sources, but people are increasingly ignorant.
Saying this much is already enough for some people to become angry. But when people start throwing around suggested causes such as "no child left behind" or other "lowering the bar" measures, people start to become even more furious. I think one of our most basic areas of training is really missing which people rarely speak of -- it's how to tell the difference between emotion and fact. But in case people haven't noticed, the measures taken have more to do with feelings than ability, achievement or knowledge. Why? Because we think ignorance leads to crime? We want to believe that don't we... after all, we're smart people and we're not criminals. And "smart" is a matter of training isn't it? That's a tremendous presumption.
Nothing I say will make any difference. But maybe if enough people start saying it, it can be heard. The first thing that has to go is anything "feel good" law or policy.
I know significant numbers of the over 60 population who avoid and ignore all things digital save for their satellite TV receivers. And the only reason they have those is because cable wasn't available in their area.
Yeah, sure, I could laugh and point at the "dumb Americans", but it's not dumb Americans -- it's dumb people, and we've no shortage of them around the world. After all, as George Carlin pointed out: Think about how stupid the average person is, and remember that half the population is dumber than that.
Besides, as many have already pointed out, this whole article is clearly a slashvertisement to give eyeballs to a piece of shit coupon site.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You really need an upper age limit on these surveys, very few elderly people in any country would know any of these acronyms. In fact very few people at all could spell out the acronyms, let alone explain what they actually mean.
Ironically, spending lots of time with HTML is nearly as effective at preventing STDs as is abstinence.
A lot of rather sexual stuff is transmitted by HTML.
One in Ten Americans Thinks HTML is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection
To be fair, from an IT geeks perspective that is kind of true. To be precise, web pages written in HTML can be, and frequently are, carriers for a multitude of electronically transmitted infections.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
LOL
It causes autism too. Don't use it!
i've seen plenty of legacy markup code that i wouldn't want touch without protection.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
It's not that hard. One set are vaguely reptilian, have misshapen heads and an unjustified sense of superiority. The others invaded Bajor.
[drabadabaTISH!]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...how many people believe in imaginary beings, like a god. More than 90% of the population of the US believe in imaginary higher beings, the president included.
89% percent knows what HTML is. Pretty good.
Coupon-seekers Troll Tech Community.
Either most of the participants lived in nursing homes, or they didn't respond seriously. I'm leaning towards the latter since, "27% thought 'gigabyte' was a South American insect." Apple's marketing department has made sure that even the most vapid of us crave "more gigabytes on our phones."
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Sherlock Holmes had no room in his head for information that was not relevant to his work.
Why should a geek expect a layman to remember the meaning of acronyms that he almost never encounters in everyday use?
Web forums like Slashdot are notoriously informal and inconsistent in the mark-ups they will accept. AOL and other IMs simply presented the user with a toolbar of options. Bold, Italic, Insert URL and so on.
I went on a wonderful cruise recently to USB. I spent a lot of time on the motherboard, watching the schools of blu-rays frolicking in the sea. I spent all day wearing my software, it was fantastic! Sadly though I got stung by gigabyte -- I though they only existed in South America? And now to make things worse, I think the captain might have given me HTML ... ... all that aside. The respondents were asked to pick from three possible definitions and 77% got SEO wrong. There must have been some impressive alternatives.
acronyms, abbreviations, and initializations out of context are confusing.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
I don't want to live on this planet anymore...
How are we going to inform the other 90% of the dangers of HTML? I am sure they also don't understand how dangerous PHP can be, and don't want to vaccinate their daughters against it.
I always thought Blu Ray was a pr0nstar - whether he has HTML or not is unclear, but with his skillz he needn't worry about being replaced by MP3 any time soon.
must...not....crack...."your mom" joke...
The sad truth is that HTML is just an accessory fruit for delivering other seeds of ideas, good and bad. Most of those ideas are capable of hosting infections, particularly DRM, computer viruses, and the kind of porn you wish you could unsee.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
There are many many acronyms that have a couple of different meanings. And unless context is given such as, "I filed a complaint against my stock broker with the SEC.", one could be referring to the South Eastern Conference.
I wonder how many complaints the Securities and Exchange Commission gets against Duke?
Long before it had anything to do with improving your website's Google ranking, "SEO" referred (and still does) to a type of heavy duty rubber electrical cord. S=Severe Service, E=Elastomer (rubber) insulated, O=Oil Resistant.
So does this mean that IT folks who only know the other definition are as "ignorant" as the general population?
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
So what? Ask people to find Croatia on a map. Forget that. Ask them to find Africa. Skip that. Ask them to find North America. For real, now we're shocked at people who can't keep up with acronyms? This is a huge shock? Is this post about making fun of people?
I know that when I am being data mined I am very likely to pick the funny or ironic answer to any poll. The less intelligent the dumbest option is, the more likely I am to select it. My data is valuable and if you aren't gong to pay a fair price, and you intend to use it to subvert my happiness, I am not likely to go quietly to the slaugter.
I remember some movie where a guy lands in a Gulag and is being forced to make mitten liners. He learns from one of the other guys to sew them shut across the fingers and then hide the sabatoged ones by slipping them into the "already inspected" pile. It is sabatoge and it's faster than making the proper stitch so it's easier to meet the quota.
Lots of people maliciously answer polls and such, or so I suspect, which is why they are such a terrible instrument of governance and polity.
And P.S. if you don't limit people to thinking about tech, well there are _many_ blue species of sting and mant rays, so contextually they might have a point on answering some of those questions. Its that whole ability to read past typos that humans are so gifted with.
So conclusion? Polls suck, they suck slightly more than the pollsters conducting them, um-kay?
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I left tech writing because I became disenchanted with what became increasingly fictional documents. Development rarely bothered including me in any meetings, so I never knew what had changed or even what was supposed to be new.
The kicker at one firm was a sterling developer who demanded -- nope, did not ask politely, that my references to the "host" computer be identical throughout the 150 page manual. I made the requested changes and the idiot developer reviewed the same manual -- yes, the one that had no corrections -- and I was fired because he could not read a date. He insisted that I ignored him when in fact, he was too stupid to realized he reviewed the "old" manual again.
So if developers are that slow, then I guess non-developers are less with it.
Obviously these were multiple choice questions. So you cannot use the data like this. 10% do not actually think HTML is a STD, they just have no idea what HTML is.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
and they are 100% correct
People Cannot Memorize Computer Industry Acronymns
Thanks goodness! I know a guy who took a hit of that PHP stuff once, and junped out the window thinking he could fly....
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Well, what if I say that 2 out of 10 web designers think US nationality is a STD? What now, eh?
On the internet, there are trolls...
"This is not a scientific study."
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I don't see what the news is here. A small percentage of people don't understand tech jargon. Why is that surprising?
I think we all enjoy a little schadenfreude when people display their ignorance, otherwise Fail Blog and blonde jokes, and the like, would not be so popular. But this article is going out of it's way to try to paint an entire nation of people as woefully ignorant when in fact only a small percentage of them are simply unfamiliar with technical terms. There are people out there with PhDs and high IQs who have no idea what HTML is. It does not mean they are stupid.
Proverbs 21:19
There is a difference between uneducated about something and stupid about something. The ironic thing is many people confuse them. One you can say 'hmm I dont know let me look it up and go, oh I see what it is". The second will never know how to look it up or know how to understand it.
One I can say 'oh you dont know about this? Let me show you'. The other I just say 'dont worry about it you dont need to know'.
Both are kinda sad in a way.
What is the point of carrying out a pointless survey if you can't -actually- work the results out afterwards...
"Is the Chief Priest an Offlian? Do dragons explode in the wood?"
Don't be surprised
http://saveie6.com/
Only half of the people surveyed were professional website developers.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
... and you get it from Internet porn!
While I have heard of the show, I have never seen it, nor do I know anyone who has.
The viewership for "keeping up with the kardashians" (2.5M) means 99.964% of people have NOT seen it.
Actually, as far as I can tell, nobody watches anything.
Even a "wildly popular" event like the Oscars (44M viewers) was NOT seen buy 99.4% of the world.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I can understand why they thought HTML was an sexually transmitted disease. Obviously they were confusing it with HDMI.
i think it nice choice for you http://www.worksforweb.com/cla...
The real problem with polls like this is that people such as youself take the results seriously. These polls do not show that people are dumb and getting dumber. There is no incentive at all to answering correctly, or punishment for answering incorrectly. Therefore, many people who get these polls are going to answer incorrectly because they think the purpose of the poll is to datamine them, or the poll has no useful purpose at all, or the poll is just clickbait. Many other people will answer randomly because they simply don't care. Now, supposing the 'poll' said 'you will get 10 free MP3s if you can identify what an MP3 is'. Now how many people do you supposed will know the 'correct' answer (or, even more importantly, how to find the correct answer)?
They must have been confusing it with the name of the virus that causes AIDS.
1. How were the questionees chosen?
2. How much of the utterly ignorant answers were from the same people?
And, for extra credit, what was the political affiliation of the people giving those responses? Note that people with high incomes don't tend to answer surveys....
mark "there are two kinds of Republicans: millionaires, and suckers"
The cause or the fault, I'm sure has many sources, but people are increasingly ignorant.
Oh, the horror! People ignore what they don't need to know. As the knowledge base of the world grows, there's more and more stuff people don't need to know. Thus they are becoming more ignorant. Film at 11.
I bet they are all low income, left-voting people lol.
This is one stupid country.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I just looked it up and approximately 10% of the internet usage is to find porn. So in a way it is true... kind of
and didn't know they were carrying The Web.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
But I didn't like it and turned back.
Giving 10 to 1 that at least half that answered that HTML is a STD did it because "snicker, snicker..I answered STD", same goes for the rest of the questions.
...and it can only be treated with a daily dose of PHP.
for America....Hating this country more and more every day. The level up stupidity is off the charts here. Those few of us with some actual intelligence end up getting branded as assholes because no one understands what we are saying due to their lack of intelligence. It really is sickening....Getting offended because you don't understand what someone said is equivalent to being racist because you're color blind. It just makes you ignorant. Which is what the majority of American citizens are today....It's sad that Americans hate America because of all the morons.
not one 'finger' joke. yet.
semper ubi sub ubi
Obviously that was 3-cpio.
"The participants were not told that the study was specifically looking into their knowledge of tech terms."
Congrats, you've been trolled. You presented them with a boring survey which they then used to entertain themselves by choosing the worst possible answers.
Most Americans aren't educated at even a basic level. A bunch of Americans also think the universe is 6k years old, humans cant effect the climate and an invisible man that punishes thinking for yourself is controlling it all.
My wanker has JavaScript warts
Table-ized A.I.
I suspect, more like 1 in 10 CEOs, managers, politicians, clergy, judges ... "The Laity" would seek marketed medical assistance with most S&T/R&D problems.
We do have IMO the most S&T/R&D dumb judiciaries existentially possible for this century (I hope). BTW: Thanks for that Dick, George, GOP-TP and plutocrats.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
What do you think that some web content going "viral" refers to?
And HTML IS a STanDard, it is not?
Not to mention the business model of most web sites and apps, to INFECT the minds of its viewers, and the sex part if to FUCK with their minds, Business as Usual, the sexual imagery is apt.
Remember, Internet is for porn, porn-porn-porn!
-- 29A the number of the Beast