While I normally would begin this discussion by putting forth a rather common sense argument (simply put: a good teacher is not good because technology makes him good, but rather because he makes technology work for him), I believe that the discussion is a moot point. Here's why:
The director of the Office of Educational Technology (the agency that published the previously cited report) is Karen Cator. Just read her bio there, and you'll discover that she worked for Apple computer for a decade. Conflict of Interest. The recommendations put forth in this report are invalid, because the director's previous employer stands to gain billions in revenue if the recommendations in this report are implemented nationwide. And what does this director stand to gain by steering billions of taxpayer dollars into the hands of Apple?
While I would agree that your math indicates that our long-term war in Afghanistan hasn't exactly been of great value to neither Afghanistan nor the United States, I see one fault in your logic. Rewarding warlords with "peace-time hush-money" only sets precedence for other countries at conflict with the United States.
I think that as soon as these guys get wind of the Afghan-US welfare program, I promise you that they're going to start raising hell w/ US troops, expecting the same type of hush money in return.
Except they have 177 million people. And plenty more radical Muslims. And nukes. Don't forget the nukes.
Personally, if we fuck up Afghanistan, it's not the end of the world. But I sure as hell wouldn't want to piss off Pakistan.
Second, the adult human brain is engineered to actually dismiss information that it does not agree with. There was a very good article I read (that I think was posted a while ago on/.) that explained the situation very well. In summary, the prefrontal cortex of the adult human brain is the "information filter" that is responsible for filtering out "unnecessary" information. For example, ask yourself how many people you walked by today. Then ask yourself how many of those peoples' faces do you remember vividly? Though your eyes most likely saw many, many faces, your prefrontal cortex filters out that information before it even is stored in short-term memory. I know there's an article out there that explains the science more thoroughly, but sadly I failed to find it.
Anyways, the same information filter that filters out unnecessary information also is also responsible for blocking any information that it determines to be dissonant from accepted information, i.e. cognitive dissonance. In this previously mentioned misplaced article, scientists hooked up participants to an MRI in an experiment analyzing how their brains processed conflicting information. The participants were sorted into two groups: physics majors and non-physics majors. The video was a recreation of Newton's gravity experiment, where a person drops a tennis ball and a bowling ball, both hitting the floor at the same time. When the physics majors saw the experiment, their brain did not register much activity, because what they saw was already what they knew to be true. But when the non-physics majors watched the video, the "WTF" section of their brain went crazy. In short, they believed that the bowling ball would hit the ground first, and when it didn't, their brain had a difficult time processing the information that conflicted with previously held beliefs. When faced with this confliction, adult minds must either reclassify what they know (a very difficult task for the adult brain), or filter out what they have just witnessed (a very easy task for the adult brain). In the end, I'm sure most of those non-physics majors ended up rationalizing what they saw with excuses such as, "Video editing" or "lead weight inside tennis ball."
As difficult as it is, the only way to prove to someone the truth is to first prove to them that their accepted beliefs are false. The only way this is possible is to take what they believe to be true, then show them how their own "facts" are inconsistent with one another. Only by creating cognitive dissonance within their own thoughts, rather than introducing it from an external stimulus, can you create the conditions necessary for them to be willing to listen to truth.
Scientists ceased work on developing a time machine that fits inside a car.
"When we first started development, we had our eyes set on a Camaro," said project manager and lead scientist Phuc Mi. "There aren't too many modern cars that still have enough space both under the hood to fit the fusion reactor necessary to generate the 2.19 GW of power needed to feed the fluidic transistor needed to initiate time travel. But, Michael Bay got wind of our project and, well, let's just say we gutted the Camaro and borrowed someone's Mustang instead. But with this second cease-and-desist letter from Steven Spielberg, we can't keep fighting lawyers! We have much better odds predicting where lightning will strike next than beating them in court!"
I agree with you that we have allowed the internet and entertainment media to distract us from our daily lives, but I believe that this is only half the problem posed by entertainment & informational technology.
The other half of the problem, as Obama perhaps tried to allude to but didn't quite fully specify, is that when we permit ourselves to be overloaded with information, but lack the expertise to evaluate its validity and worth, we are easily manipulated by lies, half-truths, and biased points-of-view. That's why we need news and media experts to help sort, highlight, and evaluate the information that we lack the expertise to do ourselves; they help identify for us what is important.
Think of it like Antique Road Show without the experts. Information is like the stuff that we collect in our attics. We need content experts to help us understand and recognize the value of what we possess, as well as convince us to throw away the things that aren't worth anything. Without the experts, we become informational pack rats; we possess everything, but know the value of nothing.
And when ignoramuses start to throw around information that they don't understand, we aren't empowered; we're misled.
Since so many of them stunk, can anybody list which box manuals were actually worth reading?
Two that come to my mind:
1) Final Fantasy VII. We had a computer, but we didn't have a Playstation. When FFVII was released to PC, I was so excited. The manual that came w/ the game had a step-by-step game guide of the first "chapter" of the game. It wasn't a complete walkthrough, but for someone who had not played that-intricate a Final Fantasy game before, it was incredibly helpful and informative. It was complete with full color print, screenshots, stats on some of the early monsters & weapons, and a good explanation of the materia.
2) Sierra's "King's Quest 6". The game manual was written as though you were a traveler passing through the land of King's Quest 6. It wasn't just a "Here's the backstory" and "Here's the controls" type manual. There were fictional stories written in the manual that shed background on the plight of the different islands, almost like short stories in-and-of themselves. It was really quite fun to read.
Back in the 70's, we were told that there were serious problems with the American diet. Fat was seen as the culprit. In that context, eliminating fat from our diet seemed like the right thing to do, because humans expected that fat in their diet was what made them fat.
Fast forward 30+ years, and we realized that we made a big mistake. Scientists overlooked information that they believed was irrelevant at the time, and instead manipulated statistics in a way to make fat evil and carbs king. Politicians jumped on board with the change, and private industries capitalized on these lies. Looking back on it all, we were wrong, and we're paying for it with the worst obesity epidemic in our nation's history. And now, it looks like we're setting ourselves up for failure all over again.
As a public school teacher, I just shake my head in disappointment when I read these comments. And when I tried to read the article, my disappointment grew even further with only one paragraph in:
In junior high school, one of my classmates [named "Ethan"] had a TV addiction...Then one day Ethan's mother made him a bold offer. If he could go a full month without watching any TV, she would give him $200. None of us thought he could do it. But Ethan quit TV, just like that. One month later, Ethan's mom paid him $200. He went out and bought a TV, the biggest one he could find.
Exactly. Mom tries to motivate her son to stop watching TV. What does son do? He takes the bet, goes one month w/o TV, gets paid, then buys his own TV. Someone please tell me, what was the moral of this story?!? Because, it sure as hell isn't, "Monetary rewards permanently change child behaviors." Just listen to what this other student says at the end of the article: Then I ask her about the psychologists' argument that she should work hard for the love of learning, not for short-term rewards. "Honestly?" she asks. "Yes, honestly," I say. She looks me dead in the eye. "We're kids. Let's be realistic." This is the attitude we are nurturing if we let this idea take flight. And these attitudes about "What's in it for me?" will shape our society for decades to come. How would you like to be stuck in a nursing home, unable to feed yourself, bedpan overflowing, and a worker just look at you, waiting to receive something from you for the work he has to do?
This "expert" seems to complain about the lack of motivation that exists in our schools. "Kids should learn for the love of learning," he says. "But they're not. So what shall we do?" Hmm, how about figure out why they don't love learning anymore? Is that too hard a question to answer? Because, what this guy is suggesting is equivalent to shooting up patients with morphine to treat any and every kind of pain. You're quelling a symptom but not ever finding the cure.
Every single study on psychology and behavior has been absolutely conclusive about extrinsic (monetary) rewards: the behaviors do not change permanently, but the attitudes do. We need to stop letting politicians and businesses with vested interests in "reforming" public education beguile the ignorant masses into believing, as we did with "fat" back in the 70's, that so-called "common-sense" ideas are the best ones. Please trust your local school leaders and personnel into making the decisions that are best for your schools. After all, to use a somewhat-related idea, who would you rather trust with your health care...your local doctor, or your national government?
As a meeting place, they're also a lot safer than the local bar.
My mother's assistant director at a suburban public library. They just developed a "youth center," filled with Wii & Playstation consoles to attract youth to the library and give them a place to hang out.
What they soon discovered was that it got more attention than they expected. Kids would just loiter there all day on the weekend, or all evening on weekdays. Many parents also dropped their kids off at the library in the morning and left them there all day. The library isn't built to be a babysitting service, but lots of parents didn't see it that way. They started having problems with graffiti, fights, turf wars, and other general mischief, and complaints from the general patrons have been on the rise.
Free video games in public places may attract kids, but they often attract the wrong kind of kids. The jury's out on whether or not the attraction actually increases awareness and utilization of the public library.
what is wrong is that ANYONE expects to make money off a 20 year old song
Bobby Picket, writer and singer of the hit Halloween song "Monster Mash," earned royalties year after year on the song. I couldn't find an article to source from online, but my local paper once had a quick bio on the man. If my recollection serves me correctly, in his later years, he was still collecting about $30,000 per year in royalties.
Roland: One. Dark Helmet: One. Colonel Sandurz: One. Roland: Two. Dark Helmet: Two. Colonel Sandurz: Two. Roland: Three. Dark Helmet: Three. Colonel Sandurz: Three. Roland: Four. Dark Helmet: Four. Colonel Sandurz: Four. Roland: Five. Dark Helmet: Five. Colonel Sandurz: Five. Dark Helmet: So the combination is... one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
-----
President Skroob: What's the combination? Colonel Sandurz: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5. President Skroob: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5? Colonel Sandurz: Yes. President Skroob: That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as "good" or "very good", while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same.
I believe that a lower number of children feel good or very good about their writing, because w/o an online audience, their only likely critic would be their school teacher. Teachers are more likely to be critical of writing, with the hope that their constructive criticism encourages students to correct mistakes to improve writing skills.
On the other hand, bloggers are more likely to get critiqued by their peers. Peer reviews are much more likely to be positive in nature (with likely comments including "LOL" and "dudz ur sooooooooooooooooooooo funy"), with few to no comments involving constructive criticism.
As such, those who are reviewed by teachers get less positive feedback, leading them to feel less confident about their writing skills, and those who are reviewed online by peers get much more (though empty) positive feedback, inflating their self-esteem and making them feel more confident about their writing.
But in no way, shape, or form, does this survey (anyone who tries to call this a "study" needs to go to college to learn what a real study looks like) prove that kids + technology = better writing.
The issue to debate here is not whether someone should lose their job over posting a vulgarity on the internet.
The issue to debate here is whether someone should lose their job over posting a vulgarity on the internet while at work.
And if anyone would RTFA, they would have noticed that he made the post twice. The first time, they just deleted it w/o a second thought, but he reposted it. Again, he did it while at work.
And, does anyone know what else was he doing on company time?
Completely agree. I was first frustrated and upset with what I read, because we the people cannot permit government to hide our laws from us. That's exactly what the summary implied. But when I RTFA, I read exactly what the parent said...the laws are available for reading at THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, as they should be.
The guy can just go to the library, research things the old-fashioned way, pay for making photocopies, and wait for this company to finish the project they were contracted to do.
McCain called the proposed net neutrality rules a "government takeover" of the Internet.
Mr. McCain, since the government pretty much invented the internet, please feel free to step in occasionally to make sure capitalism doesn't drive it back into the ground.
I suggest you watch a 60 Minutes interview where FBI Agent George Piro managed to get a lot of truth in regards to Iraq's nuclear program directly from Saddam Hussein.
It was revealed through this special interrogation that Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction after being disarmed in the 90's. He misled the world into believing that he had WMDs to not appear defenseless in front of Iran. He was afraid the Iranians might attack again.
The FBI was so proud of what George Piro accomplished, they considered it, "probably one of the top accomplishments of the agency in the last 100 years."
Not to mention that the Frontline documentary "Bush's War" pretty much debunked every single piece of "evidence" that Bush used to justify the invasion. And Scott McClellan, Bush's press secretary from '03-'05, explained in his book What Happened that Bush only went as far as finding "evidence" to justify his war; he never bothered to verify its validity.
There were no weapons of mass destruction. Even Bush, in his later years as president, finally began to admit that his "evidence" was not valid. Please stop feeding this conspiracy theory.
Anyone modding the parent insightful needs to go back to college, if they haven't been there in the first place.
What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
I would assert that one's ability to craft a finely-tuned essay can directly correlate with how one writes code, expresses technical information, and pays attention to detail in the work that he or she does.
Save that space for things that are important - research abstracts, statements of interest, letters of recommendation, etc.
All easily bullshitted. Personally, I believe that any admissions counselor would be able to determine with a pretty good degree of accuracy how much effort a student would make in their collegiate studies based on how much effort they put into an essay. Letters of recommendation? Please. They are only what get your foot in the door, but otherwise have as much worth as the paper you wipe your ass with. Any college recruiting students with the hope that they eventually become successful academics whose works in turn inflate the reputation of the college should expect from them deep, well-reasoned thought, articulate with meaningful expression, and pay strong attention to detail. The best method to meter these characteristics is through creative essay.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that makes about as much sense as putting an FM radio into a cell phone.
Wait a sec...
Conflict of Interest.
While I normally would begin this discussion by putting forth a rather common sense argument (simply put: a good teacher is not good because technology makes him good, but rather because he makes technology work for him), I believe that the discussion is a moot point. Here's why:
The director of the Office of Educational Technology (the agency that published the previously cited report) is Karen Cator. Just read her bio there, and you'll discover that she worked for Apple computer for a decade. Conflict of Interest. The recommendations put forth in this report are invalid, because the director's previous employer stands to gain billions in revenue if the recommendations in this report are implemented nationwide. And what does this director stand to gain by steering billions of taxpayer dollars into the hands of Apple?
While I would agree that your math indicates that our long-term war in Afghanistan hasn't exactly been of great value to neither Afghanistan nor the United States, I see one fault in your logic. Rewarding warlords with "peace-time hush-money" only sets precedence for other countries at conflict with the United States.
I think that as soon as these guys get wind of the Afghan-US welfare program, I promise you that they're going to start raising hell w/ US troops, expecting the same type of hush money in return.
Except they have 177 million people. And plenty more radical Muslims. And nukes. Don't forget the nukes.
Personally, if we fuck up Afghanistan, it's not the end of the world. But I sure as hell wouldn't want to piss off Pakistan.
and a willingness to use their real names.
Somewhere in this country, there's a Hugh Jass who feels silenced.
First, The Boston Globe has an article that explains the same details, though not in question & answer interview format.
Second, the adult human brain is engineered to actually dismiss information that it does not agree with. There was a very good article I read (that I think was posted a while ago on /.) that explained the situation very well. In summary, the prefrontal cortex of the adult human brain is the "information filter" that is responsible for filtering out "unnecessary" information. For example, ask yourself how many people you walked by today. Then ask yourself how many of those peoples' faces do you remember vividly? Though your eyes most likely saw many, many faces, your prefrontal cortex filters out that information before it even is stored in short-term memory. I know there's an article out there that explains the science more thoroughly, but sadly I failed to find it.
Anyways, the same information filter that filters out unnecessary information also is also responsible for blocking any information that it determines to be dissonant from accepted information, i.e. cognitive dissonance. In this previously mentioned misplaced article, scientists hooked up participants to an MRI in an experiment analyzing how their brains processed conflicting information. The participants were sorted into two groups: physics majors and non-physics majors. The video was a recreation of Newton's gravity experiment, where a person drops a tennis ball and a bowling ball, both hitting the floor at the same time. When the physics majors saw the experiment, their brain did not register much activity, because what they saw was already what they knew to be true. But when the non-physics majors watched the video, the "WTF" section of their brain went crazy. In short, they believed that the bowling ball would hit the ground first, and when it didn't, their brain had a difficult time processing the information that conflicted with previously held beliefs. When faced with this confliction, adult minds must either reclassify what they know (a very difficult task for the adult brain), or filter out what they have just witnessed (a very easy task for the adult brain). In the end, I'm sure most of those non-physics majors ended up rationalizing what they saw with excuses such as, "Video editing" or "lead weight inside tennis ball."
As difficult as it is, the only way to prove to someone the truth is to first prove to them that their accepted beliefs are false. The only way this is possible is to take what they believe to be true, then show them how their own "facts" are inconsistent with one another. Only by creating cognitive dissonance within their own thoughts, rather than introducing it from an external stimulus, can you create the conditions necessary for them to be willing to listen to truth.
I was thinking to write "1.21 GW" and "flux capacitor", but I also didn't want to get sued.
Scientists ceased work on developing a time machine that fits inside a car.
"When we first started development, we had our eyes set on a Camaro," said project manager and lead scientist Phuc Mi. "There aren't too many modern cars that still have enough space both under the hood to fit the fusion reactor necessary to generate the 2.19 GW of power needed to feed the fluidic transistor needed to initiate time travel. But, Michael Bay got wind of our project and, well, let's just say we gutted the Camaro and borrowed someone's Mustang instead. But with this second cease-and-desist letter from Steven Spielberg, we can't keep fighting lawyers! We have much better odds predicting where lightning will strike next than beating them in court!"
I agree with you that we have allowed the internet and entertainment media to distract us from our daily lives, but I believe that this is only half the problem posed by entertainment & informational technology.
The other half of the problem, as Obama perhaps tried to allude to but didn't quite fully specify, is that when we permit ourselves to be overloaded with information, but lack the expertise to evaluate its validity and worth, we are easily manipulated by lies, half-truths, and biased points-of-view. That's why we need news and media experts to help sort, highlight, and evaluate the information that we lack the expertise to do ourselves; they help identify for us what is important.
Think of it like Antique Road Show without the experts. Information is like the stuff that we collect in our attics. We need content experts to help us understand and recognize the value of what we possess, as well as convince us to throw away the things that aren't worth anything. Without the experts, we become informational pack rats; we possess everything, but know the value of nothing.
And when ignoramuses start to throw around information that they don't understand, we aren't empowered; we're misled.
Since so many of them stunk, can anybody list which box manuals were actually worth reading?
Two that come to my mind:
1) Final Fantasy VII. We had a computer, but we didn't have a Playstation. When FFVII was released to PC, I was so excited. The manual that came w/ the game had a step-by-step game guide of the first "chapter" of the game. It wasn't a complete walkthrough, but for someone who had not played that-intricate a Final Fantasy game before, it was incredibly helpful and informative. It was complete with full color print, screenshots, stats on some of the early monsters & weapons, and a good explanation of the materia.
2) Sierra's "King's Quest 6". The game manual was written as though you were a traveler passing through the land of King's Quest 6. It wasn't just a "Here's the backstory" and "Here's the controls" type manual. There were fictional stories written in the manual that shed background on the plight of the different islands, almost like short stories in-and-of themselves. It was really quite fun to read.
Back in the 70's, we were told that there were serious problems with the American diet. Fat was seen as the culprit. In that context, eliminating fat from our diet seemed like the right thing to do, because humans expected that fat in their diet was what made them fat.
Fast forward 30+ years, and we realized that we made a big mistake. Scientists overlooked information that they believed was irrelevant at the time, and instead manipulated statistics in a way to make fat evil and carbs king. Politicians jumped on board with the change, and private industries capitalized on these lies. Looking back on it all, we were wrong, and we're paying for it with the worst obesity epidemic in our nation's history. And now, it looks like we're setting ourselves up for failure all over again.
As a public school teacher, I just shake my head in disappointment when I read these comments. And when I tried to read the article, my disappointment grew even further with only one paragraph in:
In junior high school, one of my classmates [named "Ethan"] had a TV addiction...Then one day Ethan's mother made him a bold offer. If he could go a full month without watching any TV, she would give him $200. None of us thought he could do it. But Ethan quit TV, just like that. One month later, Ethan's mom paid him $200. He went out and bought a TV, the biggest one he could find.
Exactly. Mom tries to motivate her son to stop watching TV. What does son do? He takes the bet, goes one month w/o TV, gets paid, then buys his own TV. Someone please tell me, what was the moral of this story?!? Because, it sure as hell isn't, "Monetary rewards permanently change child behaviors." Just listen to what this other student says at the end of the article: Then I ask her about the psychologists' argument that she should work hard for the love of learning, not for short-term rewards. "Honestly?" she asks. "Yes, honestly," I say. She looks me dead in the eye. "We're kids. Let's be realistic." This is the attitude we are nurturing if we let this idea take flight. And these attitudes about "What's in it for me?" will shape our society for decades to come. How would you like to be stuck in a nursing home, unable to feed yourself, bedpan overflowing, and a worker just look at you, waiting to receive something from you for the work he has to do?
This "expert" seems to complain about the lack of motivation that exists in our schools. "Kids should learn for the love of learning," he says. "But they're not. So what shall we do?" Hmm, how about figure out why they don't love learning anymore? Is that too hard a question to answer? Because, what this guy is suggesting is equivalent to shooting up patients with morphine to treat any and every kind of pain. You're quelling a symptom but not ever finding the cure.
Every single study on psychology and behavior has been absolutely conclusive about extrinsic (monetary) rewards: the behaviors do not change permanently, but the attitudes do. We need to stop letting politicians and businesses with vested interests in "reforming" public education beguile the ignorant masses into believing, as we did with "fat" back in the 70's, that so-called "common-sense" ideas are the best ones. Please trust your local school leaders and personnel into making the decisions that are best for your schools. After all, to use a somewhat-related idea, who would you rather trust with your health care...your local doctor, or your national government?
As a meeting place, they're also a lot safer than the local bar.
My mother's assistant director at a suburban public library. They just developed a "youth center," filled with Wii & Playstation consoles to attract youth to the library and give them a place to hang out.
What they soon discovered was that it got more attention than they expected. Kids would just loiter there all day on the weekend, or all evening on weekdays. Many parents also dropped their kids off at the library in the morning and left them there all day. The library isn't built to be a babysitting service, but lots of parents didn't see it that way. They started having problems with graffiti, fights, turf wars, and other general mischief, and complaints from the general patrons have been on the rise.
Free video games in public places may attract kids, but they often attract the wrong kind of kids. The jury's out on whether or not the attraction actually increases awareness and utilization of the public library.
what is wrong is that ANYONE expects to make money off a 20 year old song
Bobby Picket, writer and singer of the hit Halloween song "Monster Mash," earned royalties year after year on the song. I couldn't find an article to source from online, but my local paper once had a quick bio on the man. If my recollection serves me correctly, in his later years, he was still collecting about $30,000 per year in royalties.
Roland: One.
Dark Helmet: One.
Colonel Sandurz: One.
Roland: Two.
Dark Helmet: Two.
Colonel Sandurz: Two.
Roland: Three.
Dark Helmet: Three.
Colonel Sandurz: Three.
Roland: Four.
Dark Helmet: Four.
Colonel Sandurz: Four.
Roland: Five.
Dark Helmet: Five.
Colonel Sandurz: Five.
Dark Helmet: So the combination is... one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
-----
President Skroob: What's the combination?
Colonel Sandurz: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5.
President Skroob: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5?
Colonel Sandurz: Yes.
President Skroob: That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
The core there is that selling in-game currency for real money is essentially just an exchange of currency and perfectly legal in South Korea.
Applying that logic domestically, does that mean that I can mail all my old arcade tokens to the IRS to help pay my taxes?
You're one to talk!
If I could mod you +1 for good demonstration of situational irony, I would!
From the article...
Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as "good" or "very good", while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same.
I believe that a lower number of children feel good or very good about their writing, because w/o an online audience, their only likely critic would be their school teacher. Teachers are more likely to be critical of writing, with the hope that their constructive criticism encourages students to correct mistakes to improve writing skills.
On the other hand, bloggers are more likely to get critiqued by their peers. Peer reviews are much more likely to be positive in nature (with likely comments including "LOL" and "dudz ur sooooooooooooooooooooo funy"), with few to no comments involving constructive criticism.
As such, those who are reviewed by teachers get less positive feedback, leading them to feel less confident about their writing skills, and those who are reviewed online by peers get much more (though empty) positive feedback, inflating their self-esteem and making them feel more confident about their writing.
But in no way, shape, or form, does this survey (anyone who tries to call this a "study" needs to go to college to learn what a real study looks like) prove that kids + technology = better writing.
The issue to debate here is not whether someone should lose their job over posting a vulgarity on the internet.
The issue to debate here is whether someone should lose their job over posting a vulgarity on the internet while at work.
And if anyone would RTFA, they would have noticed that he made the post twice. The first time, they just deleted it w/o a second thought, but he reposted it. Again, he did it while at work.
And, does anyone know what else was he doing on company time?
...and I think the top 1,000 sites would easily calculate that their losses in ad revenue and web traffic would be worth more than $1,000,000.
Completely agree. I was first frustrated and upset with what I read, because we the people cannot permit government to hide our laws from us. That's exactly what the summary implied. But when I RTFA, I read exactly what the parent said...the laws are available for reading at THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, as they should be.
The guy can just go to the library, research things the old-fashioned way, pay for making photocopies, and wait for this company to finish the project they were contracted to do.
McCain called the proposed net neutrality rules a "government takeover" of the Internet.
Mr. McCain, since the government pretty much invented the internet, please feel free to step in occasionally to make sure capitalism doesn't drive it back into the ground.
Central Point of Failure.
Attention terrorists: we have a new target to aim for.
Then far be it from me to not meet their expectations.
"Hey kids! Remember that new game you wanted? Well, I need to get us up to quota!"
I suggest you watch a 60 Minutes interview where FBI Agent George Piro managed to get a lot of truth in regards to Iraq's nuclear program directly from Saddam Hussein.
It was revealed through this special interrogation that Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction after being disarmed in the 90's. He misled the world into believing that he had WMDs to not appear defenseless in front of Iran. He was afraid the Iranians might attack again.
The FBI was so proud of what George Piro accomplished, they considered it, "probably one of the top accomplishments of the agency in the last 100 years."
Not to mention that the Frontline documentary "Bush's War" pretty much debunked every single piece of "evidence" that Bush used to justify the invasion. And Scott McClellan, Bush's press secretary from '03-'05, explained in his book What Happened that Bush only went as far as finding "evidence" to justify his war; he never bothered to verify its validity.
There were no weapons of mass destruction. Even Bush, in his later years as president, finally began to admit that his "evidence" was not valid. Please stop feeding this conspiracy theory.
Anyone modding the parent insightful needs to go back to college, if they haven't been there in the first place.
What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
I would assert that one's ability to craft a finely-tuned essay can directly correlate with how one writes code, expresses technical information, and pays attention to detail in the work that he or she does.
Save that space for things that are important - research abstracts, statements of interest, letters of recommendation, etc.
All easily bullshitted. Personally, I believe that any admissions counselor would be able to determine with a pretty good degree of accuracy how much effort a student would make in their collegiate studies based on how much effort they put into an essay. Letters of recommendation? Please. They are only what get your foot in the door, but otherwise have as much worth as the paper you wipe your ass with. Any college recruiting students with the hope that they eventually become successful academics whose works in turn inflate the reputation of the college should expect from them deep, well-reasoned thought, articulate with meaningful expression, and pay strong attention to detail. The best method to meter these characteristics is through creative essay.
Then go see the Science Museum of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I've been there numerous times ever since I was a kid, all the way through adulthood. Loved it every time.