No, he is not talking bollocks. Blimey. Ignorance like this makes baby Jesus cry, ok?
Would it kill you to do a bit of research?
You need a TV licence if you install or use any television receiving equipment to receive television programme services. This includes a television set, set top box, PCs fitted with TV cards or any other TV receiving equipment. You need a licence whatever programme service you receive, for example: BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, satellite, cable, or digital television.
Hint: if you install any TV receiving equipment in order to use a playstation, you do not need a TV licence. If you install any TV receiving equipment in order to watch videos or DVDs, you do not need a TV licence.
Additionally to this, installation in this case includes the tuning. If your TV is not currently tuned to receive broadcast television, it is NOT 'installed to receive TV program services' and therefore, you do not need to pay.
There you go. Education is a wonderful thing.
Note: TV licence people will claim all sorts of merry shit to try to force you into buying a TV licence, partly because they're ignorant themselves, and partly because they presumably receive some kind of commission. However, the above quoted text is the law, and TV Licencing goons are not. Therefore, if you hear anything from them that does not fit in with this law, demand to get it in writing from them. You won't; if you did, you could probably sue the bastards for a spirited attempt at extortion.
Some of us really don't watch TV. In my case, it's partly a dislike for TV licencing people, partly no time to waste, and partly that I need to be watching things in a second or third language rather than reinforcing my English any further - and you don't get much foreign TV on the BBC.
I'm aware that it's confusing; one of my friends took months to get her head around the idea. She'd ask if I'd seen last night's episode of whatever, I'd always say no.
Eventually I explained in detail that, having no TV, I never watched anything but DVDs. She sat there frowning for a while. Then she said, "But can't you video it and watch it later?"
As a kid, I lived far outside any major cities, where restaurant food was more or less uniformly brilliant - fresh grilled rainbow trout, lamb, juicy steaks (from BSE free herds, even), that kind of thing.
As an adult, I was amazed with the sort of crap that some places in UK cities serve. I'm much more amazed that the tourists actually eat the stuff... Just before Christmas last year, work sent me to a (four-star) hotel right by the train station in the centre of Birmingham for a meeting, where they served us a "Christmas lunch". Custard, folks, is not supposed to appear like cheese strings lightly suspended in muddy water.
So to sum up, my theory is that the greater the number of stars on the hotel and the greater its proximity to touristville, the greater the resemblance of the chef to Baldrick. I think it's some kind of bizarre John-Cleese style joke directed at corporate types. However, having dealt with overcooked, overpriced 'southern style cooking', or KFC as it is internationally known, and what they insisted was Californian wine, in a supposedly posh restaurant in Georgia, I'm pretty sure that the joke is actually played internationally.
The assumption is presumably that business types are too busy to taste food, and tourist types aren't qualified to comment.
Having worked in CS and Physics at Uni for a while it has become blindingly obvious that 'rigor and peer review' often mean 'having a friends group that recognises your writing style and has $$ or credibility invested in your work'.
Never heard your PhD supervisor saying, "We'll submit it to *****, because my friend $friend is chairing it and they're bound to approve it"? It is a very common occurence. Pretty much the only person I know who doesn't do that is my current PhD supervisor, who's too bright to need the help, the smug git:)
Peer review is also a bit of a laugh, even anonymous peer review; there are a lot of niche fields of research out there. After all, if you get an article on using [massive bit of experimental equipment] in order to examine [question], it isn't too much of a leap to associate it to its author. A few weeks of peer-reviewing papers for my incredibly lazy ex-boss, and I was recognising papers based on a combination of topic, specialist vocabulary, 'concepts' [assumptions made, cited ideas] and characteristic errors in spelling and grammar.
The grandparent is right that physics suffers less from this... but he/she would be wrong to assume that it doesn't happen in physics. It does. Go look up the Bogdanov affair...
Disclaimer: I don't dislike the concept of peer review. But in practice it's all a bit more complicated than that, and much more political. Peer review just makes one imperfect assumption, the same as those who originally believed that the Internet would 'democratise society'... it assumes that your writing is untainted by identity.
In the UK, contracts are pretty much unavoidable: there's a handy page on it here.
The contract can be verbal, but within two months of starting work the employer is required to provide employees with a written statement of the main terms of the contract. This is good to know if you're working for a shadowy sort of organisation - you can legally walk in and hit them with the Employment Rights Act 1996, and if they refuse to cough up a contract after two months - or indeed sack you - you are legally in the right and can do them for it...
Anyone who works in the UK without a contract, be careful; at the minimum, you're probably working illegally in that your employers have probably not gone through the motions as far as national insurance goes, and are not planning to do so. In this case, you will not be eligible for normal unemployment pay afterwards:(
As far as I know, broadly similar terms apply in Germany and in France.
This one I know (thanks to my chemistry teacher of long, long ago)
Animal fat and or oil, rainwater, ash and salt
Ash + hot soft water -> lye water
(you can use caustic soda instead, and generally do, but if we're talking survivalist I guess the assumption is that it's unavailable)
Note: lye water burns, so don't put it in anything that'll dissolve, drink it, bathe in it, etc.
Shove melted animal fat in water and remove the nasty floaty bits, add salt. You can de-stink the fat using sour milk.
Now: mix lye water and grease, boil out excess water, add salt, set it and let it dry. Note: if you get the wrong quantities of lye water, the result will burn.
I recall we did this in class using caustic soda and synthetics, but our spoilsport of a teacher wouldn't let us try the resulting liquid goo on our hands. I have a hole in one arm of my lab coat from unofficial testing of the stuff (which looked like The Blob) so he may have had a point.
I wouldn't guarantee that if I were you. According to current news,
In December Poland blocked formal approval of the deal, which opponents of the legislation argue will allow patenting of pure software, saying it needed more time to register its concerns about the new rules' impact on small and medium-sized businesses. But Poland has indicated it will not oppose the official adoption of the text of the May deal, due to be agreed to at a meeting of E.U. farm ministers next Monday.
Some recruiter websites even show false jobs--because of "programming bugs" or problems with their vendor or some excuse, those jobs don't match up to any of their openings.
Yeah, this happens a lot. I remember last autumn when looking for a job I came across the same jobs advertised again and again, particularly from one notorious company, for at least six months. According to the job centre it's the result of trying to create a false image for shareholders; you make like you're trying to expand, but just somehow you can't find anybody to fill the posts. Seems that company had crashed six months beforehand and dumped half their workforce, so they were trying to address their image problem as cheaply as possible.
Avoid companies who do this; generally it means they're cruising for a bruising in some way or another.
A parent post states that there is no difference between men and women besides the obvious one that more men go into science.
That's a misquote actually:-) Actually it says that I have not heard of any proof of (innate) differing abilities in maths/science according to gender. I hope that clears up the question about diversity, in that I certainly didn't intend to suggest that everybody was the same, since in any case this is clearly total bollocks. Due to all sorts of reasons, people are indeed incredibly diverse in all sorts of ways, one of which is the posession of mammary glands, and another is the (in)ability to do mathematics. The argument was whether or not these things (maths and tits) are directly linked in the same way as for example tits and bra ownership. No proof exists that one's reproductive hardware is the cause of later scores in maths tests; it appears to be a bit subtler than that.
Also a small misconception; it is perfectly permissible to investigate the cause of various effects in society, and that is in fact why a variety of people have been researching this for quite a few years now. It's not by any means a taboo subject in science. In fact, the people at the conference were all researchers in areas that, if not identical, were at least hauntingly similar.
Having said that, the hypothesis of this particular guy ('together with gender differences go innate differences that cause women to be less able at mathematics') is pretty impossible to test - I think TheWormThatFlies summed it up better than I can. This is actually a common problem when studying humanity, as the ideal experiment is often impossible/inhumane. This in turn is the reason why cognitive scientists often seem to prefer neuroscience - less faffing around with fancy interpretations, more stuff that you can actually measure directly. Sadly for neuroscience, even once stuff is measured we still typically don't have any clear idea of what it all means.
It's totally allowable to study these things, and people do. That's why there is research available to cite!
This discussion is just a question of 'should one mouth off about gender on the basis of zero apparent data in front of a lot of people?', or indeed 'should one mouth off about social/cultural diversity on the basis of zero apparent data, etc', and the obvious answer is: no. Unless it's on slashdot and you're under a pseudonym, and nobody knows you run Harvard. If you have no idea, start by researching until you have an idea.
It does not have to be the same as other peoples' ideas, nor does it have to be PC; but it does have to be thought out - otherwise, it's like walking into a physics conference and going "the earth is flat". Ignoring the current state of research just gives reasonable people headaches, and they end up having to explain that whilst it may look that way to you, the truth is a little more complex.
I just went to take another look. Ye gods, there's a metric shitload of argument about this - of the "2001 reading test was biased towards boys!!" nature.
Apparently it varies depending on the kind of school (grant-maintained, etc), on local education althority, on year... and as you say, the boys are apparently fighting back.
Society is emergent on all sorts of stuff. Physical differences are part of that. I think everybody is fine with that fact.
However, gender is (by far) not the only one defining factor of each human's destiny, nor the one factor that defines neurological, hormone-driven psychological changes either. For example, did you read this one about female hormones in male scientists, and testosterone levels in female scientists? Well, turns out that male scientists typically have a level of the hormone oestrogen as high as their testosterone level, and women social scientists tended to have higher levels of testosterone, making their brains closer to those of males in general.
So where's the gender gap? Defined by hormones? Seems that at least where science is concerned, it's more of a gender blur;-)
I think people are going ballistic because in that statement, he has assumed (as I note have you) that there are gender differences in maths/science - beyond the very obvious one that women tend not to take up maths/science, I don't actually know of any proof of differing abilities. His anecdotal demonstration, that his daughter is apparently able to make effective use of metaphor in choosing nomenclature, doesn't quite come up to scratch.
The light of scientific inquiry has incidentally been shining on this problem for quite a few years now. There's a wealth of research out there on these topics, and I am sure his contribution would be very welcome, if he had in fact made one; sadly, all he has succeeded in doing is a) stuffing his foot in his mouth, and b) elegantly demonstrating the fact that he hasn't actually read any of it.
Well, studies have shown differences between men and women. This is no surprise. Studies have not on the other hand been particularly revealing as to whether it's down to nature or nurture. Of course, in the example of his good at maths/bad at maths one, it all comes down to the question that you ask.
If you ask, "Are men better at maths than women?" you can show it to be true easily by showing the number of graduates of each sex - just as you can supposedly prove that white men can't jump by looking at basketball results. Are either of these results rigorous proof of the assertions? No. They just show that as of today, white men apparently less often jump and women less often take maths degrees.
As a matter of pure interest, note the UK A-level results; girls outperform boys in science and maths on a regular basis at age 18, according to those.
So one might say that really what this guy has done is asked, and answered, the wrong question, using a mixture of anecdotal evidence (that stupid story about his daughter's trucks; why is he so upset that she shows such a good grasp of metaphor?!) and what appears to be pure presumption.
Can women do maths? immediately splits ability by gender, which is daft, seeing that gender is a pretty blurry line. Even the differences in language processing in the brain so popular for authors of self-help books are only true in a small set of circumstances, for a small proportion of the population; probably you could split by toenail length and get an intriguing correlation, too.
You might find it interesting to read Beyond Binary Thinking, an interesting introduction to exactly this field.
Ye gods, I bought the book of the Bourne Supremacy.
I was left with the distinct impression that whilst there are many authors whose work I respect greatly, they do not include Ludlum. Something about his writing style leaped out at me. It may have been excess! exclamation! marks! and? too many rhetorical? questions? Or it may have been all this "fuck-fuck" "damn-damn" rubbish that he has all his Chinese characters come out with for no evident reason.
OTOH I do remember his habit of repeatedly describing specific people as "the Zhongguo ren", which is desperately annoying as it gives the strong impression that he has succeeded in researching a minimal number of terms in Chinese, and is desperately looking for any possible occasion to re-use them. Particularly since they're in China at the time, it's not exactly a unique bloody identifier either. It only means 'Chinese person', after all.
The whole thing was desperately reminiscent of those Tom Clancy characters whose English is rendered with utter fluency throughout the book, but who nonetheless pepper their conversation with meaninglessly ungrammatical constructions ("how do you say?"). Sometimes this gets extreme; you get Germans coming out with sentences like, "Just arrived, ja, we have three sets."
Someone really needs to take these authors aside and explain that:
a) Even though Chinese might sound odd, it doesn't if you're listening in Chinese, so if you don't want to cause unintentional hilarity it is best not to bother with all that "fuck-fuck" crap beyond the bare minimum required to establish the point.
b) Russian people really don't say 'Tovarisch' anymore (Stargate need to learn this too. Ouch).
c) When speaking a second language it is generally not the case that you remember all of the hard words and complex grammar but fluff up on 'yes', 'no', and 'shit'. The really funny thing about (c) is that Clancy gets it right where his Anglophones are concerned, eg: "'Bitte sehr, Herr-Direktor,' the Brit answered, just about exhausting his knowledge of the German language."
Still, apart from that it might have been a good book, but to be honest I quit taking it seriously after the bit where d'Anjou gets his head chopped off (what sort of final words are "Come die with me, General Dung!"?)
That too, but it isn't the deciding factor from what I can see. Putting aside the fact that getting a 100% accurate report of what she's really thinking on the subject is kinda unlikely.
Here's a hundred sexiest men list if you want to go through and count the number of wistful/thoughtful expressions:-P
Or take a look at Orlando Bloom posters like this, or this, this, or this... or this (note the posture reminiscent of Rodin's The Thinker)...
For some reason, this stuff sells. Despite lack of uncovered hot body:-)
Ah, it works both ways, that (and for both sexes btw). In slashdot terms:
Step 1: Sexual stereotyping Step 2: Popular idealised image of the perfect body Step 3: Feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem Step 4: ??? Step 5: Profit!!!
Where Step 4 is usually defined as: advertise (expensive) methods of addressing the issues in step 3, in order to get closer to the image in Step 2... these usually involve selling magazines, overpriced gym subscriptions, kewl clothes and plastic surgery....
Step 5 really is defined as 'profit', though.
So actually the situation is an iterative loopy thing, only now Step 1 is fed by the magazines as much or more than from any guys' input. So the situation is responsible for the sexual stereotyping, although those who want to go back to step 0 probably would find that men started it (but does it matter? Particularly since men are now increasingly caught in exactly the same situation).
and I can guarantee that Mario probably has about as much sex appeal as the he-man looking dudes. According to womens' magazines (bleurgh) womens' ideas of the sexiest guys out there are, for example, Jude Law, Orlando Bloom, Robbie Williams...
In other words, out of the Lord of the Rings, women would choose the sensitive'n'reserved elf. Enigmatic, dreamy-eyed, sad-looking and caring is where it's at (puke at will).
Any of them on the computer game boxes? (hey, I don't play -- so I honestly don't know)
Re:What about the studly men!?
on
Getting the Girl
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Well, both sexes are regularly 'objectified' (if anybody's a believer in "objectification is just a politically correct excuse to whine", see this site for a bit of not-too-crap research and discussion on the matter, such as it is), although it's a relatively recent phenomenon for men - there's a vaguely interesting article on the subject here.
One suggestion in this article is that the increasingly frequent appearance of these idealised images of men are causing similar effects to those often seen in women, blamed on objectification by feminists, and laughed away by the rest of the world:-) And I quote:
The bodies in advertisements come to represent an ideal that individuals seek to achieve, and hence provide the foundation for a masochistic or punitive relationship with one's own body. It becomes possible to think about one s body as if it were this thing which followed one about and attached itself unevenly to the ideal outline which lingers beneath (Coward, 1992, p. 416). The dislike for the body becomes pathological and has very real consequences such as low self-esteem, distorted self-image, eating disorders, and even changing the body through painful plastic surgery (Coward, 1992; Kilbourne, 1999;Wolf, 1991).
Increasingly, these consequences are manifesting in men, who are responding to a consumer culture that is less and less forgiving of those who are not sufficiently young, thin, and attractive. In response to these images of the perfect male, men are getting manicures and facials, dyeing their hair, concealing blemishes, and spending millions on plastic surgery.
In 1992, men spent $88 million on liposuction, facelifts, nose-reshaping, and eyelid surgery. This number increased to almost $130 million in 1997. In 1996, men spent $12 million on penile implants, and silicone calf and pectoral implants are rapidly increasing in popularity (Fraser, 1999). In addition, men now account for almost 10% of individuals suffering with eating disorders (Fraser, 1999). In short, men are increasingly dissatisfied with their bodies, go to great lengths to achieve a more youthful and hard-bodied appearance, and are suffering the psychological consequences that are a side effect of consumer culture.
So there we are. Finally, equality of the sexes; we all get to have bad self-image thrust upon us! The bonus side is I suppose that one day it might well equal out; when we're all totally freaked out, bulimic gym zombies, maybe there'll be an advertising revolution of some kind.
And the cynical part of me also wants to add: what goes around, comes around...
Again you have a definite point there. It isn't a choice post-addiction, and it certainly doesn't deserve to be trivialised either - apologies if I sounded as though I was going into that direction. One unfortunate mistake certainly shouldn't give any government carte blanche to string people up:-/
Slashdot Mirror
No, he is not talking bollocks. Blimey. Ignorance like this makes baby Jesus cry, ok?
Would it kill you to do a bit of research?
You need a TV licence if you install or use any television receiving equipment to receive television programme services. This includes a television set, set top box, PCs fitted with TV cards or any other TV receiving equipment. You need a licence whatever programme service you receive, for example: BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, satellite, cable, or digital television.
Hint: if you install any TV receiving equipment in order to use a playstation, you do not need a TV licence. If you install any TV receiving equipment in order to watch videos or DVDs, you do not need a TV licence.
Additionally to this, installation in this case includes the tuning. If your TV is not currently tuned to receive broadcast television, it is NOT 'installed to receive TV program services' and therefore, you do not need to pay.
There you go. Education is a wonderful thing.
Note: TV licence people will claim all sorts of merry shit to try to force you into buying a TV licence, partly because they're ignorant themselves, and partly because they presumably receive some kind of commission. However, the above quoted text is the law, and TV Licencing goons are not. Therefore, if you hear anything from them that does not fit in with this law, demand to get it in writing from them. You won't; if you did, you could probably sue the bastards for a spirited attempt at extortion.
Some of us really don't watch TV. In my case, it's partly a dislike for TV licencing people, partly no time to waste, and partly that I need to be watching things in a second or third language rather than reinforcing my English any further - and you don't get much foreign TV on the BBC.
I'm aware that it's confusing; one of my friends took months to get her head around the idea. She'd ask if I'd seen last night's episode of whatever, I'd always say no.
Eventually I explained in detail that, having no TV, I never watched anything but DVDs. She sat there frowning for a while. Then she said, "But can't you video it and watch it later?"
Hah. Yeah.
As a kid, I lived far outside any major cities, where restaurant food was more or less uniformly brilliant - fresh grilled rainbow trout, lamb, juicy steaks (from BSE free herds, even), that kind of thing.
As an adult, I was amazed with the sort of crap that some places in UK cities serve. I'm much more amazed that the tourists actually eat the stuff... Just before Christmas last year, work sent me to a (four-star) hotel right by the train station in the centre of Birmingham for a meeting, where they served us a "Christmas lunch". Custard, folks, is not supposed to appear like cheese strings lightly suspended in muddy water.
So to sum up, my theory is that the greater the number of stars on the hotel and the greater its proximity to touristville, the greater the resemblance of the chef to Baldrick. I think it's some kind of bizarre John-Cleese style joke directed at corporate types. However, having dealt with overcooked, overpriced 'southern style cooking', or KFC as it is internationally known, and what they insisted was Californian wine, in a supposedly posh restaurant in Georgia, I'm pretty sure that the joke is actually played internationally.
The assumption is presumably that business types are too busy to taste food, and tourist types aren't qualified to comment.
Having worked in CS and Physics at Uni for a while it has become blindingly obvious that 'rigor and peer review' often mean 'having a friends group that recognises your writing style and has $$ or credibility invested in your work'.
:)
Never heard your PhD supervisor saying, "We'll submit it to *****, because my friend $friend is chairing it and they're bound to approve it"? It is a very common occurence. Pretty much the only person I know who doesn't do that is my current PhD supervisor, who's too bright to need the help, the smug git
Peer review is also a bit of a laugh, even anonymous peer review; there are a lot of niche fields of research out there. After all, if you get an article on using [massive bit of experimental equipment] in order to examine [question], it isn't too much of a leap to associate it to its author. A few weeks of peer-reviewing papers for my incredibly lazy ex-boss, and I was recognising papers based on a combination of topic, specialist vocabulary, 'concepts' [assumptions made, cited ideas] and characteristic errors in spelling and grammar.
The grandparent is right that physics suffers less from this... but he/she would be wrong to assume that it doesn't happen in physics. It does. Go look up the Bogdanov affair...
Disclaimer: I don't dislike the concept of peer review. But in practice it's all a bit more complicated than that, and much more political. Peer review just makes one imperfect assumption, the same as those who originally believed that the Internet would 'democratise society'... it assumes that your writing is untainted by identity.
In the UK, contracts are pretty much unavoidable: there's a handy page on it here.
:(
The contract can be verbal, but within two months of starting work the employer is required to provide employees with a written statement of the main terms of the contract. This is good to know if you're working for a shadowy sort of organisation - you can legally walk in and hit them with the Employment Rights Act 1996, and if they refuse to cough up a contract after two months - or indeed sack you - you are legally in the right and can do them for it...
Anyone who works in the UK without a contract, be careful; at the minimum, you're probably working illegally in that your employers have probably not gone through the motions as far as national insurance goes, and are not planning to do so. In this case, you will not be eligible for normal unemployment pay afterwards
As far as I know, broadly similar terms apply in Germany and in France.
I have no idea how to make soap though.
This one I know (thanks to my chemistry teacher of long, long ago)
Animal fat and or oil, rainwater, ash and salt
Ash + hot soft water -> lye water
(you can use caustic soda instead, and generally do, but if we're talking survivalist I guess the assumption is that it's unavailable)
Note: lye water burns, so don't put it in anything that'll dissolve, drink it, bathe in it, etc.
Shove melted animal fat in water and remove the nasty floaty bits, add salt. You can de-stink the fat using sour milk.
Now: mix lye water and grease, boil out excess water, add salt, set it and let it dry.
Note: if you get the wrong quantities of lye water, the result will burn.
I recall we did this in class using caustic soda and synthetics, but our spoilsport of a teacher wouldn't let us try the resulting liquid goo on our hands. I have a hole in one arm of my lab coat from unofficial testing of the stuff (which looked like The Blob) so he may have had a point.
Hope the news is wrong.
Some recruiter websites even show false jobs--because of "programming bugs" or problems with their vendor or some excuse, those jobs don't match up to any of their openings.
Yeah, this happens a lot. I remember last autumn when looking for a job I came across the same jobs advertised again and again, particularly from one notorious company, for at least six months. According to the job centre it's the result of trying to create a false image for shareholders; you make like you're trying to expand, but just somehow you can't find anybody to fill the posts. Seems that company had crashed six months beforehand and dumped half their workforce, so they were trying to address their image problem as cheaply as possible.
Avoid companies who do this; generally it means they're cruising for a bruising in some way or another.
Interesting stuff... any chance of a link/reference?
A parent post states that there is no difference between men and women besides the obvious one that more men go into science.
:-) Actually it says that I have not heard of any proof of (innate) differing abilities in maths/science according to gender. I hope that clears up the question about diversity, in that I certainly didn't intend to suggest that everybody was the same, since in any case this is clearly total bollocks. Due to all sorts of reasons, people are indeed incredibly diverse in all sorts of ways, one of which is the posession of mammary glands, and another is the (in)ability to do mathematics. The argument was whether or not these things (maths and tits) are directly linked in the same way as for example tits and bra ownership. No proof exists that one's reproductive hardware is the cause of later scores in maths tests; it appears to be a bit subtler than that.
That's a misquote actually
Also a small misconception; it is perfectly permissible to investigate the cause of various effects in society, and that is in fact why a variety of people have been researching this for quite a few years now. It's not by any means a taboo subject in science. In fact, the people at the conference were all researchers in areas that, if not identical, were at least hauntingly similar.
Having said that, the hypothesis of this particular guy ('together with gender differences go innate differences that cause women to be less able at mathematics') is pretty impossible to test - I think TheWormThatFlies summed it up better than I can. This is actually a common problem when studying humanity, as the ideal experiment is often impossible/inhumane. This in turn is the reason why cognitive scientists often seem to prefer neuroscience - less faffing around with fancy interpretations, more stuff that you can actually measure directly. Sadly for neuroscience, even once stuff is measured we still typically don't have any clear idea of what it all means.
It's totally allowable to study these things, and people do. That's why there is research available to cite!
This discussion is just a question of 'should one mouth off about gender on the basis of zero apparent data in front of a lot of people?', or indeed 'should one mouth off about social/cultural diversity on the basis of zero apparent data, etc', and the obvious answer is: no. Unless it's on slashdot and you're under a pseudonym, and nobody knows you run Harvard. If you have no idea, start by researching until you have an idea.
It does not have to be the same as other peoples' ideas, nor does it have to be PC; but it does have to be thought out - otherwise, it's like walking into a physics conference and going "the earth is flat". Ignoring the current state of research just gives reasonable people headaches, and they end up having to explain that whilst it may look that way to you, the truth is a little more complex.
Hmm... you have a point there. But then, the amount of various hormones in children does not have that strict a relationship to their gender.
Perhaps if he had stood up and talked about hormones, he'd have been correct. But then it wouldn't have been about gender any longer...
I just went to take another look. Ye gods, there's a metric shitload of argument about this - of the "2001 reading test was biased towards boys!!" nature.
:-)
Apparently it varies depending on the kind of school (grant-maintained, etc), on local education althority, on year... and as you say, the boys are apparently fighting back.
Cheers for the heads-up on that one.
Sure :-)
;-)
Society is emergent on all sorts of stuff. Physical differences are part of that. I think everybody is fine with that fact.
However, gender is (by far) not the only one defining factor of each human's destiny, nor the one factor that defines neurological, hormone-driven psychological changes either. For example, did you read this one about female hormones in male scientists, and testosterone levels in female scientists? Well, turns out that male scientists typically have a level of the hormone oestrogen as high as their testosterone level, and women social scientists tended to have higher levels of testosterone, making their brains closer to those of males in general.
So where's the gender gap? Defined by hormones? Seems that at least where science is concerned, it's more of a gender blur
I think people are going ballistic because in that statement, he has assumed (as I note have you) that there are gender differences in maths/science - beyond the very obvious one that women tend not to take up maths/science, I don't actually know of any proof of differing abilities. His anecdotal demonstration, that his daughter is apparently able to make effective use of metaphor in choosing nomenclature, doesn't quite come up to scratch.
The light of scientific inquiry has incidentally been shining on this problem for quite a few years now. There's a wealth of research out there on these topics, and I am sure his contribution would be very welcome, if he had in fact made one; sadly, all he has succeeded in doing is
a) stuffing his foot in his mouth, and
b) elegantly demonstrating the fact that he hasn't actually read any of it.
Well, studies have shown differences between men and women. This is no surprise. Studies have not on the other hand been particularly revealing as to whether it's down to nature or nurture. Of course, in the example of his good at maths/bad at maths one, it all comes down to the question that you ask.
If you ask, "Are men better at maths than women?" you can show it to be true easily by showing the number of graduates of each sex - just as you can supposedly prove that white men can't jump by looking at basketball results. Are either of these results rigorous proof of the assertions? No. They just show that as of today, white men apparently less often jump and women less often take maths degrees.
As a matter of pure interest, note the UK A-level results; girls outperform boys in science and maths on a regular basis at age 18, according to those.
So one might say that really what this guy has done is asked, and answered, the wrong question, using a mixture of anecdotal evidence (that stupid story about his daughter's trucks; why is he so upset that she shows such a good grasp of metaphor?!) and what appears to be pure presumption.
Can women do maths? immediately splits ability by gender, which is daft, seeing that gender is a pretty blurry line. Even the differences in language processing in the brain so popular for authors of self-help books are only true in a small set of circumstances, for a small proportion of the population; probably you could split by toenail length and get an intriguing correlation, too.
You might find it interesting to read Beyond Binary Thinking, an interesting introduction to exactly this field.
Ye gods, I bought the book of the Bourne Supremacy.
I was left with the distinct impression that whilst there are many authors whose work I respect greatly, they do not include Ludlum. Something about his writing style leaped out at me. It may have been excess! exclamation! marks! and? too many rhetorical? questions? Or it may have been all this "fuck-fuck" "damn-damn" rubbish that he has all his Chinese characters come out with for no evident reason.
OTOH I do remember his habit of repeatedly describing specific people as "the Zhongguo ren", which is desperately annoying as it gives the strong impression that he has succeeded in researching a minimal number of terms in Chinese, and is desperately looking for any possible occasion to re-use them. Particularly since they're in China at the time, it's not exactly a unique bloody identifier either. It only means 'Chinese person', after all.
The whole thing was desperately reminiscent of those Tom Clancy characters whose English is rendered with utter fluency throughout the book, but who nonetheless pepper their conversation with meaninglessly ungrammatical constructions ("how do you say?"). Sometimes this gets extreme; you get Germans coming out with sentences like, "Just arrived, ja, we have three sets."
Someone really needs to take these authors aside and explain that:
a) Even though Chinese might sound odd, it doesn't if you're listening in Chinese, so if you don't want to cause unintentional hilarity it is best not to bother with all that "fuck-fuck" crap beyond the bare minimum required to establish the point.
b) Russian people really don't say 'Tovarisch' anymore (Stargate need to learn this too. Ouch).
c) When speaking a second language it is generally not the case that you remember all of the hard words and complex grammar but fluff up on 'yes', 'no', and 'shit'. The really funny thing about (c) is that Clancy gets it right where his Anglophones are concerned, eg:
"'Bitte sehr, Herr-Direktor,' the Brit answered, just about exhausting his knowledge of the German language."
Still, apart from that it might have been a good book, but to be honest I quit taking it seriously after the bit where d'Anjou gets his head chopped off (what sort of final words are "Come die with me, General Dung!"?)
Actually I'm not at all sure if that's actually true.
I seem to remember that copyright is automatic even if not specifically claimed on a work. So unless that email was a work for hire...
Total, total agreement :-)
That too, but it isn't the deciding factor from what I can see. Putting aside the fact that getting a 100% accurate report of what she's really thinking on the subject is kinda unlikely.
:-P
... or this (note the posture reminiscent of Rodin's The Thinker)...
:-)
Here's a hundred sexiest men list if you want to go through and count the number of wistful/thoughtful expressions
Or take a look at Orlando Bloom posters like this, or this, this, or this
For some reason, this stuff sells. Despite lack of uncovered hot body
He wouldn't be my choice but yeah he was voted 'year's sexiest man' (see here). In the company of Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and, ye gods, Ben Affleck.
Ah, it works both ways, that (and for both sexes btw). In slashdot terms:
Step 1: Sexual stereotyping
Step 2: Popular idealised image of the perfect body
Step 3: Feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!!!
Where Step 4 is usually defined as: advertise (expensive) methods of addressing the issues in step 3, in order to get closer to the image in Step 2... these usually involve selling magazines, overpriced gym subscriptions, kewl clothes and plastic surgery....
Step 5 really is defined as 'profit', though.
So actually the situation is an iterative loopy thing, only now Step 1 is fed by the magazines as much or more than from any guys' input. So the situation is responsible for the sexual stereotyping, although those who want to go back to step 0 probably would find that men started it (but does it matter? Particularly since men are now increasingly caught in exactly the same situation).
yeah :-)
and I can guarantee that Mario probably has about as much sex appeal as the he-man looking dudes. According to womens' magazines (bleurgh) womens' ideas of the sexiest guys out there are, for example, Jude Law, Orlando Bloom, Robbie Williams...
In other words, out of the Lord of the Rings, women would choose the sensitive'n'reserved elf. Enigmatic, dreamy-eyed, sad-looking and caring is where it's at (puke at will).
Any of them on the computer game boxes? (hey, I don't play -- so I honestly don't know)
One suggestion in this article is that the increasingly frequent appearance of these idealised images of men are causing similar effects to those often seen in women, blamed on objectification by feminists, and laughed away by the rest of the world
So there we are. Finally, equality of the sexes; we all get to have bad self-image thrust upon us! The bonus side is I suppose that one day it might well equal out; when we're all totally freaked out, bulimic gym zombies, maybe there'll be an advertising revolution of some kind.
And the cynical part of me also wants to add: what goes around, comes around...
Again you have a definite point there. It isn't a choice post-addiction, and it certainly doesn't deserve to be trivialised either - apologies if I sounded as though I was going into that direction. One unfortunate mistake certainly shouldn't give any government carte blanche to string people up :-/