Oh Gawd, plastic cowlings on the fronts of PC's, that you have to remove to get at stuff, are such a pain in the ass. I'll die happy if I never see one again.
As a law student and former legal clerk, I second this wholeheartedly. Nothing makes my day easier when I'm writing up pleadings or defences or forms than that capslock key.
My reply to you is way too long, and for that I apologise in advance.
Perhaps the problem is that so many people equate higher pay with success.
Why yes, many many people equate higher pay with success. Certainly the CEO's of major multinational corporations do, and they're perfectly happy making sure that the rest of us get less money, so they can get more. Alongside them are the power-hungry, who merely enjoy running everything, and telling the rest of us what to do. In successive layers (remember the pyramid you mentioned in your original post?) are the upper class, who basically enable the top echelon folk; the middle class, who do a lot of the gruntwork of keeping the society from falling apart and at the very bottom (and the very largest population) are the lower classes, who scrabble and scrape to earn a living. This is the society we live in, and whether you or I like it or not matters not one whit to the wicked world.
The 'goal' becomes 'to make more money'. It's a reasonable 'means', but it's a stupid 'goal'.
"Make more money" is a stupid goal if you already have enough money to live a comfortable life. It is an eminently reasonable goal if "make more money" is synonymous with "feed the kids and myself and maybe keep the lights on this month." You don't seem to take into account the great numbers of people who really do need more money, so they can acquire the basics of life. These people can't afford to work toward their personal enrichment, or study with Nadia Boulanger, they need to absorb enough information to enable them to hold down a minimum-wage job or three.
The education system as it is is supposed to serve these people. It doesn't do so very well, but the changes you propose won't necessarily make things any better (and will cost more to implement; I personally am all for this increase in spending, but many people aren't).
Therefore, all you really have to do monetarily is be stable. Go do what interests you. That's true success.
This is not a trivial goal for many, many people. It's a problem in Western society, and in the world as a whole, it's the problem. Remember that in Maslow's hierarchy, self-actualization is the last step.
Even if it was solely about money, the richest people are either born into it, or have built successful companies on their own (which does not require straight A's on any tests).
This example proves my point. The rich don't educate their children in the public education system, they send their children to private schools, where the teaching is much more in line with your (and my) idea of what education should be. That kind of education is best suited for the kind of work rich people get. The kind of education you advocate is a luxury good.
I can't imagine a boss saying, "Well you're not a team player, and I don't like you, but you scored well on the test I gave, so here's your promotion."
A red herring. Being well-rounded and a team player is just one more hoop you have to jump through. I spoke to a public school teacher who said that "social skills" courses were being considered for the curriculum (in Ontario, Canada). Presumably, they'll have some form of test to evaluate student performance.
Getting a job is mostly based on an interview. Getting a promotion is mostly based on your boss.
Not to beat a dead horse, but it depends on the job. If you're applying to work at a Kwik-E-Mart, do you really think it's the killer interview that gets you in, or your ability to count change without a calculator? What about that factory job? Interviews are important in any job, but not in every job, and especially not in the low-end, subsistence wage jobs that most people have to apply for. Now in these cases, grades may not matter, but getting in that minimum level of education does matter: can you r
Paradigm Shift If we are trying to pidgin-hole people and put them into their place on a pyramid, with the achievers on top and the average in their places below, well then our system is perfectly set up for that. Fortunately, the real world doesn't work like that outside of a totalitarian state.
Er, where do you live that the world doesn't work like that? I'd like to join you. Actually, you're right, achievers don't get to the top of the social pyramid, sociopaths and psychopaths get to the top of the social pyramid. Achievers generally get distributed through the pile where they're needed. But don't pretend the pyramid doesn't exist in our societies. It does, as anyone who's actually tried to work their way up from the bottom can attest.
Why tests? There is educational value in studying but actually taking tests is an extremely inefficient use of time. When a student takes them, either they know the material, or they don't. They can't look up or learn the material during that time. If development was the goal, that time would be better spent studying, practising, or testing themselves. Tests as they are, are more for grading purposes (hence administrational purposes) and only provide the student with a motivation not to fail.
Tests are efficient at evaluating the level of knowledge of the student. They can be more or less effective, depending on how they are designed. Probably most tests are not very effective, but then neither is some amorphous "gut-feeling" of the teacher, excreted into a report, about how well or ill they think the student is "enhancing their life goals." Also, tests can serve the very useful purpose of reducing the subconscious biases of class and/or race discrimination that different teachers may be prone to.
Should our education be centered around not failing? Or should it be centered around aiding people with their lives?
Education should prepare the student for the real world. In the real world, your livelihood depends on not failing (at work, your family, whatever). Nobody after school is interested in aiding you with your life. It's an ugly fact, but it's what we have to work with now. Change society first, then change the education system to match.
Education as an aid to development Many famous classical composers (like Aaron Copland) went to study under a woman named Nadia Boulanger. She was famous, well respected, and something you could put on a resume. She didn't give tests, she just worked with you on your craft. Why can't universities use a similar model? Or any schools for that matter? They would work with you on the material you came to study, period.
This is a beautiful example, but you omit the fact that the students of Nadia Boulanger had to gain a certain minimum level of knowledge before they could even hope to study with her. Likely, her students had to work hard to gain that basic level of knowledge, and probably wrote many tests as well on their way to that goal.
Further, the value of studying with Nadia Boulanger was Nadia Boulanger. Does every teacher carry the same weight of value? Of course not. Grades are a way for other people (parents, employers, peers) of assessing roughly what your level of ability is, without having to look at the resume of every teacher who ever taught you.
It's money I think. It's hard to advertise.
It's efficiency I think, most people can't afford to study with the very best, and there are not enough excellent teachers to teach everyone who needs to be taught. The system is designed to get a large volume of people through their childhood and young adulthood with a solid educational foundation, and it does so fairly efficiently (though there is lots of room for improvement). The kind of education you suggest would be very expensive, and would probably require a complete transformation of the values of our society before we could implement it.
What's funny is, Nokia used to make a phone just like that (maybe they still do). Presumably you don't see them around because they don't sell well. Why wouldn't they sell well? Well if a prospective purchaser has to choose between two phones, both of which are "free" with a 3 year contract, it makes more sense to pick the phone that has a larger feature set, on the off chance that you might use those features in the future. Sure, you don't need the crappy camera, but who knows, someday you might be in a car accident and want to take pictures of the scene or something.
Also, don't knock the razr, man. I accidentally ran one through the washing machine, and it still runs.
That list should fill up about two years, at this kid's pace. Then what? I agree that it would be great for him to improve his soft skills, but he's already so far distinguishable from his cohort that no matter what he does, he's not going to fit in within a grade school/high school context.
As for teaching, that would be a disaster. When I was in grade 7, my English teacher asked me to teach ONE lesson. I was set back socially with my peers for the rest of the year, and never fully recovered until high school. Late high school.
Doing what, exactly? Should he essentially start at middle-school level work and do it all over again? Do you think that if he's back in school with the other kids, acing everything and bored out of his skull, that somehow he'll be able to fit in? I agree that he probably needs to learn better how to socialize with kids his own age, but taking him and his degree and tossing him back to middle school isn't going to do that. It would have been better if he'd never been advanced past his cohort, but it's far too late for that now.
It's been a while since I read the bible, but I'd bet that somewhere in there it does discuss rape in a positive light. Certainly there are passages where god commands his people to commit genocide. I don't know how much worse than that the bible needs to be before we wonder if maybe it shouldn't be accorded the status of moral guidebook.
I can think of a lot of countries like that. And to give the answer that GP won't want to give, we are immature for so long because we can afford to be. Whether this is ultimately a good thing or not is an open question, as far as I'm concerned.
There does seem to be a correlation between downloaders and purchasers of CD's and concert tickets though. Geist's blog featured the results of a poll of Canadians that showed that downloaders were also more likely to buy music and pay for concerts. There was a similar poll or study from Scandinavia that showed the same relation.
Now as to the link between causation and correlation, for the statement you quoted to be strictly true, he only needs to find one example of a person who downloaded an album, and then bought the album or a concert ticket specifically because of that download (not every download would then be lost revenue, there would be at least one download that represented increased revenue). I don't think it's unreasonable to make this claim, even if he doesn't have evidence to back it up. It's certainly a more believable claim than the music industries' claim, that downloading always results in lost revenue.
In short, you don't need to have irrefutable evidence to challenge a wild claim, only reason to think that the wild claim is too wild to be true, and I think the correlation between downloaders and music consumers is sufficient in itself. Occam's razor isn't the answer to everything, but it remains a handy tool, for all of that.
or D) setting somebody up for a really hard fall. I'm thinking of Judge Kimball, in the SCOX files, who seemed to be bending over backwards to give time and attention to SCO's every little move, only to thoroughly trash them later. Judges who've got an idea of where the case is going (or who don't particularly like one side, regardless of the merits of the case) will sometimes play out as much rope as one side wants, and whistle jauntily while that side puts their head in the noose. It's a way of making your judgment appeal-proof. If the appeal court looks at your judgment and the proceedings, and saw that you gave the loser every chance to present their side before cutting them down, the court will be more favourable to your judgment.
As a strategy, it is probably a bad, desperate move. I can't speak for US courts, but in the Canadian rules, almost every single rule of court procedure has a specific exception that judges can ignore the rules if it advances the cause of justice. This essentially gives judges a very big hammer to bring down upon counsel who try to pull stupid stunts. Having costs awarded against you (really your client) because of your crappy motion is one thing; having costs awarded against you (the lawyer) personally is a wonderful convincer, one that judges seem to love to use. I hope the rules are similar in the Court in question.
The argument stinks because the appeal court didn't overturn the verdict of the trial court, they ordered a new trial; essentially, the first trial never happened. There's no verdict to be overturned. If the appeals court had overturned the verdict, it would be game over (barring further appeals) and the verdict would be reversed. Note also that appeals courts have more flexibility than just supporting or overturning the whole verdict: appeals judges get to pick and choose. They can rule that the trial judge ruled correctly, but for the wrong reasons, or they can rule that the judge should have considered the law in a particular way that nobody before had thought of (creating a new test, for example). There are limitations to what an appeals judge can do to a verdict (they can usually only rule on points of law, as noted elsewhere), but within those limitations they can do anything.
I was under the impression that all physics was just "math with a mask on". Why does string theory bug you, when quantum mechanics or relativity doesn't?
What exactly is so offensive about String theory (really, string hypothesis) that you're so worked up about it? Really? It's an interesting hypothesis, it hasn't been disproved yet, it may be disprovable (we don't know for sure yet) so why do you expend so much vitriol against it?
Ah, you see, you're claiming that String theorists are claiming that they're right. And guess what, they're not making those kind of claims, as far as I've ever heard. Even Brian Greene, whose cheerleading for String theory is well-known, has been careful to point out that nothing is proven yet and a lot of work needs to be done.
String theory may or may not turn out to be wrong, but it hasn't been disproven yet, and nobody has come up with a better theory yet, and thus I would opine that it's still worth exploring.
Your example is a red herring, anyway. As the caricature of the religious believer that you've drawn does have a competing theory, and that believer thinks it's better. If the hypothesis that god created the universe is the only theory you have, you can justify accepting it conditionally, until a better theory comes along or until you've disproven your hypothesis.
So where's the competing theory, the one that explains things better, and is testable and whatnot? I hadn't heard that there really was one. My impression was that the one advantage the String theorists have is that they currently don't have any credible competition, though I confess that I haven't been keeping up with the debates.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh Gawd, plastic cowlings on the fronts of PC's, that you have to remove to get at stuff, are such a pain in the ass. I'll die happy if I never see one again.
As a law student and former legal clerk, I second this wholeheartedly. Nothing makes my day easier when I'm writing up pleadings or defences or forms than that capslock key.
My reply to you is way too long, and for that I apologise in advance.
Perhaps the problem is that so many people equate higher pay with success.
Why yes, many many people equate higher pay with success. Certainly the CEO's of major multinational corporations do, and they're perfectly happy making sure that the rest of us get less money, so they can get more. Alongside them are the power-hungry, who merely enjoy running everything, and telling the rest of us what to do. In successive layers (remember the pyramid you mentioned in your original post?) are the upper class, who basically enable the top echelon folk; the middle class, who do a lot of the gruntwork of keeping the society from falling apart and at the very bottom (and the very largest population) are the lower classes, who scrabble and scrape to earn a living. This is the society we live in, and whether you or I like it or not matters not one whit to the wicked world.
The 'goal' becomes 'to make more money'. It's a reasonable 'means', but it's a stupid 'goal'.
"Make more money" is a stupid goal if you already have enough money to live a comfortable life. It is an eminently reasonable goal if "make more money" is synonymous with "feed the kids and myself and maybe keep the lights on this month." You don't seem to take into account the great numbers of people who really do need more money, so they can acquire the basics of life. These people can't afford to work toward their personal enrichment, or study with Nadia Boulanger, they need to absorb enough information to enable them to hold down a minimum-wage job or three.
The education system as it is is supposed to serve these people. It doesn't do so very well, but the changes you propose won't necessarily make things any better (and will cost more to implement; I personally am all for this increase in spending, but many people aren't).
Therefore, all you really have to do monetarily is be stable. Go do what interests you. That's true success.
This is not a trivial goal for many, many people. It's a problem in Western society, and in the world as a whole, it's the problem. Remember that in Maslow's hierarchy, self-actualization is the last step.
Even if it was solely about money, the richest people are either born into it, or have built successful companies on their own (which does not require straight A's on any tests).
This example proves my point. The rich don't educate their children in the public education system, they send their children to private schools, where the teaching is much more in line with your (and my) idea of what education should be. That kind of education is best suited for the kind of work rich people get. The kind of education you advocate is a luxury good.
I can't imagine a boss saying, "Well you're not a team player, and I don't like you, but you scored well on the test I gave, so here's your promotion."
A red herring. Being well-rounded and a team player is just one more hoop you have to jump through. I spoke to a public school teacher who said that "social skills" courses were being considered for the curriculum (in Ontario, Canada). Presumably, they'll have some form of test to evaluate student performance.
Getting a job is mostly based on an interview. Getting a promotion is mostly based on your boss.
Not to beat a dead horse, but it depends on the job. If you're applying to work at a Kwik-E-Mart, do you really think it's the killer interview that gets you in, or your ability to count change without a calculator? What about that factory job? Interviews are important in any job, but not in every job, and especially not in the low-end, subsistence wage jobs that most people have to apply for. Now in these cases, grades may not matter, but getting in that minimum level of education does matter: can you r
Paradigm Shift
If we are trying to pidgin-hole people and put them into their place on a pyramid, with the achievers on top and the average in their places below, well then our system is perfectly set up for that. Fortunately, the real world doesn't work like that outside of a totalitarian state.
Er, where do you live that the world doesn't work like that? I'd like to join you. Actually, you're right, achievers don't get to the top of the social pyramid, sociopaths and psychopaths get to the top of the social pyramid. Achievers generally get distributed through the pile where they're needed. But don't pretend the pyramid doesn't exist in our societies. It does, as anyone who's actually tried to work their way up from the bottom can attest.
Why tests?
There is educational value in studying but actually taking tests is an extremely inefficient use of time. When a student takes them, either they know the material, or they don't. They can't look up or learn the material during that time. If development was the goal, that time would be better spent studying, practising, or testing themselves. Tests as they are, are more for grading purposes (hence administrational purposes) and only provide the student with a motivation not to fail.
Tests are efficient at evaluating the level of knowledge of the student. They can be more or less effective, depending on how they are designed. Probably most tests are not very effective, but then neither is some amorphous "gut-feeling" of the teacher, excreted into a report, about how well or ill they think the student is "enhancing their life goals." Also, tests can serve the very useful purpose of reducing the subconscious biases of class and/or race discrimination that different teachers may be prone to.
Should our education be centered around not failing? Or should it be centered around aiding people with their lives?
Education should prepare the student for the real world. In the real world, your livelihood depends on not failing (at work, your family, whatever). Nobody after school is interested in aiding you with your life. It's an ugly fact, but it's what we have to work with now. Change society first, then change the education system to match.
Education as an aid to development
Many famous classical composers (like Aaron Copland) went to study under a woman named Nadia Boulanger. She was famous, well respected, and something you could put on a resume. She didn't give tests, she just worked with you on your craft. Why can't universities use a similar model? Or any schools for that matter? They would work with you on the material you came to study, period.
This is a beautiful example, but you omit the fact that the students of Nadia Boulanger had to gain a certain minimum level of knowledge before they could even hope to study with her. Likely, her students had to work hard to gain that basic level of knowledge, and probably wrote many tests as well on their way to that goal.
Further, the value of studying with Nadia Boulanger was Nadia Boulanger. Does every teacher carry the same weight of value? Of course not. Grades are a way for other people (parents, employers, peers) of assessing roughly what your level of ability is, without having to look at the resume of every teacher who ever taught you.
It's money I think. It's hard to advertise.
It's efficiency I think, most people can't afford to study with the very best, and there are not enough excellent teachers to teach everyone who needs to be taught. The system is designed to get a large volume of people through their childhood and young adulthood with a solid educational foundation, and it does so fairly efficiently (though there is lots of room for improvement). The kind of education you suggest would be very expensive, and would probably require a complete transformation of the values of our society before we could implement it.
What's funny is, Nokia used to make a phone just like that (maybe they still do). Presumably you don't see them around because they don't sell well. Why wouldn't they sell well? Well if a prospective purchaser has to choose between two phones, both of which are "free" with a 3 year contract, it makes more sense to pick the phone that has a larger feature set, on the off chance that you might use those features in the future. Sure, you don't need the crappy camera, but who knows, someday you might be in a car accident and want to take pictures of the scene or something.
Also, don't knock the razr, man. I accidentally ran one through the washing machine, and it still runs.
Judges 21:10-24
Numbers 31:7-18
Deuteronomy 20:10-14
Deuteronomy 21:10-14
Zechariah 14:1-2
For starters. You lose.
That list should fill up about two years, at this kid's pace. Then what? I agree that it would be great for him to improve his soft skills, but he's already so far distinguishable from his cohort that no matter what he does, he's not going to fit in within a grade school/high school context.
As for teaching, that would be a disaster. When I was in grade 7, my English teacher asked me to teach ONE lesson. I was set back socially with my peers for the rest of the year, and never fully recovered until high school. Late high school.
Doing what, exactly? Should he essentially start at middle-school level work and do it all over again? Do you think that if he's back in school with the other kids, acing everything and bored out of his skull, that somehow he'll be able to fit in? I agree that he probably needs to learn better how to socialize with kids his own age, but taking him and his degree and tossing him back to middle school isn't going to do that. It would have been better if he'd never been advanced past his cohort, but it's far too late for that now.
I find it really easy to disable Microsoft's search engine.
1) Open IEx
2) search for "firefox" or "opera" or whatever
3) click the first link that has "download" in the description.
4) download and install.
It's been working like a charm for years now.
Protip: Humans are animals.
It's been a while since I read the bible, but I'd bet that somewhere in there it does discuss rape in a positive light. Certainly there are passages where god commands his people to commit genocide. I don't know how much worse than that the bible needs to be before we wonder if maybe it shouldn't be accorded the status of moral guidebook.
Experienced tentacle monster. Will rape for food.
I can think of a lot of countries like that. And to give the answer that GP won't want to give, we are immature for so long because we can afford to be. Whether this is ultimately a good thing or not is an open question, as far as I'm concerned.
There does seem to be a correlation between downloaders and purchasers of CD's and concert tickets though. Geist's blog featured the results of a poll of Canadians that showed that downloaders were also more likely to buy music and pay for concerts. There was a similar poll or study from Scandinavia that showed the same relation.
Now as to the link between causation and correlation, for the statement you quoted to be strictly true, he only needs to find one example of a person who downloaded an album, and then bought the album or a concert ticket specifically because of that download (not every download would then be lost revenue, there would be at least one download that represented increased revenue). I don't think it's unreasonable to make this claim, even if he doesn't have evidence to back it up. It's certainly a more believable claim than the music industries' claim, that downloading always results in lost revenue.
In short, you don't need to have irrefutable evidence to challenge a wild claim, only reason to think that the wild claim is too wild to be true, and I think the correlation between downloaders and music consumers is sufficient in itself. Occam's razor isn't the answer to everything, but it remains a handy tool, for all of that.
or D) setting somebody up for a really hard fall. I'm thinking of Judge Kimball, in the SCOX files, who seemed to be bending over backwards to give time and attention to SCO's every little move, only to thoroughly trash them later. Judges who've got an idea of where the case is going (or who don't particularly like one side, regardless of the merits of the case) will sometimes play out as much rope as one side wants, and whistle jauntily while that side puts their head in the noose. It's a way of making your judgment appeal-proof. If the appeal court looks at your judgment and the proceedings, and saw that you gave the loser every chance to present their side before cutting them down, the court will be more favourable to your judgment.
As a strategy, it is probably a bad, desperate move. I can't speak for US courts, but in the Canadian rules, almost every single rule of court procedure has a specific exception that judges can ignore the rules if it advances the cause of justice. This essentially gives judges a very big hammer to bring down upon counsel who try to pull stupid stunts. Having costs awarded against you (really your client) because of your crappy motion is one thing; having costs awarded against you (the lawyer) personally is a wonderful convincer, one that judges seem to love to use. I hope the rules are similar in the Court in question.
The argument stinks because the appeal court didn't overturn the verdict of the trial court, they ordered a new trial; essentially, the first trial never happened. There's no verdict to be overturned. If the appeals court had overturned the verdict, it would be game over (barring further appeals) and the verdict would be reversed. Note also that appeals courts have more flexibility than just supporting or overturning the whole verdict: appeals judges get to pick and choose. They can rule that the trial judge ruled correctly, but for the wrong reasons, or they can rule that the judge should have considered the law in a particular way that nobody before had thought of (creating a new test, for example). There are limitations to what an appeals judge can do to a verdict (they can usually only rule on points of law, as noted elsewhere), but within those limitations they can do anything.
but your post deserves the insightful mods.
Is it the vibrating strings that offends people?
I was under the impression that all physics was just "math with a mask on". Why does string theory bug you, when quantum mechanics or relativity doesn't?
What exactly is so offensive about String theory (really, string hypothesis) that you're so worked up about it? Really? It's an interesting hypothesis, it hasn't been disproved yet, it may be disprovable (we don't know for sure yet) so why do you expend so much vitriol against it?
Ah, you see, you're claiming that String theorists are claiming that they're right. And guess what, they're not making those kind of claims, as far as I've ever heard. Even Brian Greene, whose cheerleading for String theory is well-known, has been careful to point out that nothing is proven yet and a lot of work needs to be done.
String theory may or may not turn out to be wrong, but it hasn't been disproven yet, and nobody has come up with a better theory yet, and thus I would opine that it's still worth exploring.
Your example is a red herring, anyway. As the caricature of the religious believer that you've drawn does have a competing theory, and that believer thinks it's better. If the hypothesis that god created the universe is the only theory you have, you can justify accepting it conditionally, until a better theory comes along or until you've disproven your hypothesis.
As mud. Thank you.
So where's the competing theory, the one that explains things better, and is testable and whatnot? I hadn't heard that there really was one. My impression was that the one advantage the String theorists have is that they currently don't have any credible competition, though I confess that I haven't been keeping up with the debates.
I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with "pc keyboards back-to-back" as a system of measurement, could you translate that into Football Fields for me?
Ah, but Bryan Adams is taking pictures now (which he's actually pretty decent at) and last I checked, Celine Dion was in Vegas.