Yes, it's not a yes or no answer; it's a matter of professional judgment, and there comes the rub, for there are so few professionals in modern journalism. Not because we're stupid but because we lack a culture of mentorship -- old pros are tossed aside like, well, yesterday's news, and the young are left to learn the long, hard, bad way -- often in an environment where survival is critical and ethics are optional. A recent example from what I now call Higgs-dependence Day (July 4): generally, the trend here went toward jargon. Journalists attempted to educate readers in a little of the theoretical minutiae behind the Higgs field, and ran the risk of losing those who didn't GAS in the first place anyway. Hacks and amateurs resorted instantly to the phrase "God particle" and ran with it. In politics, it's perhaps worst of all, because the hacks own the field, and even at places like the NYT, usualy reduce everything to what I call a common "de-numb-inator." I read Grist regularly and see the frustration amid their editors at the trained ignorance in matters like climate change/climate science.
Again: the problem is in the culture, not in the people. Folks who want to keep their jobs know that you have to work from the outside in, and the further in you get the more cred you have. Professionals, the few that remain, know that the journalist's job is as a critical, questioning, sometimes abrasive outsider who names virtually all his sources and engages in little or no games of push-me-pull-you intellectual commerce.
Once again, the obsession with the technical amid the ignorance of the practical. Why no "master teachers" in English? Or in computer/online basics? Oh, that's because it's hard to learn languages likes algebra, trig, and Java, but easy to learn to use English well -- hey, everybody does it, check out the comments bin on most any weblog! Everybody knows how to communicate just fine, right? Um...right?
As I've said many, many times: teachers (and certainly not unions) aren't the problem with education. Choice is. Teaching anything more than single-variable equations or elemental earth sciences to HS kids is, from a societal perspective, a vast and nearly incalculable waste. Primary education divorced from real life is not education. I recall asking my kid once, when she was in 10th grade: "what are they teaching you at school about being safe and smart online, with dangerous stuff like Facebook?" She said, "nothing, but I've got advanced algebra and chemistry. And there's a computer lab we can use." "But no teachers in using the computers?" I asked. "Nope," she said, "just monitors." This is at a large, big-city public school.
Again: as long as we as a society choose to teach college-level stuff in high school, we will crank out kids into the real world who are stressed out by quadratic equations and otherwise have little or no skills for life.
I wrote this on the morning of the announcement because I suspected that some wild and wacky stuff would soon be dancing across the Intarwebs, because even the "straight" reporting was conflicting.
The folks who say "what you mean is what matters, not how you say it" are of the same crowd as the "all religions are true" sillies. Grammar and syntax always matter; and the proof can be found in other disciplines besides ordinary language that employ grammar/syntax (music's a big one, another is, um, coding). One side benefit of attention to grammar, spelling, and syntax: it inspires thought and review of one's work, which can in turn inspire reflection and prevent hitting the Send button when it would mean "Send invitation to disaster/embarrassment/major conflict". That point made, the writer's reminder (in the CBS article) about not calling a person out in public about grammatical errors also applies to the well-known grammar trolls of the online world. When I see such a problem in an online posting, I look for a way to DM or otherwise privately contact the author rather than pollute the comments bin with some gotcha nonsense. People shouldn't be attacked, humiliated, or even blamed for poor grammar: it isn't very well taught because it isn't very well valued in the culture. And that's the fault neither of email, texting, or smartphones. Grammar can be very easy and attractive to teach if there is commitment and if it's done the right way; there are many models to hold up, especially for kids. Some of the soundest writing, both technically and artistically (they do go together) can be found in the works of J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter). Years ago I applied for a job in the NYC Public Schools and offered exactly that as my pitch to them: teach grammar and syntax for an entire term straight from the Potteriad. They weren't interested.
It depends on what you can do. I see a lot of postings from fin. firms looking for architects and Java devs to deploy and customize content management systems. There's always work in the "lights-on" realms, sys admin, trading systems support/maintenance, and of course DBAs. Also remember that telecommute is becoming an increasingly popular option re. corporate contract work for geeks; so make a telecommute search agent part of your dice profile.
Big deal -- Van Gogh saw this stuff with his ordinary human equipment and then painted it. This tech stuff is merely pale imitation of what that superior intelligence saw and recorded to canvas long ago.
anyone else notice (this is very common, too) that the presentation of the trickle-down theory here is pre-loaded with "Maybe's"??? Maybe this, maybe that, maybe, maybe, maybe.
And believe it or not, the young people of this nation (especially) have had their fill of shit-and-maybe sandwich.# Occupy!
Back when most current nerds were busy being born, we all operated on the command line. Then the current philanthropist champion of Education came up with the idea of dumbing it all down: let people click on little pictures and make the command line invisible to all. Never mind that, for a long time, it didn't work -- it was such a Great Idea that it was accepted, warts and all. Everyone agreed: The goal was salubrious -- viz., make a machine that my two-year old can operate. The apotheosis of this beautiful journey has arrived with the Pad and many charming celebrations of the achievement can be viewed at leisure on youtube today.
It's a repeated theme in dying empires, the unrelenting quest for Stupidity, the idealization of Regression. Back in Rome, this quest was pursued for centuries until Constantine came along and said, let's all become Christians and complete the journey. British, French, and other imperial upstarts since have similarly equated the way of regression with Progress, often with hilarious results (just see the novels of Wodehouse). Now it's America's turn, where our new national anthem is an old crooner's song called "iPhone to Watch Over Me". For the few who strangely choose to resist such obvious progress, there is everything from Quantico to extradition treaties to pepper spray to the revered remedy of washing the mouth out with SOPA. Let the march of regression continue apace; let us submit to the Guiding Hand that brushes us gently backward toward the utopian bliss of infantilism (there's an app for that).
I figured it would go like this, but I had a serious problem with the timing of everything. They opened this paywall in the same month that two of their best and most vituperative anti-establishmentarian writers -- Frank Rich and Bob Herbert -- "left" the NYT. It was a very strange coincidence, as if perfectly timed to bring the corporate and well-heeled safely over without fear of seeing their agenda keelhauled several times a week. All that remains is the Nobel winner Krugman, who is as bulletproof as it gets in that kind of culture.
I still have several lying around, beginning with 5.04 (hedgehog? I get the critters confused). I'm sure there are lots of geeks who look down their noses at it, but for this non-geek/para-geek, it was a tremendous learning experience. After just a few months with ubuntu and the shell, I was suddenly understanding some of what the architects and admins were talking about in meetings at work, and they noticed too. And I was eventually making smarter choices (and non-choices) on all the tech consumer shit that's been flooding the market this decade. If I were teaching tech in a middle school or high school setting I'd create a linux network in a classroom and introduce them to tech that asks a little more of them than slide-n-poke. The corporations in particular and the collective overall want us to experience tech in as superficial a way as possible; I think linux could offer kids a chance to overcome that conditioning. I always had the feeling that was part of ubuntu's mission, if you will: to offer a deeper and more rounded and intelligent experience of tech than the proprietary gods want us to have.
I just finished spending 10 mos. on my first telecommute gig and found myself working harder/longer than usual. My thinking was: "I want them feeling like they're getting everything out of this guy working from home, no need to have him in the office..."
Yes, there were days where I was waiting for content and design specs and was able to hang for an hour or two at a time chilling, but every time the bell rang I was humping it and gave extra time when needed regularly for nothing. Bad economy aside, it was just too good being home and not dealing with the expense and annoyance of commuting NOT to put out extra. And now I'm telling the recruiting firms I'll take 10% off my rate for any gig that's 80%+ telecommute. It's the civilized way to earn a living.
Day after the Wal-Mart decision at SCOTUS -- think it got through to the Winkies that SCOTUS is a deep friend of wealthy established multi-billion $ corporate entities? Young Winki, you chose wisely.
I worked for 20 yrs. in that area and walked those streets (47th - 49th between 5th and 6th Avenues) thousands of times with nothing more in my mind than annoyance at the street hawkers, bums, mendicants, and hustlers that clog the walkways. There used to be a great tech store there, by the way, corner of 6th Ave. and 48th, forget the name but spent plenty of time there. And a beautiful used book store on 47th amid all the jewelry shops ("wise men fish here"), and of course Scribner's on 5th Ave., where Faulkner and Fitzgerald used to hang out (last I checked it had been turned into a Benneton's, ugh). All those messianic crazies going up and down those block ("Moishiach is Coming!"). What a strange neighborhood. If you've never been to NYC, rent a Dustin Hoffman movie called "Marathon Man" and check out the beginning, which was filmed right there in the diamond district.
If you're a baseball fan you'll get the connection here (um, get the name of the stadium): this is so Mets-like an event and an outcome. I recall Casey Stengel's immortal words from when he had the helm in Flushing: "can't anyone play this here game?"
DW is best for ease of use, convenience, durability, plugins, CSS toys, etc., etc. If you're in the Mac universe, DW is still best, but there's also a British product called Freeway which I used years ago on a PPC Mac and I think is still around. Very well done, as I remember. But if you want free, NVU is okay and I have a product on the Windows box here called HTML Kit, which is okay. But if you want the full monty in being able to work with code and design simultaneously with the assurance that the product will be on and supported five years from now, DW is your can't miss choice. It ain't cheap: $300 for the CS5.5 version; $150 if you're a student or teacher (and can prove it).
It's the God particle, fercrhissakes. What do you expect it to do, be born of a virgin, get baptized by the guy who does the intro to Monty Python, perform miracles and then get pinned to a cross and made into a symbol of martyrdom for a program of worldwide warfare and occupation? If I'm the God of this world, you're never gonna find me, so put that in yer crotch and post it to twitter...
Read the poetry of Shakespeare, Rumi, Chaucer, Keats, Coleridge, Goethe, Wordsworth, Rilke, Tennyson, Eliot (I could go on), and the same theme arises: poets have known this for ages and have patiently waited in their graves for science to catch on. It is a very ordinary sort of knowledge, based on near-universal experience. I just think the poets do a far better job of expressing it.
Just read the interview and then watched a couple of the original shows. It's worse than even I remember it was. Those of us who watched every episode of every season as they arrived recognized even then how badly they were written, how badly acted, how lamely produced -- but their poverty of quality somehow made them more compelling. We used to say, "they have to be good to be so awful.." But today, what 40 yrs or more later? There is only the vapidity left, none of the magic...
This one comes closest to getting it. To put it in terms of inferential logic, it's the difference between the "inclusive or" and the "exclusive or": you can be this-or-that according to circumstances/audience rather than this-or-that-and-never-both. I'm lucky to have a manager who dares to advocate for what I'm doing and burns low growth to keep my path clear, but there's plenty of times where I have to explain things to other managers and content owners ("the page has to be edited because 'someone' pasted into the CMA from a Word doc and there's 300 lines of MSO code in there, which is appropriate for a Word doc but not for a web page"). But I don't do well with the bean counters and senior VPs because I'm as maladept with MBA-speak as they are with XML. That's where my boss runs interference for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I wouldn't worry, that place is full of those Type A characters. Just look at their basketball coach...
Yes, it's not a yes or no answer; it's a matter of professional judgment, and there comes the rub, for there are so few professionals in modern journalism. Not because we're stupid but because we lack a culture of mentorship -- old pros are tossed aside like, well, yesterday's news, and the young are left to learn the long, hard, bad way -- often in an environment where survival is critical and ethics are optional. A recent example from what I now call Higgs-dependence Day (July 4): generally, the trend here went toward jargon. Journalists attempted to educate readers in a little of the theoretical minutiae behind the Higgs field, and ran the risk of losing those who didn't GAS in the first place anyway. Hacks and amateurs resorted instantly to the phrase "God particle" and ran with it. In politics, it's perhaps worst of all, because the hacks own the field, and even at places like the NYT, usualy reduce everything to what I call a common "de-numb-inator." I read Grist regularly and see the frustration amid their editors at the trained ignorance in matters like climate change/climate science. Again: the problem is in the culture, not in the people. Folks who want to keep their jobs know that you have to work from the outside in, and the further in you get the more cred you have. Professionals, the few that remain, know that the journalist's job is as a critical, questioning, sometimes abrasive outsider who names virtually all his sources and engages in little or no games of push-me-pull-you intellectual commerce.
Once again, the obsession with the technical amid the ignorance of the practical. Why no "master teachers" in English? Or in computer/online basics? Oh, that's because it's hard to learn languages likes algebra, trig, and Java, but easy to learn to use English well -- hey, everybody does it, check out the comments bin on most any weblog! Everybody knows how to communicate just fine, right? Um...right?
As I've said many, many times: teachers (and certainly not unions) aren't the problem with education. Choice is. Teaching anything more than single-variable equations or elemental earth sciences to HS kids is, from a societal perspective, a vast and nearly incalculable waste. Primary education divorced from real life is not education. I recall asking my kid once, when she was in 10th grade: "what are they teaching you at school about being safe and smart online, with dangerous stuff like Facebook?" She said, "nothing, but I've got advanced algebra and chemistry. And there's a computer lab we can use." "But no teachers in using the computers?" I asked. "Nope," she said, "just monitors." This is at a large, big-city public school.
Again: as long as we as a society choose to teach college-level stuff in high school, we will crank out kids into the real world who are stressed out by quadratic equations and otherwise have little or no skills for life.
Wow, nearly 6 yrs. ago, I was given an exclusive with the doggy little planet that wasn't.
I wrote this on the morning of the announcement because I suspected that some wild and wacky stuff would soon be dancing across the Intarwebs, because even the "straight" reporting was conflicting.
The folks who say "what you mean is what matters, not how you say it" are of the same crowd as the "all religions are true" sillies. Grammar and syntax always matter; and the proof can be found in other disciplines besides ordinary language that employ grammar/syntax (music's a big one, another is, um, coding). One side benefit of attention to grammar, spelling, and syntax: it inspires thought and review of one's work, which can in turn inspire reflection and prevent hitting the Send button when it would mean "Send invitation to disaster/embarrassment/major conflict". That point made, the writer's reminder (in the CBS article) about not calling a person out in public about grammatical errors also applies to the well-known grammar trolls of the online world. When I see such a problem in an online posting, I look for a way to DM or otherwise privately contact the author rather than pollute the comments bin with some gotcha nonsense. People shouldn't be attacked, humiliated, or even blamed for poor grammar: it isn't very well taught because it isn't very well valued in the culture. And that's the fault neither of email, texting, or smartphones. Grammar can be very easy and attractive to teach if there is commitment and if it's done the right way; there are many models to hold up, especially for kids. Some of the soundest writing, both technically and artistically (they do go together) can be found in the works of J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter). Years ago I applied for a job in the NYC Public Schools and offered exactly that as my pitch to them: teach grammar and syntax for an entire term straight from the Potteriad. They weren't interested.
It depends on what you can do. I see a lot of postings from fin. firms looking for architects and Java devs to deploy and customize content management systems. There's always work in the "lights-on" realms, sys admin, trading systems support/maintenance, and of course DBAs. Also remember that telecommute is becoming an increasingly popular option re. corporate contract work for geeks; so make a telecommute search agent part of your dice profile.
Big deal -- Van Gogh saw this stuff with his ordinary human equipment and then painted it. This tech stuff is merely pale imitation of what that superior intelligence saw and recorded to canvas long ago.
Just have to find one with 32 tentacles. Or a large appetite.
oh WTF, never mind:die short and prosper
anyone else notice (this is very common, too) that the presentation of the trickle-down theory here is pre-loaded with "Maybe's"??? Maybe this, maybe that, maybe, maybe, maybe. And believe it or not, the young people of this nation (especially) have had their fill of shit-and-maybe sandwich.# Occupy!
Back when most current nerds were busy being born, we all operated on the command line. Then the current philanthropist champion of Education came up with the idea of dumbing it all down: let people click on little pictures and make the command line invisible to all. Never mind that, for a long time, it didn't work -- it was such a Great Idea that it was accepted, warts and all. Everyone agreed: The goal was salubrious -- viz., make a machine that my two-year old can operate. The apotheosis of this beautiful journey has arrived with the Pad and many charming celebrations of the achievement can be viewed at leisure on youtube today. It's a repeated theme in dying empires, the unrelenting quest for Stupidity, the idealization of Regression. Back in Rome, this quest was pursued for centuries until Constantine came along and said, let's all become Christians and complete the journey. British, French, and other imperial upstarts since have similarly equated the way of regression with Progress, often with hilarious results (just see the novels of Wodehouse). Now it's America's turn, where our new national anthem is an old crooner's song called "iPhone to Watch Over Me". For the few who strangely choose to resist such obvious progress, there is everything from Quantico to extradition treaties to pepper spray to the revered remedy of washing the mouth out with SOPA. Let the march of regression continue apace; let us submit to the Guiding Hand that brushes us gently backward toward the utopian bliss of infantilism (there's an app for that).
I figured it would go like this, but I had a serious problem with the timing of everything. They opened this paywall in the same month that two of their best and most vituperative anti-establishmentarian writers -- Frank Rich and Bob Herbert -- "left" the NYT. It was a very strange coincidence, as if perfectly timed to bring the corporate and well-heeled safely over without fear of seeing their agenda keelhauled several times a week. All that remains is the Nobel winner Krugman, who is as bulletproof as it gets in that kind of culture.
I still have several lying around, beginning with 5.04 (hedgehog? I get the critters confused). I'm sure there are lots of geeks who look down their noses at it, but for this non-geek/para-geek, it was a tremendous learning experience. After just a few months with ubuntu and the shell, I was suddenly understanding some of what the architects and admins were talking about in meetings at work, and they noticed too. And I was eventually making smarter choices (and non-choices) on all the tech consumer shit that's been flooding the market this decade. If I were teaching tech in a middle school or high school setting I'd create a linux network in a classroom and introduce them to tech that asks a little more of them than slide-n-poke. The corporations in particular and the collective overall want us to experience tech in as superficial a way as possible; I think linux could offer kids a chance to overcome that conditioning. I always had the feeling that was part of ubuntu's mission, if you will: to offer a deeper and more rounded and intelligent experience of tech than the proprietary gods want us to have.
God, how utterly shocking: the only winners from a new technology are lawyers. My world will go half deaf from being thus turned onto its ear.
I just finished spending 10 mos. on my first telecommute gig and found myself working harder/longer than usual. My thinking was: "I want them feeling like they're getting everything out of this guy working from home, no need to have him in the office..." Yes, there were days where I was waiting for content and design specs and was able to hang for an hour or two at a time chilling, but every time the bell rang I was humping it and gave extra time when needed regularly for nothing. Bad economy aside, it was just too good being home and not dealing with the expense and annoyance of commuting NOT to put out extra. And now I'm telling the recruiting firms I'll take 10% off my rate for any gig that's 80%+ telecommute. It's the civilized way to earn a living.
Paypal says wikileaks should be gone even earlier than that!
Day after the Wal-Mart decision at SCOTUS -- think it got through to the Winkies that SCOTUS is a deep friend of wealthy established multi-billion $ corporate entities? Young Winki, you chose wisely.
I worked for 20 yrs. in that area and walked those streets (47th - 49th between 5th and 6th Avenues) thousands of times with nothing more in my mind than annoyance at the street hawkers, bums, mendicants, and hustlers that clog the walkways. There used to be a great tech store there, by the way, corner of 6th Ave. and 48th, forget the name but spent plenty of time there. And a beautiful used book store on 47th amid all the jewelry shops ("wise men fish here"), and of course Scribner's on 5th Ave., where Faulkner and Fitzgerald used to hang out (last I checked it had been turned into a Benneton's, ugh). All those messianic crazies going up and down those block ("Moishiach is Coming!"). What a strange neighborhood. If you've never been to NYC, rent a Dustin Hoffman movie called "Marathon Man" and check out the beginning, which was filmed right there in the diamond district.
If you're a baseball fan you'll get the connection here (um, get the name of the stadium): this is so Mets-like an event and an outcome. I recall Casey Stengel's immortal words from when he had the helm in Flushing: "can't anyone play this here game?"
DW is best for ease of use, convenience, durability, plugins, CSS toys, etc., etc. If you're in the Mac universe, DW is still best, but there's also a British product called Freeway which I used years ago on a PPC Mac and I think is still around. Very well done, as I remember. But if you want free, NVU is okay and I have a product on the Windows box here called HTML Kit, which is okay. But if you want the full monty in being able to work with code and design simultaneously with the assurance that the product will be on and supported five years from now, DW is your can't miss choice. It ain't cheap: $300 for the CS5.5 version; $150 if you're a student or teacher (and can prove it).
It's the God particle, fercrhissakes. What do you expect it to do, be born of a virgin, get baptized by the guy who does the intro to Monty Python, perform miracles and then get pinned to a cross and made into a symbol of martyrdom for a program of worldwide warfare and occupation? If I'm the God of this world, you're never gonna find me, so put that in yer crotch and post it to twitter...
Read the poetry of Shakespeare, Rumi, Chaucer, Keats, Coleridge, Goethe, Wordsworth, Rilke, Tennyson, Eliot (I could go on), and the same theme arises: poets have known this for ages and have patiently waited in their graves for science to catch on. It is a very ordinary sort of knowledge, based on near-universal experience. I just think the poets do a far better job of expressing it.
Just read the interview and then watched a couple of the original shows. It's worse than even I remember it was. Those of us who watched every episode of every season as they arrived recognized even then how badly they were written, how badly acted, how lamely produced -- but their poverty of quality somehow made them more compelling. We used to say, "they have to be good to be so awful.." But today, what 40 yrs or more later? There is only the vapidity left, none of the magic...
This one comes closest to getting it. To put it in terms of inferential logic, it's the difference between the "inclusive or" and the "exclusive or": you can be this-or-that according to circumstances/audience rather than this-or-that-and-never-both. I'm lucky to have a manager who dares to advocate for what I'm doing and burns low growth to keep my path clear, but there's plenty of times where I have to explain things to other managers and content owners ("the page has to be edited because 'someone' pasted into the CMA from a Word doc and there's 300 lines of MSO code in there, which is appropriate for a Word doc but not for a web page"). But I don't do well with the bean counters and senior VPs because I'm as maladept with MBA-speak as they are with XML. That's where my boss runs interference for me.