I completely agree with you. The problem (in my experience - and yes, this is anecdotal) is that very bright children who are not given enough help become bored, disruptive, and disaffected. They quickly see that all the attention is given to their less-academically-capable peers and, as a result, tend to develop a contempt for those who, they feel, are slowing down their education. Because they are bright, they are given less leeway and less praise than others, and are expected to behave like adults just because they can think like adults. They become scared to try anything other than academic pursuits, because their smartness makes them obvious targets for bullying and any hint of failure only exacerbates that.
Even if all you're worried about is the socialisation of young people, I would contend that there is as much good reason for spending time on the very able as on the less able. If you don't want to raise a bunch of arrogant, insecure, uncaring and dysfunctional adults, you need to give bright children attention, kindness, scope for intellectual growth at their own level, age-appropriate interaction from teachers, and a safe environment in which they are valued for their abilities and encouraged to value others for theirs.
Hard work, yes. This is why bright kids need the same resources devoted to them as any others.
Interesting - in many ways, we're seeing a return to medieval ideas of productivity and "intellectual property". Payment comes from a wealthy patron, not a wider audience. Works are distributed to anyone who has the means to copy them. Anonymity is not uncommon, especially for more controversial writings. Music earns money in performance. Re-working other people's material is not plagiarism, but a means of honouring one's predecessors, learning one's craft and encouraging creativity. I think we could learn a lot from people like Chaucer and Dante.
Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?
on
Six Degrees of Wikipedia
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Well, of course, I'd tend to agree with you. But there are plenty of smokers who (regardless of the rights or wrongs of their having taken up smoking in the first place) find that going without a cigarette causes them significant stress, and so one could claim that they are benefited by being allowed to smoke. In contrast, wearing perfume that's so strong it causes a person sitting in the same carriage as you on the underground to become ill surely has no benefits whatsoever!
I once moderated an "insightful" as a "troll", so I commented in the thread in order to undo it! (That only works if you haven't made any other moderations that you want to keep, of course.) Anyway, what I mean to say is "no worries":)
Yeah, you have a point. Saved by the Bell was really pretty heinous, wasn't it?
I think you're wrong about the books not being published in the 80s or before, though. Books about geeky kids were all over the place when I was growing up - look at Roald Dahl for lots of examples, or Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, Gillian Cross's The Demon Headmaster, and so on. You might be right, though, that the movie version of Harry would have been less geeky-looking. In fact, it's interesting to look at the movies' presentation of Hermione vs. that of the books - in the books, she has awful hair and is teased for having teeth like a rabbit; in the movies, she's really attractive. Geeky guys may be coming into vogue, but geeky girls still need to be supermodels in order to cut it!
Well, if you have more than the minimum of standards, you'll never get the girl or guy of your dreams with anything "alone".
The kind of person who's only looking for one thing (money, looks, status) is not the kind of person I, for one, think I could be happy with. Even a genius IQ will not make the perfect partner unless it's allied with a half-decent personality!
Yeah, you're right in so many ways. Yet I think there's something kinda nice about the fact that those of us who do geeky stuff now have marketing aimed at us. I like coding, and fixing my friends' computers, and taking things apart with screwdrivers. I also like being able to go to ThinkGeek or somewhere and buy t-shirts with slogans that are relevant to me, rather than the usual "I'm a princess: buy me chocolate" crap that proliferates on the high street. I like that the people who make Swiss Army Knives now have a special geek version that comes with torx bits. I like having a backpack with pictures of circuit boards on it, even if it did cost a week's wages.
Re:let me get this straight
on
The Rise of Geekdom
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Speaking for myself, the NBA players and rock stars don't hold much charm; billionaires are a different matter, but give me Sergei Brin over Prince William any day! Money is all well and good, but it won't keep your brain warm on a boring winter's evening...
Re:Geeks still get beat up..
on
The Rise of Geekdom
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Absolutely.
I was interested that TFA cited Harry Potter as a kind of geek icon. Either they didn't read the books, or they think that "geek" = "wearing eyeglasses fixed with sticky-tape". Harry Potter is always doing badly at his classes, is more interested in sports than books, and leaves all the really clever stuff to Hermione. In other words, he's pretty much the quintessential jock! If geek-kids want role models, they need to look somewhere very different.
Although it may seem obvious to you from your personal experience that this is a problem, there have been quite a few scientific studies cited in the comments above, most of which tend to disagree with you. Doing your own experiment on a couple of friends just doesn't cut it scientifically. It doesn't sound like you had a statistically significant sample, for one thing. For another, you can't control whether there are other factors which might be affecting the result. For example, it's possible that your PocketPC gives off some other kind of signal that the wifi is switched on (barely audible noise or such). You're right that there has been quite a bit of scorn in the comments here, but there have also been a lot of people quoting research and facts in order to back up their dismissal of these claims.
Could we also ban strip lighting, humidity, cigarette smoke, bonfires, barbecues and strong perfume since they all trigger debilitating migraines for me?
Or... wait! Maybe I should just take the painkillers and preventative medication I'm prescribed and stop expecting the world to grind to a halt because I have medical problems? What a revolutionary idea.
If the Olympics were about the human spirit, my mother would be a gold medallist! Sadly, being disabled, she's unlikely to be so in reality. The prosthetics modify the human body, which is not acceptable in the Olympics, regardless of the reason for the modification or the worthiness of the person.
I think they probably had more... how shall I say it?... aesthetic reasons for that?:)
But certainly in competitions like swimming, where there's been controversy over different types of costume and the advantage they confer, it would probably make the competition more fair if we could overcome modern prudishness and insist that competitors are naked.
I think you're making a false leap of logic here - you're assuming that competing in the Olympics is a matter of equal rights. It isn't. It's about falling within particular physical categories and competing according to the requirements of those categories. For women and men to have different events is not sexist, it reflects the biological reality that normal physical ranges are different for the two sexes. Equally, excluding someone with these prostheses from competing against both those with natural limbs and those who use wheelchairs is not a matter of equal rights, but a reflection of the fact that his chosen method of dealing with his impairment puts him outside the requirements of each of those competition categories. It sucks for him, but I'm bemused as to why it is seen as "unfair" - except in the wider cosmic sense.
It's also a different situation. Surgery to correct deteriorating eyesight is no different from surgery to correct an injury to the leg, say. It can't take the person beyond the range of normal human possibility, but only improve them within biological limits. If the result of surgery were a prosthetic which provided zoom vision, then of course that person should not be allowed to compete with people with natural eyesight.
This is the kind of argument which makes the question difficult to debate. I sincerely doubt anyone is saying that this guy's having his legs amputated was a good thing, or a deliberate cheat, or anything of the sort. What they are saying is that, as an unintended consequence of his physical impairment, he has found himself in the situation of having mechanical aids which put him outside the scope of the Olympics' competition specifications and potentially give him an advantage which he could not have gained from his natural physique and training alone.
By translating that into "they say that having your legs amputated is an advantage, the insensitive clods", you skew the argument in the direction of disability rights, which is really not what it's about at all.
Absolutely. It might be inspirational to see a dyslexic child competing in a spelling bee with the aid of a spellchecker, but it's hardly the point of the competition. The point of the Olympics is to look at the extremes which the human body can achieve. Whether prosthetics are an advantage or a disadvantage is almost beside the point, which is that they go beyond the remit and the purpose of the competition.
I guess that if we're keen on getting more people into Linux, then some commonality across the major distros might be a good thing. On the other hand, it's not so great for the smaller distros if we get a kind of monolithic Linux which dominates the market and means that people are less willing to try something different.
Still, there'll always be enough of us who want to use things because they're different - and because they are better at doing exactly what we want rather than being more generic, suit-everyone tools.
I'm not sure I agree - a lot of the real heroes of any political dissent are those who don't make the news or get any recognition, but are willing to suffer lesser, incremental indignities that make their lives a misery.
I'm really sick of the aggressive and snide comments people like to make here when they think they're superior to someone else. If someone seems to be getting something wrong or not understanding it, the kind thing to do is to be patient and try to explain why you think they're wrong. If you can't do that, just ignore them. Being sarcastic, aggressive or unpleasant just makes the other person feel bad; why would you want to do that?
I'm perfectly aware that censorship is one way of enforcing a law. I was trying to explore the question of whether "government censorship" is a meaningful term when it's used as a catch-all for a whole range of activities, some of which are serious breaches of human rights, while others involve regulating harmful and illegal material. This comes back to the terminology used in the headline; to say that people "like internet censorship" when what you mean is that they are in favour of both government and ISP regulation of kiddie porn leaves you with a perfectly non-newsworthy statement that could be made of probably every single country in the world including yours and mine.
Is stopping a criminal activity censorship? If not, then accepting government control of child porn is not the same as accepting government censorship. If it is, then claiming that someone "supports government censorship" is meaningless because you're referring to people who agree with the illegality of printed/video/graphic kiddie porn in the same breath as those who would stop their political opponents from having a forum on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree with you. The problem (in my experience - and yes, this is anecdotal) is that very bright children who are not given enough help become bored, disruptive, and disaffected. They quickly see that all the attention is given to their less-academically-capable peers and, as a result, tend to develop a contempt for those who, they feel, are slowing down their education. Because they are bright, they are given less leeway and less praise than others, and are expected to behave like adults just because they can think like adults. They become scared to try anything other than academic pursuits, because their smartness makes them obvious targets for bullying and any hint of failure only exacerbates that.
Even if all you're worried about is the socialisation of young people, I would contend that there is as much good reason for spending time on the very able as on the less able. If you don't want to raise a bunch of arrogant, insecure, uncaring and dysfunctional adults, you need to give bright children attention, kindness, scope for intellectual growth at their own level, age-appropriate interaction from teachers, and a safe environment in which they are valued for their abilities and encouraged to value others for theirs.
Hard work, yes. This is why bright kids need the same resources devoted to them as any others.
Woah - I'd never imagined a /. user being illiterate... ;)
Interesting - in many ways, we're seeing a return to medieval ideas of productivity and "intellectual property". Payment comes from a wealthy patron, not a wider audience. Works are distributed to anyone who has the means to copy them. Anonymity is not uncommon, especially for more controversial writings. Music earns money in performance. Re-working other people's material is not plagiarism, but a means of honouring one's predecessors, learning one's craft and encouraging creativity. I think we could learn a lot from people like Chaucer and Dante.
Makes me think of Russell's paradox...
Well, of course, I'd tend to agree with you. But there are plenty of smokers who (regardless of the rights or wrongs of their having taken up smoking in the first place) find that going without a cigarette causes them significant stress, and so one could claim that they are benefited by being allowed to smoke. In contrast, wearing perfume that's so strong it causes a person sitting in the same carriage as you on the underground to become ill surely has no benefits whatsoever!
I once moderated an "insightful" as a "troll", so I commented in the thread in order to undo it! (That only works if you haven't made any other moderations that you want to keep, of course.) Anyway, what I mean to say is "no worries" :)
Yeah, you have a point. Saved by the Bell was really pretty heinous, wasn't it?
I think you're wrong about the books not being published in the 80s or before, though. Books about geeky kids were all over the place when I was growing up - look at Roald Dahl for lots of examples, or Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, Gillian Cross's The Demon Headmaster, and so on. You might be right, though, that the movie version of Harry would have been less geeky-looking. In fact, it's interesting to look at the movies' presentation of Hermione vs. that of the books - in the books, she has awful hair and is teased for having teeth like a rabbit; in the movies, she's really attractive. Geeky guys may be coming into vogue, but geeky girls still need to be supermodels in order to cut it!
Well, if you have more than the minimum of standards, you'll never get the girl or guy of your dreams with anything "alone".
The kind of person who's only looking for one thing (money, looks, status) is not the kind of person I, for one, think I could be happy with. Even a genius IQ will not make the perfect partner unless it's allied with a half-decent personality!
Yeah, you're right in so many ways. Yet I think there's something kinda nice about the fact that those of us who do geeky stuff now have marketing aimed at us. I like coding, and fixing my friends' computers, and taking things apart with screwdrivers. I also like being able to go to ThinkGeek or somewhere and buy t-shirts with slogans that are relevant to me, rather than the usual "I'm a princess: buy me chocolate" crap that proliferates on the high street. I like that the people who make Swiss Army Knives now have a special geek version that comes with torx bits. I like having a backpack with pictures of circuit boards on it, even if it did cost a week's wages.
Speaking for myself, the NBA players and rock stars don't hold much charm; billionaires are a different matter, but give me Sergei Brin over Prince William any day! Money is all well and good, but it won't keep your brain warm on a boring winter's evening...
Absolutely.
I was interested that TFA cited Harry Potter as a kind of geek icon. Either they didn't read the books, or they think that "geek" = "wearing eyeglasses fixed with sticky-tape". Harry Potter is always doing badly at his classes, is more interested in sports than books, and leaves all the really clever stuff to Hermione. In other words, he's pretty much the quintessential jock! If geek-kids want role models, they need to look somewhere very different.
Although it may seem obvious to you from your personal experience that this is a problem, there have been quite a few scientific studies cited in the comments above, most of which tend to disagree with you. Doing your own experiment on a couple of friends just doesn't cut it scientifically. It doesn't sound like you had a statistically significant sample, for one thing. For another, you can't control whether there are other factors which might be affecting the result. For example, it's possible that your PocketPC gives off some other kind of signal that the wifi is switched on (barely audible noise or such). You're right that there has been quite a bit of scorn in the comments here, but there have also been a lot of people quoting research and facts in order to back up their dismissal of these claims.
Could we also ban strip lighting, humidity, cigarette smoke, bonfires, barbecues and strong perfume since they all trigger debilitating migraines for me?
Or... wait! Maybe I should just take the painkillers and preventative medication I'm prescribed and stop expecting the world to grind to a halt because I have medical problems? What a revolutionary idea.
If the Olympics were about the human spirit, my mother would be a gold medallist! Sadly, being disabled, she's unlikely to be so in reality. The prosthetics modify the human body, which is not acceptable in the Olympics, regardless of the reason for the modification or the worthiness of the person.
I think they probably had more... how shall I say it?... aesthetic reasons for that? :)
But certainly in competitions like swimming, where there's been controversy over different types of costume and the advantage they confer, it would probably make the competition more fair if we could overcome modern prudishness and insist that competitors are naked.
Yes, that was what I was saying - adding prosthetics to the human body makes it about something other than what the body can naturally achieve.
I think you're making a false leap of logic here - you're assuming that competing in the Olympics is a matter of equal rights. It isn't. It's about falling within particular physical categories and competing according to the requirements of those categories. For women and men to have different events is not sexist, it reflects the biological reality that normal physical ranges are different for the two sexes. Equally, excluding someone with these prostheses from competing against both those with natural limbs and those who use wheelchairs is not a matter of equal rights, but a reflection of the fact that his chosen method of dealing with his impairment puts him outside the requirements of each of those competition categories. It sucks for him, but I'm bemused as to why it is seen as "unfair" - except in the wider cosmic sense.
It's also a different situation. Surgery to correct deteriorating eyesight is no different from surgery to correct an injury to the leg, say. It can't take the person beyond the range of normal human possibility, but only improve them within biological limits. If the result of surgery were a prosthetic which provided zoom vision, then of course that person should not be allowed to compete with people with natural eyesight.
This is the kind of argument which makes the question difficult to debate. I sincerely doubt anyone is saying that this guy's having his legs amputated was a good thing, or a deliberate cheat, or anything of the sort. What they are saying is that, as an unintended consequence of his physical impairment, he has found himself in the situation of having mechanical aids which put him outside the scope of the Olympics' competition specifications and potentially give him an advantage which he could not have gained from his natural physique and training alone.
By translating that into "they say that having your legs amputated is an advantage, the insensitive clods", you skew the argument in the direction of disability rights, which is really not what it's about at all.
Absolutely. It might be inspirational to see a dyslexic child competing in a spelling bee with the aid of a spellchecker, but it's hardly the point of the competition. The point of the Olympics is to look at the extremes which the human body can achieve. Whether prosthetics are an advantage or a disadvantage is almost beside the point, which is that they go beyond the remit and the purpose of the competition.
I'm sorry - I should clarify. I meant that it would be bad to see a single type of distro dominating the Linux market.
I guess that if we're keen on getting more people into Linux, then some commonality across the major distros might be a good thing. On the other hand, it's not so great for the smaller distros if we get a kind of monolithic Linux which dominates the market and means that people are less willing to try something different.
Still, there'll always be enough of us who want to use things because they're different - and because they are better at doing exactly what we want rather than being more generic, suit-everyone tools.
I'm not sure I agree - a lot of the real heroes of any political dissent are those who don't make the news or get any recognition, but are willing to suffer lesser, incremental indignities that make their lives a misery.
I'm really sick of the aggressive and snide comments people like to make here when they think they're superior to someone else. If someone seems to be getting something wrong or not understanding it, the kind thing to do is to be patient and try to explain why you think they're wrong. If you can't do that, just ignore them. Being sarcastic, aggressive or unpleasant just makes the other person feel bad; why would you want to do that?
I'm perfectly aware that censorship is one way of enforcing a law. I was trying to explore the question of whether "government censorship" is a meaningful term when it's used as a catch-all for a whole range of activities, some of which are serious breaches of human rights, while others involve regulating harmful and illegal material. This comes back to the terminology used in the headline; to say that people "like internet censorship" when what you mean is that they are in favour of both government and ISP regulation of kiddie porn leaves you with a perfectly non-newsworthy statement that could be made of probably every single country in the world including yours and mine.
Is stopping a criminal activity censorship? If not, then accepting government control of child porn is not the same as accepting government censorship. If it is, then claiming that someone "supports government censorship" is meaningless because you're referring to people who agree with the illegality of printed/video/graphic kiddie porn in the same breath as those who would stop their political opponents from having a forum on the internet.