This is a rhetorically powerful sentiment that makes older people feel better at the expense of younger ones.
The competition that surrounds getting into college for the "MTV Generation" is something of which previous generations have no conception. When you hear about students with thousands of service hours, dozens of AP classes, who are also multi-instrumentalists and multi-sport athletes all because they want a chance to go to the ivy league your paternalistic notion that "they all wanna be rap stars" seems ludicrous.
Is the system screwed up now, absolutely, but blaming the sense of entitlement of the kids seems disingenuous at best and debilitating at worst. There's an uproar over standardized tests because the tests are being put in a position to determine kids' futures, and tests are a bad way to determine those kinds of things.
I think you will see the furor over tests die down if we can get to a place as a society where we admit to ourselves that its OK to go to the local state university, and realize that which bubbles you fill in on the scantron sheet shouldn't determine your self worth. You'll have a way better chance of getting the "feel gooders" out of schools if you break the link between psychological wellbeing and test taking ability than by trying to toughen up the exams.
From reading the article (which is light on the details) it seems like they used nothing but batting average, at bats, and games played.
The problem is this doesn't control for variances in the quality of pitching. The chances of going that many games without running into a hot pitcher isn't accounted for.
Imagine you average a 75% chance of getting a hit in any individual game. If you face three average pitchers, your chances are (.75)^3 but if you face a good pitcher an average pitcher and a bad pitcher it might be (.5)(.75)(1.0) which gives a different probability, despite the same average number of hits.
In order to be realistic the calculation would need to account for the deviation from average in the ability of the pitchers (which would likely be higher 100 years ago because of fewer player and segregation, and now because of expansion, as compared to the 1950s)
What they don't report is how often there are long (but not record) streaks in their model, so there is no way of knowing how accurately it reproduces reality.
Theoretically after their time in the penal system a convict has paid their debt to society, and has been their slate wiped clean. That is not true now, nor has it ever been. Probation, three-strikes-and-your-out type legislation, and judges taking past criminal history into account when determining sentencing are all ways of saying your slate is never clean. When you molest a child, you forfeit your right to have that information kept private. Or, more accurately, there IS NO right to have information about sexual crimes kept private. You do have a right not to be murdered for it, which is why the psycho-father is going to jail.
Simplistic platitudes about mob mentalities and cultures of fear aside (they may be true, but aren't illuminating) what has changed since the previous generation that has led to this problem is the intersection of two trends. The decline in what you know about the people who live around you, and the rise of repositories for large stores of information provided by technology.
Put simply, 50 years ago people didn't need websites to find out who their neighbors were, they showed up with a casserole when they moved in and introduced themselves (folksiness exaggerated for effect). We simply know less about the people who live around us, and the internet has given us the ability to find out. It's not some cultural revolution of heightened fear, people in the 50s just feared different things than we do now.
That being said, I'll pose the counter-question that doesn't seem to be being addressed. Why don't I have the right to know the sex offenders who live around me? The reason megan's laws and similar legislation is passed is because when you stack up the privacy rights of a sex offender against the right of a parent to know who lives around them that is potentially dangerous, it's an easy decision for politicians to make. And an easy decision for me too.
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This is a rhetorically powerful sentiment that makes older people feel better at the expense of younger ones.
The competition that surrounds getting into college for the "MTV Generation" is something of which previous generations have no conception. When you hear about students with thousands of service hours, dozens of AP classes, who are also multi-instrumentalists and multi-sport athletes all because they want a chance to go to the ivy league your paternalistic notion that "they all wanna be rap stars" seems ludicrous.
Is the system screwed up now, absolutely, but blaming the sense of entitlement of the kids seems disingenuous at best and debilitating at worst. There's an uproar over standardized tests because the tests are being put in a position to determine kids' futures, and tests are a bad way to determine those kinds of things.
I think you will see the furor over tests die down if we can get to a place as a society where we admit to ourselves that its OK to go to the local state university, and realize that which bubbles you fill in on the scantron sheet shouldn't determine your self worth. You'll have a way better chance of getting the "feel gooders" out of schools if you break the link between psychological wellbeing and test taking ability than by trying to toughen up the exams.
From reading the article (which is light on the details) it seems like they used nothing but batting average, at bats, and games played.
The problem is this doesn't control for variances in the quality of pitching. The chances of going that many games without running into a hot pitcher isn't accounted for.
Imagine you average a 75% chance of getting a hit in any individual game. If you face three average pitchers, your chances are (.75)^3 but if you face a good pitcher an average pitcher and a bad pitcher it might be (.5)(.75)(1.0) which gives a different probability, despite the same average number of hits.
In order to be realistic the calculation would need to account for the deviation from average in the ability of the pitchers (which would likely be higher 100 years ago because of fewer player and segregation, and now because of expansion, as compared to the 1950s)
What they don't report is how often there are long (but not record) streaks in their model, so there is no way of knowing how accurately it reproduces reality.
Simplistic platitudes about mob mentalities and cultures of fear aside (they may be true, but aren't illuminating) what has changed since the previous generation that has led to this problem is the intersection of two trends. The decline in what you know about the people who live around you, and the rise of repositories for large stores of information provided by technology.
Put simply, 50 years ago people didn't need websites to find out who their neighbors were, they showed up with a casserole when they moved in and introduced themselves (folksiness exaggerated for effect). We simply know less about the people who live around us, and the internet has given us the ability to find out. It's not some cultural revolution of heightened fear, people in the 50s just feared different things than we do now.
That being said, I'll pose the counter-question that doesn't seem to be being addressed. Why don't I have the right to know the sex offenders who live around me? The reason megan's laws and similar legislation is passed is because when you stack up the privacy rights of a sex offender against the right of a parent to know who lives around them that is potentially dangerous, it's an easy decision for politicians to make. And an easy decision for me too.