Well going by this review, it looks like the working mother role-model has a definite positive effect on daughters, but there might be
a problem with "middle-class boys" for some reason:
Further studies have demonstrated that a mother's employment
status and occupation tends to be a good predictor of the outcome of
the working mother's daughter, since daughters tend to follow in
their mother's footsteps. Typically, working mothers held higher
educational aspirations for their children and furthermore, most
daughters tend to achieve higher grades in school. (Spitz 606) It is
also important to note that both male and female children acquire more
egalitarian sex role attitudes when both parents work. Boys with
working mothers showed better social and personal skills than boys of
non-working mothers. On a negative note, middle-class boys tend to do
worse in school when their mothers worked. (Shreve 118)
There are stats about how much time children has spent with their
parents (and/or family) and how maladjusted they are. I will not
point you to the stats, you may have to leave your computer (and
YOUR television) and go to you local institution for cultural
studies to get them.
Now that's a horrible thought. Are you saying that there's
oodles of data supporting the traditional American nuclear
family, and there are no conservative groups trumpeting it on the
web?
But generally they point to that the more time spent with
different adults, the less maladjusted the children gets.
Despite a sharp increase in the number of dual-career families,
children spend more time with their parents than children did
two decades ago, according to a U-M study.
The study, forthcoming in Demography, finds that children ages
3-12 in two parent families spent about 31 hours a week with
their mothers in 1997, compared to about 25 hours in 1981. The
amount of time spent with fathers increased from about 19 hours
to 23 hours a week.
I've lost data using a number of filesystems, but never on ext3. Not that they're bad (most cases were related to hardware malfunctions), but after a few times i moved to ext3 for archiving.
Great, dueling reliability anecdotes.
Anyway, I never said ext3 wasn't reliable. I'm not aware of having ever lost data to any filesystem bug, myself (disk hardware problems, or course, but not the filesystem).
I wouldn't bet on that. Doctors were dime a dozen in the old USSR, and this was just the time when things got worse in the medical professions. Chances are she has a diploma, but that's about it; she would not be allowed to practice in the USA without jumping through many hoops and basically retraining for the local realities. That's probably why she did not work as a doctor - whe was not eligible.
If you look at the article, however, you'll see that some of her defenders say it's absurd that she would've embezzled money from NamSys, because her family is so wealthy.
I RTFA: This just doesn't add up. Why did the children get sent to Russia?!?
Nina's mother was taking care of them -- whether she had legal custody or not, I don't know, but obviously, both parents were unavailable -- and she walked, taking the kids with her to Russia. Whether the kids wanted to go to Russian, I have no idea, and I doubt they were asked -- but if I remember right their grandmother said they were scared of the USA and so on.
One of the contrary theories is that Nina is still alive and well and hiding out in Russia, having embezzled a pile of cash from NameSys, she's setup Hans for her murder. The fact that her mother and kids are over there now helps support that theory.
We watched the show. Before, I thought he was probably innocent, and she thought he was probably guilty. After watching it, we've each changed our minds. (Although I think it more likely he paid someone to get rid of her.)
If he paid someone to get rid of her, than you wouldn't expect his own car was used in any way, and if so, a good half of the circumstantial evidence in the case just fades away -- e.g. the missing car seat, the supposed concealment of the car, all of that has nothing to do with the case if the car wasn't used to transport a body. And what difference does it make if they had an argument on the day of the disappearence if he's supposed to have hired someone to do it? That's "crime of passion" stuff, it's not part of any "premeditated hit" scenario.
Myself, I wouldn't want to guess what actually happened, but I have trouble seeing how anyone could believe that the case against Reiser passes the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard.
I'm afraid what really convicts Reiser in people's minds is that he appears to be a pretty weird guy, but weirdness isn't supposed to be a crime...
Another question: What are the merits of the Rieser file system?
Well, off the top of my head, the main distinguishing technical feature of Reiser FS is that it has optimizations for the case of many small files. Most of the other systems you might hear about (XCF and so on) sound to me like they're tanks intended for industrial use: they're great for something like big database servers where you'll often need to deal with huge files, but Reiser FS alone was intended to be able to scale down as well as up.
Note: the distinguishing feature of ext3 is that it is backwards compatible with ext2, and there isn't much reason to care about that now, if there ever was.
The thing that I really like about Reiser 3 as opposed to ext3, is that there's some relationship between the listed size of a directory and it's contents. In ext3 everything is rounded up to an even number of blocks, in Reiser 3, empty directories look empty.
As for Reiser 4, I haven't used it yet, but it sounds like there are a lot of interesting ideas there. As I understand it, there's a system for attaching metadata to files (like ID3 tags for mp3 files, except that you can use them on any file, and they're stored externally, not inside the file).
There's also some way of writing extensions to the filesystem that sounds cool...
Now I probably won't get updates for my ReiserFS....damnit.
Don't give up too quickly. Last I heard NameSys still had programmers working on both ReiserFS 3 and 4. And even if NameSys goes under, it's at least possible that some other people will step in and pick up the ball on ReiserFS 4, which despite the competition for "mindshare" in file systems, sounds like it's got some technically neat features...
(And I hate to kick Hans when he's down, but all accounts agree he's not the easiest guy in the world to get along with. ReiserFS 4 might gain some wider acceptance if there's someone at the helm who can talk to the kernel developers without pissing them off.)
And so he finds himself living in his car. Which, for him, seemed the logical thing to do under the circumstances." When Reiser was picked up for DNA testing, he was carrying his passport and nearly $9,000 in cash.
Yeah, right, he had to live out of his car. He's supposed to be a genius? I guess just in math: not a criminal one.
Their explanation is that this was money for some sort of business payments in Russia -- either, payroll or possibly, some sort of bribes (things are weird in Russia). I know teenagers have a hard time grasping things like this,
but $9000 isn't really a lot of money, however weird it is to carry it around with you.
You want a real example of a genius doing something stupid: what was he doing trying to do business in Russia? He doesn't speak the language: note that Nina was brought in as a translator (speaking of which, if she's supposed to be a hotshot doctor from a rich family, what's she doing working as a translator?). And trying to use a Russian dating service is mildly crazy in itself -- Russian mail-order bride scams abound on the internet at the moment, by the way, and I doubt it's much better doing face-to-face meetings on the ground.
The cops/prosecution decided Reiser must be guilty since he's really weird, despite no real evidence that a crime was committed at all. Having followed the case locally (from across the bay), I and many others were surprised the case even passed basic plausibility by the judge holding the preliminary hearing.
One of the Great Mysteries in the case is the behavior of the police.
Do they always try to convict people in the media when they
know that they don't have any evidence that's worth a damn? Isn't that
like, unethical, or something?
Partly for that reason. In my opinion, it's rare for a maladjusted child to come from a home where the father works, and the mother cares for the children, but it's common for maladjusted children to be latch key kids with both parents working 2 jobs.
Do you have stats to back that up, or are you living your life based on what you've seen on television?
Interviewing Hans Reiser about the Hans Resier murder, eh? Clever.
Actually, that's what they've got here that's new. Previously we haven't had Hans Reiser's side of the story, just the case the police were making against him in the media.
And I have to say, it's nice to see a story that more-or-less takes Reiser's side on this, everyone else seems anxious to convict him before the trial... including "Wired", slashdot, etc.
By the way: How would you feel if you were on a jury and found out later, after the trial was over, that the judge had decided not to worry your head with a minor little detail like the fact that one of the people in the story was a confessed serial killer?
Anyway, I'm typing this up on a machine running Reiser FS, which is a really nice file system, and it remains so irrespective of whatever did happen to Reiser's wife. I hope the guys at NameSys succeed in keeping the work going, with or without Hans.
Now I'm sorry I didn't submit any questions. The kind of things I was wondering
about were things like:
(1) Doesn't it bother you that you guys haven't had a new idea in years? The new "features" you've been adding are all imitations of other sites (blogs, tags, etc).
(2) Is slashdot an entertainment site, or is it supposed to fill an important social role? Do you focus on making it "useful" or on making it "fun"?
(2a) Any second thoughts on "anonymity" and letting anyone with an email address sign-up for an account?
Given the problems we have with political stuff on Wikipedia, this seems like the worst possible idea for a specialized wiki
You have a point, but in their defense at least they require contributors to
register. On the downside though, all you need to register is a working email
address -- that will screen out casual vandals, but not hired-guns, which are arguably the real problem in the political arena.
I've come to the conclusion that "anonymity" isn't really suitable for anything but a toy site [1]. If you can't tie the identities of the authors back to meatspace
ids you're just asking to be messed with by the Karl Roves of the world.
[1] Where this leaves slashdot is left as an exercise.
I personally like the Condorcet Criterion (a candidate who would defeat all other candidates individually when running in head-to-head contests should be the winner) as an important criterion to apply to voting systems.
As far as I can tell pairwise voting schemes scale really badly
with the number of candidates. Okay, so three guys runnining for president,
you need to vote three times (AB BC AC). Four guys running, it's six times (AB BC AC AD BD CD). A dozen candidates it's, what, 78 times?
And the whole purpose of these schemes is to encourage lots of candidates to run, isn't it?
Re:It's held back by useless metaphors.
on
Has Wikipedia Peaked?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Personally, I think Wikipedia suffers from being too limited in scope.
This is certainly one of the problems. For one thing, I suspect that instead of forbidding "original research", they should be providing an outlet for it... some
place to work on figuring things out, where the "encylopedia" is used as a summary of findings.
A related problem: they're parasitic on print media publications, but over time
those are guaranteed to become less important. What do you do if you want to
talk about a subject that doesn't exist in the print media world yet?
Trying to write for wikipedia is like having a lobotomy while
working in an office filled with squabbling lawyers shouting
at you.
If I'm going to take the trouble to write something, I'd
rather not have to deal with it being ripped apart by a bunch
of programmer's who think "neutrality" means it sounds like
Spock wrote it.
On the other hand, if you I need to know something about anime, mathematics,
or the current drift of the Republican spin machine, wikipedia is the first
place I check.
Show that, before the patent, others had identified the problem, but hadn't solved it.
And it would fail on this point. Phillip Greenspun, for example, says he had implemented something like before Amazon did.
The real trouble with this is: (1) it's obvious once you've got cookies... this
is the kind of thing cookies were invented for. Someone else put out a new piece of tech and Amazon slapped a patent on using the tech. (2) software patents are inherently a bleeding stupid idea, and the United States needs to get over this bullshit.
This all seems like a lot of work for slight gain (easier to log-in different places, easier for people who like my ranting about politics to find my tips on making leather harnesses...); but I'm glad it excites this fellow enough to work on it.
The question in my mind would be: can you start with this "friend" framework and build a "trust network" out of it...
If you take the idea seriously that the internet is going to become the new journalism, the
backbone of democracy and so on, then eventually we're going to need ways to screen out the hired sock-puppets.
... many of the most apparently
self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the
Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a
growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or
even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.
The notion that the wikipedia social process is getting more
sophisticated strikes me as silly -- Jimbo Wales, for one, is in
denial that there's any problem.
It's far more likely that there's a rise in "corporate Wikipedia
policies", which is to say, (1) "don't do anything stupid that's
going to look bad" and I would suspect (2) "leave the
internet spindoctoring up to the expert team that knows how to
hide it's tracks".
Or as I see MichaelR commented over at wired.com:
I foresee an upsurge in telecommuting. I foresee an increase in
Wikipedia Whitewashing from DHCP IP ranges hosted by Comcast, Verizon and other
large ISPs.
And I foresee that Jimbo Wales will buy the first explanation: "See! The problem has gone away!"
As much as it may astound us, even CIA agents are real people with real feelings and interests. (Well, to the extent that Buffy epsidoe music lyrics can count as a "real interest"...)
And more to the point, if you're in the business of faking being a "normal" member of the wikipedia community, making edits like this can be easily justified to the boss.
You would not, for example, expect a hired gun working the slashdot discussion forums to stick only to their employer's interests. In order to build up karma,
you need to play to the mob a bit, so you'll have the karma when you need it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well going by this review, it looks like the working mother role-model has a definite positive effect on daughters, but there might be a problem with "middle-class boys" for some reason:
Now that's a horrible thought. Are you saying that there's oodles of data supporting the traditional American nuclear family, and there are no conservative groups trumpeting it on the web?
Except that it appears that: Children spend more time with parents:
Great, dueling reliability anecdotes.
Anyway, I never said ext3 wasn't reliable. I'm not aware of having ever lost data to any filesystem bug, myself (disk hardware problems, or course, but not the filesystem).
If you look at the article, however, you'll see that some of her defenders say it's absurd that she would've embezzled money from NamSys, because her family is so wealthy.
Nina's mother was taking care of them -- whether she had legal custody or not, I don't know, but obviously, both parents were unavailable -- and she walked, taking the kids with her to Russia. Whether the kids wanted to go to Russian, I have no idea, and I doubt they were asked -- but if I remember right their grandmother said they were scared of the USA and so on.
One of the contrary theories is that Nina is still alive and well and hiding out in Russia, having embezzled a pile of cash from NameSys, she's setup Hans for her murder. The fact that her mother and kids are over there now helps support that theory.
If he paid someone to get rid of her, than you wouldn't expect his own car was used in any way, and if so, a good half of the circumstantial evidence in the case just fades away -- e.g. the missing car seat, the supposed concealment of the car, all of that has nothing to do with the case if the car wasn't used to transport a body. And what difference does it make if they had an argument on the day of the disappearence if he's supposed to have hired someone to do it? That's "crime of passion" stuff, it's not part of any "premeditated hit" scenario.
Myself, I wouldn't want to guess what actually happened, but I have trouble seeing how anyone could believe that the case against Reiser passes the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard.
I'm afraid what really convicts Reiser in people's minds is that he appears to be a pretty weird guy, but weirdness isn't supposed to be a crime...
Well, off the top of my head, the main distinguishing technical feature of Reiser FS is that it has optimizations for the case of many small files. Most of the other systems you might hear about (XCF and so on) sound to me like they're tanks intended for industrial use: they're great for something like big database servers where you'll often need to deal with huge files, but Reiser FS alone was intended to be able to scale down as well as up.
Note: the distinguishing feature of ext3 is that it is backwards compatible with ext2, and there isn't much reason to care about that now, if there ever was.
The thing that I really like about Reiser 3 as opposed to ext3, is that there's some relationship between the listed size of a directory and it's contents. In ext3 everything is rounded up to an even number of blocks, in Reiser 3, empty directories look empty.
As for Reiser 4, I haven't used it yet, but it sounds like there are a lot of interesting ideas there. As I understand it, there's a system for attaching metadata to files (like ID3 tags for mp3 files, except that you can use them on any file, and they're stored externally, not inside the file).
There's also some way of writing extensions to the filesystem that sounds cool...
Don't give up too quickly. Last I heard NameSys still had programmers working on both ReiserFS 3 and 4. And even if NameSys goes under, it's at least possible that some other people will step in and pick up the ball on ReiserFS 4, which despite the competition for "mindshare" in file systems, sounds like it's got some technically neat features...
(And I hate to kick Hans when he's down, but all accounts agree he's not the easiest guy in the world to get along with. ReiserFS 4 might gain some wider acceptance if there's someone at the helm who can talk to the kernel developers without pissing them off.)
Their explanation is that this was money for some sort of business payments in Russia -- either, payroll or possibly, some sort of bribes (things are weird in Russia). I know teenagers have a hard time grasping things like this, but $9000 isn't really a lot of money, however weird it is to carry it around with you.
You want a real example of a genius doing something stupid: what was he doing trying to do business in Russia? He doesn't speak the language: note that Nina was brought in as a translator (speaking of which, if she's supposed to be a hotshot doctor from a rich family, what's she doing working as a translator?). And trying to use a Russian dating service is mildly crazy in itself -- Russian mail-order bride scams abound on the internet at the moment, by the way, and I doubt it's much better doing face-to-face meetings on the ground.
One of the Great Mysteries in the case is the behavior of the police. Do they always try to convict people in the media when they know that they don't have any evidence that's worth a damn? Isn't that like, unethical, or something?
Do you have stats to back that up, or are you living your life based on what you've seen on television?
gowen wrote:
Actually, that's what they've got here that's new. Previously we haven't had Hans Reiser's side of the story, just the case the police were making against him in the media. And I have to say, it's nice to see a story that more-or-less takes Reiser's side on this, everyone else seems anxious to convict him before the trial... including "Wired", slashdot, etc.
By the way: How would you feel if you were on a jury and found out later, after the trial was over, that the judge had decided not to worry your head with a minor little detail like the fact that one of the people in the story was a confessed serial killer?
Anyway, I'm typing this up on a machine running Reiser FS, which is a really nice file system, and it remains so irrespective of whatever did happen to Reiser's wife. I hope the guys at NameSys succeed in keeping the work going, with or without Hans.
Or at least it's not supposed to be. I've heard tell of hacked versions of Eliza that were actually spyware.
(One version of this story attributes this nasty hack to the young Robert Morris, in the days before the internet worm.)
(1) Doesn't it bother you that you guys haven't had a new idea in years? The new "features" you've been adding are all imitations of other sites (blogs, tags, etc).
(2) Is slashdot an entertainment site, or is it supposed to fill an important social role? Do you focus on making it "useful" or on making it "fun"?
(2a) Any second thoughts on "anonymity" and letting anyone with an email address sign-up for an account?
You have a point, but in their defense at least they require contributors to register. On the downside though, all you need to register is a working email address -- that will screen out casual vandals, but not hired-guns, which are arguably the real problem in the political arena.
I've come to the conclusion that "anonymity" isn't really suitable for anything but a toy site [1]. If you can't tie the identities of the authors back to meatspace ids you're just asking to be messed with by the Karl Roves of the world.
[1] Where this leaves slashdot is left as an exercise.
But wikipedia has discovered neutrality!
Well, there you've got me.
As far as I can tell pairwise voting schemes scale really badly with the number of candidates. Okay, so three guys runnining for president, you need to vote three times (AB BC AC). Four guys running, it's six times (AB BC AC AD BD CD). A dozen candidates it's, what, 78 times?
And the whole purpose of these schemes is to encourage lots of candidates to run, isn't it?
This is certainly one of the problems. For one thing, I suspect that instead of forbidding "original research", they should be providing an outlet for it... some place to work on figuring things out, where the "encylopedia" is used as a summary of findings.
A related problem: they're parasitic on print media publications, but over time those are guaranteed to become less important. What do you do if you want to talk about a subject that doesn't exist in the print media world yet?
Trying to write for wikipedia is like having a lobotomy while working in an office filled with squabbling lawyers shouting at you.
If I'm going to take the trouble to write something, I'd rather not have to deal with it being ripped apart by a bunch of programmer's who think "neutrality" means it sounds like Spock wrote it.
On the other hand, if you I need to know something about anime, mathematics, or the current drift of the Republican spin machine, wikipedia is the first place I check.
And it would fail on this point. Phillip Greenspun, for example, says he had implemented something like before Amazon did.
The real trouble with this is: (1) it's obvious once you've got cookies... this is the kind of thing cookies were invented for. Someone else put out a new piece of tech and Amazon slapped a patent on using the tech. (2) software patents are inherently a bleeding stupid idea, and the United States needs to get over this bullshit.
The question in my mind would be: can you start with this "friend" framework and build a "trust network" out of it...
If you take the idea seriously that the internet is going to become the new journalism, the backbone of democracy and so on, then eventually we're going to need ways to screen out the hired sock-puppets.
Maybe "will survive at least into the third season".
The wired article remarks:
The notion that the wikipedia social process is getting more sophisticated strikes me as silly -- Jimbo Wales, for one, is in denial that there's any problem.It's far more likely that there's a rise in "corporate Wikipedia policies", which is to say, (1) "don't do anything stupid that's going to look bad" and I would suspect (2) "leave the internet spindoctoring up to the expert team that knows how to hide it's tracks".
Or as I see MichaelR commented over at wired.com:
And I foresee that Jimbo Wales will buy the first explanation: "See! The problem has gone away!"
And more to the point, if you're in the business of faking being a "normal" member of the wikipedia community, making edits like this can be easily justified to the boss.
You would not, for example, expect a hired gun working the slashdot discussion forums to stick only to their employer's interests. In order to build up karma, you need to play to the mob a bit, so you'll have the karma when you need it.
Now that he's retiring maybe he can spend even more time on troll accounts on slashdot.