OK, i'm on the ground here in PRC and the situation is a thousand times more complex than what you are thinking about. Your thoughts are, of course, conditioned by your environment and culture/ background. Try this on for size: where do D&G make there stuff? In China. Where? In Chinese factories that work insane hours every day producing goods by highly overworked, hungry, poor workers who drone away to get a paycheck. Ok, where do they produce the "pirates?" Oh damn it! the same factory, the same workers, the same day or week or month.
Is that piracy or the utilization of resources that are not being used at the moment. Yes, the company would prefer to make D&G stuff, it pays better, but they also cannot afford to produce for D&G at the price D&G wants unless they keep their workers going all the time and to do that they have to continue to produce, and what are they skilled at producing. I won't insult your intelligence by telling you the answer.
Who created the situation? You did, by demanding low prices on everything that you can buy. Your D&G goods are low price, they really are. They would be much more expensive if the cost of production went up by 30%. You want the real thing to be cheap, you demand that those prices stay "reasonable" and then complain that there are "pirates" that are cheaper still. Not fair.
Next, what is the difference between a "pirate good" and the "real thing"? Material, the base goods that are used to produce the item. The Chinese pirated iPhones, (yeah, made at Foxconn too) use cheaper this and cheaper that and everything is a little bit shabbier, but they look the same on day one if you don't scrutinize. Now I want you to have the fun of comparing the price of a Chinese pirate (say 100 dollars for an 1Phoney) and a "real" iPhone. and compare the dif in the cost of goods. hmmmmmmm. Now we know why "name brand makers" hate the pirates, are stinking rich and support the BSA numbers that are provided to make you believe that this piracy is hurting you, the consumer. It is not hurting you. The jobs are not being lost in the west.
Hopefully the problem of piracy has some extra dimensions for everyone now.
Which COULD be argued to be saying that the patent applications are most likely based on stolen ideas and other stolen IP. Is this possible? Yes, quite possible. The article describes my experince here attempting to mitigate student cheating and plagiarism, even for things that don't matter a rats's ass they cheat.
yeah, i get 60+kph on my electric bike here in China and people pass me all the time. BUT, the damn things are not safe at 50kph, i was eating lunch today watching two guys lying in front of a hair salon waiting for the police and a cab to take their statements and hustle them off to the hospital. they were hurting after a 2 e-bike crash at slow speeds. It is common to see smashed up e-bikes in intersections with a pool of blood around them.
But another shockingly large number just hasn't a clue. I went to the head of IT last month because someone asked for my help with an office computer problem and they were still running IE6. So i took the time to tell IT that even MS is begging people to upgrade for free to IE8 for security reasons. They listened and have updated everyone to IE 8, including their ghosted version of winXP which they use (with a real site license i must add) to "repair" computer problems: that's "nuke and replace" to you guys, the standard windows "repair" function here in China.
i am sorry but the Google add for this summary is for a segway touring company in CAlifornia and shows some boffins with helmets that have red fluff on top. I had to laugh, please god forgive me.
I ditto the p, Open Office didn't need to be the plaything of Oracle. I only hope that Virtual Box can escape as well (although I am currently getting my KVM skills up to the level of my VB skills because I don't think that VB has the depth of support that OOo has). MYSQL seems to have squeaked out already but what will we do with JAVA?
You would think that with all the video, all the TV, channels all the visual stuff flooding your eyes for your whole GD life you might have actually looked at what you see on the medical shows! It is not just hard to tell what something is, they change shape, color and texture with illness. A sick kidney don't look the same as a healthy one. Learning to judge that stuff is not just technical knowledge but experience, oversight by more skilled professionals who have seen much more that the beginning doctor. And still there are skills that are just individual.
I saw a discussion on an internet show yesterday where R Dawkins was watching an anatomist show the vagus nerve of a giraffe and how it connects to the laryngeal nerve ( which was really cool BTW) but I could never have been able to differentiate the nerve from the surrounding fascia. It takes skill and training and practical experience.
In Holland, (another place I sometimes live) the doctors are treated more like technicians. Their medical system is cheaper, but frankly it sucks. My father-in-law died from what could be defined as benign neglect. Yes he was elderly, but it was just too much work to care about him and really try to keep him alive through the illness that killed him. Yes, in the US we could have spent the money to give him a little more time with his grandkid, who was barely 2 when he passed. In Holland we couldn't do it, they just let him go.
Depends. I make barely 25,000 a year but do what I care about. I could move next door and triple it but not get to do what I want, so I stay here. I have a wife, two children still in the house, one in university right now and one (who is in a private school right now) will go to uni next year. My wife is an artist who is back in school this year for advanced training in acupuncture, which i am paying for.
How do I do it? Priorities set in a reasonable way. Expectations = zero. Take what comes and communicate with people about what you need and what you have. Don't get sucked in to the idea that you are "poor" or that you "need more." That is the consumer culture. That is what "they" want: "Oh I must have a new TV, a new computer, a new phone, new clothes, try this new food, eat at shitdonald's" everything that the TV, radio and advertisers tells you is a lie.
My oldest son has succeeded more than I. He has no car, no electricity, no real job, lives in a tiny house with 6 kids and a wonderful wife. They spend their days together, growing and raising food, helping friends for free and living, just living.
My son has much less than I do and is happier than I am, the idiots who made this study made it based on a cultural norm that you "must be a consumer to be happy." Reject that norm and the whiole fabric of the study and this society fall to pieces.
While my prior career was very different from most of you, as is my current vocation, the reason I "retired" before was the rise of the college trained idiots. That industry (construction) had an old and reliable model: you start from scratch, you learn through experience, you are moved up based on success and ability. You generally succeed well enough to go over your peak and you slack off, retire or crash. Normal, old time business.
But I hit the wall in the 80's. After 20+ years in the business in almost all the various management positions I was stuck at project manager. Why? There was no one moving up from below. The people under me didn't have the skills to take my job and let me move up. People with motivation and inherent thinking skills were staying in college, not going into an industry that required years of OJT to succeed. Four years, 6 years and they could get a bigger paycheck than someone with 15 years of real work. (don't assume that I am fussing about college not being real work, I have a master's now and i did work for --most-- of it.)
But in the early nineties after fighting hard to move up the next step I was being surpassed by people with no understanding of the industry, no connection to the product and no desire to have one. It was hot outside the air conditioning and they didn't want to go. After watching two projects get gutted (unhappy owner, unhappy architect, unhappy me, happy asshat who showed a profit on his balance sheet) I had had enough and retired. I miss some parts of that life, but I don't want to be a part of it any more. Sad, very sad because quality, the very essence of why I did it, has disappeared.
When I got my phone here (Suzhou, Jiangsu, PR China) they asked for my passport but unfortunately I didn't have it. So the girl behind the counter used her name and ID card for the phone. Too bad for her I hate that particular branch store They signed me up for the super-premium plan and then made it hateful to go back to the super cheapie plan.
Here in China I routinely clean any USB that comes into my hands (linux duh, fedora 13,) It is not unusual to find 3,4 or 5 different viruses, aberrant autorun files and rootkit loaders on USB sticks. They are vicious too. Even the classroom computers which are not supposed to have persistence are occasionally breached and I have to use a portable virus/malware scanner to find it. The installed versions of Kaspersky cannot update and so fall quickly prey to the constantly evolving malware ecosystem, but the botnet programs can. Sad, so sad, that the security guys can't get past their own security but the bad guys can.
It has been a long term dream of mine to create a statue that includes a 3 meter dish with the back half of a VW beetle. You get the picture I am sure, I don't care who does it, I just have held that image in my heads for more than 30 years. You have the chance to create art! Kitsch art, but art.
What tests measure is ability to succeed at taking tests. I am a good case in point. IQ about average (100+ a smidgen) but my test scores show me as being in the top ten percent. Am I a good student, mmmm, not really great but slightly above average. But I rock at taking tests. I have a built-in ability to quickly and accurately guess/discern correct answers in MGQ (multiple guess questions) and I can quickly finish a larger percentage of questions than other, more intelligent/schooled people. Why? I dunno. I just can.
As a teacher I often see the opposite: students that totally suck at test taking. they are as average as I am but fail miserably, no matter how hard they study (but then I work in tertiary ed so they have mostly given up by the time they get to me) Dp they have "other" problems? Yes, but forcing them to be judged by test scores is stupid. The next , more ridiculous level is judging their teachers based on their test scores. The teachers who (might have) scarred the poor bastards are in their past. The parents who might still be scarring them are not being judged. The system that is screwing up is being promoted as fair and just and "helping to improve test scores."
Pardon me for calling bullshit on this. I am teaching at an institution that focuses entirely on forcing students to take and pass tests in English (the students 3rd or 4th language and one that has been horribly mangled for them by incompetent non-skilled teachers since early years). The students are so brainwashed with this shit that they believe that the tests can tell their English ability. They can't. The teachers are restrained by the system that requires them to teach the test (not English) in English even though the students cannot understand enough English to follow the class. then the Ss have to pass a test that is crucial to their job application or to moving further in the ed system. Everyone is screwed.
The solution here is to set passing grades at 45% or lower (as a C-). Think about it, in a test that uses 4 MG answers for each question, random guessing should give something like 25%. So these kids don't have much of a bar to cross, and still there is a 10% failure rate.
So, what I am ranting about is that we need to teach the content, not the test. Stop giving tests that are considered "standards" and stop using test data to judge teachers. Return to a system where parents are welcome in the classroom and the school and the parents can not only act to support discipline with their presence but to understand the teacher and make an INFORMED judgment about their connection to the students. How hard would it be for businesses to give worker drones a day off every semester to visit their children's school and participate in helping the teacher, getting to know the teacher and the classroom and to understand what the classrooms and teachers and students actually need. Not the scripted one day fits all PT conference but a random day for parents to just visit and help the teacher or the school, to be around.
Yes I can hear the screams abut how it wouldn't work, but the reasons given are always to do with legal BS. We are crippling our children to feed lawyers?
Sorry, I'm too passionate about education, I apologize.
I don't know what they teach in the US now for math, but my youngest son (7 yrs old) just finished first grade here in Suzhou, PR China. He was in the top 3 students in his class in his FINAL EXAM in math in July. (Are the bells going off in your head?)
What they were tested on: addition of single, double and triple digit real numbers with single, double and triple digit reals.
Subtraction of single and double digit reals with single and double reals
Multiplication of single digit reals with double digit reals
Mental math: (speed math based on the ability to do simple arithmetic in your head, not through memorization)
I just asked him to do the above mentioned problem and he did it in about 3 or 4 seconds, mentally adding the numbers on the left subtracting the 2 and writing in the 7. He asked me why I wanted him to do it and I explained the article and he laughed and said "That's so easy!" He already is solving for x in his school as part of the math teaching.
We are planning to come back to the US next year and I am worried, frankly. His math is, apparently, too high, he speaks three languages fluently and has experience living in two foreign countries. WTH am I going to do with him?
I'm from the state of Virginia, which is also very energy poor and relies entirely on imported energy. I am guessing most of you from the US would have to say the same thing: Wake up kids! What we are doing is raping our grandkids future so that we can drive our car to the mailbox, get 40 MPG and think we are "saving" energy. Let's get real, what Portugal has done might not be a perfect model for Virginia or any other US state, but it might provide some insight into how we could begin to build a future that makes sense.
Making sense means that you accept personal responsibility for the energy you use. That you are willing to pay the real cost of your energy (not the BS subsidized cost that you accept as your "right") which is folded into the subsidization of everything you buy (through oil subsidies for diesel and gasoline transport, government handouts of mineral and drilling rights on our national land and other hidden subsidies that allow business to make "profits" that kick back into campaign funds for politicians.
Yes you all already know all this but you continue to uphold the model of consumer entitlement that says that you deserve cheap prices on goods so that the economy will remain "strong." You still believe that you deserve to have your thermostat on 80F in the winter and 75F in the summer so that you can be "comfortable." You Must have your own car, Must have dishwashers, refrigerators, 5 lights turned on in each room while you sit up until midnight watching your massive TV and playing your game machine simultaneously. Understand the truth, you are the problem, you are the solution.
It's really easy to make fun of those of us trying to reduce consumption. You can vomit statistics produced by the companies that rely on you to continue to buy their crap. While you know the answers, you talk the talk, but Portugal is trying to walk the walk. They are not the only European country moving this way. Holland gives consumers credits for using renewable energy so that the energy cost playing field is leveled NOW, when we need it. Germany is planning to invest massively in solar. Spain has Portugal right next door and the Spanish people have many times the population and land area but they also want to move totally into renewables.
We in the US are miles behind because we the people are miles behind. Let's get moving now and quit carping about how "we can't do THAT": Fine, we can't, what the f*** are you doing instead?
China here: we are subject to constant "hiccups" in gmail and google. This has been a fact of life and often it has to do with physical problems as well as deliberate blockage.
What I mean is that google goes down sometimes and that affects us here, the cables sometimes create disruptions and that causes problems here, the firewall is not exactly a foolproof thing (or... well, each provider blocks things as well as the firewall, sometimes it is the ISP office that makes decisions. At work if one person googles something inappropriate we all lose google for 15 minutes while the connection gets reset) and sometimes blocks stupid stuff and then unblocks it for no apparent reason. All these things are constant. We hate it but have little choice but accepting it. Our Chinese co-workers are embarrassed but confused about why you would want to go to a site like that anyway.
Because I live outside the US and am a product of both the US university system (UVA, College, 2000) and the Australian University system (USQ, 2007) I can tell you a few things that make the comparison more clear.
Australian Universities follow the British system quite strictly. British people that I was with when I did the Au Master's program told me repeatedly that this was a "standard" (as in not Oxford and not storefront) university offering we were getting. It was, frankly, lame. Most of the work that I did for it I had already done when i was working on my BA- linguistics at UVA. The professors graded harshly, mostly based on whether I was following their personal version of APA rather than on content. When I did run into content problems it was because I had accessed things that they disagreed with and assumed that I couldn't "really understand" because I was a "student". They got me initially pissed off when they insisted that I had to take their "Intro to Linguistics" when I had a BA in linguistics. They insisted that the breadth and depth of the masters course was much more than anything I would have done at the BA level. Then they required that I buy a textbook that I already owned (just not the Aussie version, ) and had used to TEACH A HIGH SCHOOL CLASS! Sorry, i'm still pissed about it.
Now I teach in universities here in Asia. Nowhere have I seen anything that approaches what is available in the US, even in second tier unies in the US. I have worked with some great students, but they just don't get anything like the value from their education that is available to US students.
So why the dissonance here? 1) (this is Asian style) There are asshole professors everywhere. But there are also some absolutely dropdead fantastic professors as well. And they are all people: I had a professor at UVA who was a hardcore classical linguist and a bit of a linguistic troglodyte, but he can teach, his passion for his subject, his control of material and his ability to help students get those really tricky concepts in place where they can live with you forever is amazing. While I know lots of good teachers here, I have yet to meet anyone of his caliber. Oh, Its not fair because I can think of quite a few others at UVA that were equally fantastic, and more modern, too.
2) no matter how wonderful the professor is the students are the other half of the equation. Last year I worked at Soochow University and it was the most painful job I have ever had. The students were paying large sums and expected to pass the course no matter their grade (they did, no fault of mine) and no matter whether they come to class. They were hateful, mean and rude. Now I have students that come to class and struggle to succeed. All equally skilled to begin with but with different motivations.
3) University environment determines much of this. Asian universities are made for only traditionally aged students. Nobody goes back, so you have this homogeneous student body that lives in an academic island. While UVA was certainly an academic island, the effect here is that students are completely pampered, watched, controlled, they have 40 hours of class a week (yeah!) and learn almost nothing from it. They have a single textbook per class that barely covers introductory material. Only when they get to graduate level do they actually have anything approaching real university expectations put on them, think of undergrad as grade13-16 and graduate as beginning your sophomore year.
OK, this is getting too long which i am morally opposed to. The US provides better ed for most students, it is the reality of the world, whether it can get better, duh, it can
15-20 years ago (fuzzy memories, i'm old) a good friend who was already both a rocket scientist AND a nuclear engineer for a big company realized that what he was doing was dead and he had to move on, again. So he started to learn C and switched over to the "new" division where the big company was writing programs about god knows what.
So the parent here is correct, but don't go off whining in your beer, my buddy did it, twice last I know, I "retired" when I was 40 and went back to uni to build a completely different skill set. That is just the way the world works. Frankly, I'm so glad I'm not stuck in the dead end my old "fast-paced, upwardly mobile" job is today.
I know I am too old to get in to this one, but I do have a seven year old... My teenager is going to a Canadian school where they have this grading system: A = 85-100 B= 70-85 C+= 65-70 C= 60-65 C-=55-60 F 55
There is some A and B + and - too, but I forget the whole thing. Compare to my antediluvian system: A= 90-100 B=80-90 C=70-80 D=60-70 F 60
does somebody want to do an analysis of what the change in grading does to GPA? Not to mention the weird warp with the A covering 15 points and C being almost the equivalent of D while B is C and a little B? And now let us discuss how C, which used to mean "average" now means that you have learned only slightly more than half the required (tested) information while B only means 3/4 of the (I suppose I am going out on a limb to say) IMPORTANT stuff they are teaching in school.
Let me slap some Canadian face here: my son is in first grade in the same city, but he goes to a Chinese school. (Let me make this clear: we live in China, my son goes to a Chinese national school while my daughter goes to an overseas British Columbian/ Canadian school which costs 8 times as much) My son scored 98% on his first grade final math exam (yeah, yeah that part is insane) and was only the third best in the class. He also scored 93% on his Chinese language exam (PinYin and characters, reading and writing) and was the second lowest in his class. 100% in English but that doesn't count.
My daughter had 3 A's and 2B's on her final report card this spring and was on the "Honor roll" (Whale done!!! --gag, gag) but the numbers make no sense. Does she know anything useful or not? Is her education valuable or not, and the same for my son. What do the numbers connect to in terms of real world information control?
When I came back to China 3 years ago the biggest change that I saw was the use of electric motorbikes. The first month almost got me run over a bunch of times cause they were so fast and quiet. Either one alone would have been OK, but while they are not as fast as a car they are faster than most push-bikes so they arrive sooner and you have no sound to gauge approach. Nowadays I drive one maniacally (just like everyone else) and have the automatic responses to them that you need here to survive.
I really ought to stay out of this, but.... I live in a country where we have cell service in about 95-98% of the country. There are a few pockets where there are almost no people and therefore almost no service. The service is provided by three different carriers who, by government decree, must share users across the networks. In other words I get picked up by the strongest tower, for no extra charge, no matter where in the country I am. This seems like such a no-brainer to me that i was totally shocked when I came back to the US last summer with my cheap ass GSM phone, had only two choices of carrier and they did not play together.
I went to the beach with some friends and some people had a signal and others didn't. I did, full power, my bud didn't:: zero, zip. Hey, US people, wake the f*** up and kick some stupid a** because you are being ripped off by these companies.
Now, let's talk about text messages. WTF, i automatically get text messaging for about.... let me convert currency... say. $.0024 per message. Yeah, about 4 for a penny. That is close to the real cost, but our carriers manage to make a profit out of that. When I was in the US the cost was insane, over the top and I had (drumroll please) AT&T, cause I had only two choices for my GSM phone (that works everywhere in the world except with most carriers in the US unless you want a special plan that you pay extra for (maybe, i forget, it was just too stupidly expensive for limited areas, no SMS for free, etc.etc.) sorry friends and family but you are totally getting ripped.
Is there some way for you guys to get your "free enterprise" heads out of your a***** and realize that "free" means that these companies are free to rip you off and you have no freedom to do anything except not have a service. The market is not creating a fair and even playing field, you are being trodden underfoot and those of you who claim to be libertarian are just suckers for a warped view of how "it would be nice if things worked this way but they don't."
Final kick in the groin. The country where I live is about as libertarian as you can get. If you have a business you have the support of the government to stay out of your business except if they get hassled by other governments about your "business activities." You pay very little in tax (there is a 7%VAT) , if anything. Even workers here are better off, a small labor unrest a few months ago has resulted in huge pay raises for workers who are a valued resource now. You have tremendous freedom to do anything involving making money: which, like it or not, is the libertarian objective. This place is a money making machine that really works well for people who live here and don't cause trouble. Even if you do cause trouble, if you are successful in business you get little hassle. Where am I? PR China.
Sorry, you are just another shill for W7. I have a houseful of newbs, from age 48 to 7. We use Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Fedora. My wife (age 48) has trouble using a mouse, just not a close enough connection to make sense to her so she is only comfortable with a trackpad. She will tell you that you are a fool to use anything other than Ubuntu: and she knows since she has used windows xp, os 9, and osX. My older daughter is at university in the US and was suckered by her boyfriend into Win 7. Her computer barely works and she has begged me to replace it with ubuntu. Her 17 year old sister here in China japes at her and uses Kubuntu, although she doesn't even try to use all the config functions, she doesn't want to. Sure she lusts after an iBook, but only because her stylish friends have them. This spring however she has noticed that their iBooks are looking a little tatty and shabby while her rig is still sleek and stylish, to her anyway.
Finally, my 7 year old has been here at work with me in the mornings all week. He switches with ease between Fedora, linux Mint (Dr Ting over in IT, one of my son's buddies), Windows xp and Win7, depending on exactly whose computer it is. He can show people how to do things on IE, Firefox or even Epiphany or Midori. He was just setting up a QQ account yesterday afternoon (IM and email here in China, shabby trash) with some help from another teacher. He is comfortable helping and being helped and with teaching the teachers that computers are just here to do a job, not to be a statement.
Grammar and language Nazi here, the poster above is correct about the use of the indefinite article and Letters. The difficulty comes with the use with the "h" as the initial letter in a word such as the previous poster who says "an" historical. This is still disputed by the old school fools who learned a written standard for something that governs a spoken standard. In other words, if the "h" is written then its sound value need not be considered and you can make a rule that holds across all situations. If the "h" is spoken then you have the difficulty of two variant pronunciations (each calling a different article-- "a" or "an") that can appear with the same spelling. This possibility mind-fucks (this is a classical linguistics term first used by Ferdinand de Saussure in his famous thirteenth introductory lecture on semiotics) the prescriptionists who insist that all rules must apply equally and completely in all situations. All other situations create the kind of linguistic diversity up with which they will not put.
I was at a party the other night trying to avoid getting close to an overweight girl. Living in Asia has the disadvantage of making me really uncomfortable around overweight people. But really, a Thai family of five weighs the same as that girl, she needed to plant her own damn forest to cover the carbon offset, and then she was bitching about being outside cause there was no air-con. Oh dear, i feel a rant coming on...bye
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OK, i'm on the ground here in PRC and the situation is a thousand times more complex than what you are thinking about. Your thoughts are, of course, conditioned by your environment and culture/ background. Try this on for size: where do D&G make there stuff? In China. Where? In Chinese factories that work insane hours every day producing goods by highly overworked, hungry, poor workers who drone away to get a paycheck. Ok, where do they produce the "pirates?" Oh damn it! the same factory, the same workers, the same day or week or month.
Is that piracy or the utilization of resources that are not being used at the moment. Yes, the company would prefer to make D&G stuff, it pays better, but they also cannot afford to produce for D&G at the price D&G wants unless they keep their workers going all the time and to do that they have to continue to produce, and what are they skilled at producing. I won't insult your intelligence by telling you the answer.
Who created the situation? You did, by demanding low prices on everything that you can buy. Your D&G goods are low price, they really are. They would be much more expensive if the cost of production went up by 30%. You want the real thing to be cheap, you demand that those prices stay "reasonable" and then complain that there are "pirates" that are cheaper still. Not fair.
Next, what is the difference between a "pirate good" and the "real thing"? Material, the base goods that are used to produce the item. The Chinese pirated iPhones, (yeah, made at Foxconn too) use cheaper this and cheaper that and everything is a little bit shabbier, but they look the same on day one if you don't scrutinize. Now I want you to have the fun of comparing the price of a Chinese pirate (say 100 dollars for an 1Phoney) and a "real" iPhone. and compare the dif in the cost of goods. hmmmmmmm. Now we know why "name brand makers" hate the pirates, are stinking rich and support the BSA numbers that are provided to make you believe that this piracy is hurting you, the consumer. It is not hurting you. The jobs are not being lost in the west.
Hopefully the problem of piracy has some extra dimensions for everyone now.
Check out this New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/world/asia/07fraud.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th
Which COULD be argued to be saying that the patent applications are most likely based on stolen ideas and other stolen IP. Is this possible? Yes, quite possible. The article describes my experince here attempting to mitigate student cheating and plagiarism, even for things that don't matter a rats's ass they cheat.
yeah, i get 60+kph on my electric bike here in China and people pass me all the time. BUT, the damn things are not safe at 50kph, i was eating lunch today watching two guys lying in front of a hair salon waiting for the police and a cab to take their statements and hustle them off to the hospital. they were hurting after a 2 e-bike crash at slow speeds. It is common to see smashed up e-bikes in intersections with a pool of blood around them.
But another shockingly large number just hasn't a clue. I went to the head of IT last month because someone asked for my help with an office computer problem and they were still running IE6. So i took the time to tell IT that even MS is begging people to upgrade for free to IE8 for security reasons. They listened and have updated everyone to IE 8, including their ghosted version of winXP which they use (with a real site license i must add) to "repair" computer problems: that's "nuke and replace" to you guys, the standard windows "repair" function here in China.
i am sorry but the Google add for this summary is for a segway touring company in CAlifornia and shows some boffins with helmets that have red fluff on top. I had to laugh, please god forgive me.
I ditto the p, Open Office didn't need to be the plaything of Oracle. I only hope that Virtual Box can escape as well (although I am currently getting my KVM skills up to the level of my VB skills because I don't think that VB has the depth of support that OOo has). MYSQL seems to have squeaked out already but what will we do with JAVA?
Kent State University, nuff said
You would think that with all the video, all the TV, channels all the visual stuff flooding your eyes for your whole GD life you might have actually looked at what you see on the medical shows! It is not just hard to tell what something is, they change shape, color and texture with illness. A sick kidney don't look the same as a healthy one. Learning to judge that stuff is not just technical knowledge but experience, oversight by more skilled professionals who have seen much more that the beginning doctor. And still there are skills that are just individual.
I saw a discussion on an internet show yesterday where R Dawkins was watching an anatomist show the vagus nerve of a giraffe and how it connects to the laryngeal nerve ( which was really cool BTW) but I could never have been able to differentiate the nerve from the surrounding fascia. It takes skill and training and practical experience.
In Holland, (another place I sometimes live) the doctors are treated more like technicians. Their medical system is cheaper, but frankly it sucks. My father-in-law died from what could be defined as benign neglect. Yes he was elderly, but it was just too much work to care about him and really try to keep him alive through the illness that killed him. Yes, in the US we could have spent the money to give him a little more time with his grandkid, who was barely 2 when he passed. In Holland we couldn't do it, they just let him go.
Depends.
I make barely 25,000 a year but do what I care about. I could move next door and triple it but not get to do what I want, so I stay here. I have a wife, two children still in the house, one in university right now and one (who is in a private school right now) will go to uni next year. My wife is an artist who is back in school this year for advanced training in acupuncture, which i am paying for.
How do I do it? Priorities set in a reasonable way. Expectations = zero. Take what comes and communicate with people about what you need and what you have. Don't get sucked in to the idea that you are "poor" or that you "need more." That is the consumer culture. That is what "they" want: "Oh I must have a new TV, a new computer, a new phone, new clothes, try this new food, eat at shitdonald's" everything that the TV, radio and advertisers tells you is a lie.
My oldest son has succeeded more than I. He has no car, no electricity, no real job, lives in a tiny house with 6 kids and a wonderful wife. They spend their days together, growing and raising food, helping friends for free and living, just living.
My son has much less than I do and is happier than I am, the idiots who made this study made it based on a cultural norm that you "must be a consumer to be happy." Reject that norm and the whiole fabric of the study and this society fall to pieces.
While my prior career was very different from most of you, as is my current vocation, the reason I "retired" before was the rise of the college trained idiots. That industry (construction) had an old and reliable model: you start from scratch, you learn through experience, you are moved up based on success and ability. You generally succeed well enough to go over your peak and you slack off, retire or crash. Normal, old time business.
But I hit the wall in the 80's. After 20+ years in the business in almost all the various management positions I was stuck at project manager. Why? There was no one moving up from below. The people under me didn't have the skills to take my job and let me move up. People with motivation and inherent thinking skills were staying in college, not going into an industry that required years of OJT to succeed. Four years, 6 years and they could get a bigger paycheck than someone with 15 years of real work. (don't assume that I am fussing about college not being real work, I have a master's now and i did work for --most-- of it.)
But in the early nineties after fighting hard to move up the next step I was being surpassed by people with no understanding of the industry, no connection to the product and no desire to have one. It was hot outside the air conditioning and they didn't want to go. After watching two projects get gutted (unhappy owner, unhappy architect, unhappy me, happy asshat who showed a profit on his balance sheet) I had had enough and retired. I miss some parts of that life, but I don't want to be a part of it any more. Sad, very sad because quality, the very essence of why I did it, has disappeared.
When I got my phone here (Suzhou, Jiangsu, PR China) they asked for my passport but unfortunately I didn't have it. So the girl behind the counter used her name and ID card for the phone. Too bad for her I hate that particular branch store They signed me up for the super-premium plan and then made it hateful to go back to the super cheapie plan.
Here in China I routinely clean any USB that comes into my hands (linux duh, fedora 13,) It is not unusual to find 3 ,4 or 5 different viruses, aberrant autorun files and rootkit loaders on USB sticks. They are vicious too. Even the classroom computers which are not supposed to have persistence are occasionally breached and I have to use a portable virus/malware scanner to find it. The installed versions of Kaspersky cannot update and so fall quickly prey to the constantly evolving malware ecosystem, but the botnet programs can. Sad, so sad, that the security guys can't get past their own security but the bad guys can.
It has been a long term dream of mine to create a statue that includes a 3 meter dish with the back half of a VW beetle. You get the picture I am sure, I don't care who does it, I just have held that image in my heads for more than 30 years. You have the chance to create art! Kitsch art, but art.
What tests measure is ability to succeed at taking tests. I am a good case in point. IQ about average (100+ a smidgen) but my test scores show me as being in the top ten percent. Am I a good student, mmmm, not really great but slightly above average. But I rock at taking tests. I have a built-in ability to quickly and accurately guess/discern correct answers in MGQ (multiple guess questions) and I can quickly finish a larger percentage of questions than other, more intelligent/schooled people. Why? I dunno. I just can.
As a teacher I often see the opposite: students that totally suck at test taking. they are as average as I am but fail miserably, no matter how hard they study (but then I work in tertiary ed so they have mostly given up by the time they get to me) Dp they have "other" problems? Yes, but forcing them to be judged by test scores is stupid. The next , more ridiculous level is judging their teachers based on their test scores. The teachers who (might have) scarred the poor bastards are in their past. The parents who might still be scarring them are not being judged. The system that is screwing up is being promoted as fair and just and "helping to improve test scores."
Pardon me for calling bullshit on this. I am teaching at an institution that focuses entirely on forcing students to take and pass tests in English (the students 3rd or 4th language and one that has been horribly mangled for them by incompetent non-skilled teachers since early years). The students are so brainwashed with this shit that they believe that the tests can tell their English ability. They can't. The teachers are restrained by the system that requires them to teach the test (not English) in English even though the students cannot understand enough English to follow the class. then the Ss have to pass a test that is crucial to their job application or to moving further in the ed system. Everyone is screwed.
The solution here is to set passing grades at 45% or lower (as a C-). Think about it, in a test that uses 4 MG answers for each question, random guessing should give something like 25%. So these kids don't have much of a bar to cross, and still there is a 10% failure rate.
So, what I am ranting about is that we need to teach the content, not the test. Stop giving tests that are considered "standards" and stop using test data to judge teachers. Return to a system where parents are welcome in the classroom and the school and the parents can not only act to support discipline with their presence but to understand the teacher and make an INFORMED judgment about their connection to the students. How hard would it be for businesses to give worker drones a day off every semester to visit their children's school and participate in helping the teacher, getting to know the teacher and the classroom and to understand what the classrooms and teachers and students actually need. Not the scripted one day fits all PT conference but a random day for parents to just visit and help the teacher or the school, to be around.
Yes I can hear the screams abut how it wouldn't work, but the reasons given are always to do with legal BS. We are crippling our children to feed lawyers?
Sorry, I'm too passionate about education, I apologize.
I don't know what they teach in the US now for math, but my youngest son (7 yrs old) just finished first grade here in Suzhou, PR China. He was in the top 3 students in his class in his FINAL EXAM in math in July. (Are the bells going off in your head?)
What they were tested on:
addition of single, double and triple digit real numbers with single, double and triple digit reals.
Subtraction of single and double digit reals with single and double reals
Multiplication of single digit reals with double digit reals
Mental math: (speed math based on the ability to do simple arithmetic in your head, not through memorization)
I just asked him to do the above mentioned problem and he did it in about 3 or 4 seconds, mentally adding the numbers on the left subtracting the 2 and writing in the 7. He asked me why I wanted him to do it and I explained the article and he laughed and said "That's so easy!" He already is solving for x in his school as part of the math teaching.
We are planning to come back to the US next year and I am worried, frankly. His math is, apparently, too high, he speaks three languages fluently and has experience living in two foreign countries. WTH am I going to do with him?
I'm from the state of Virginia, which is also very energy poor and relies entirely on imported energy. I am guessing most of you from the US would have to say the same thing: Wake up kids! What we are doing is raping our grandkids future so that we can drive our car to the mailbox, get 40 MPG and think we are "saving" energy. Let's get real, what Portugal has done might not be a perfect model for Virginia or any other US state, but it might provide some insight into how we could begin to build a future that makes sense.
Making sense means that you accept personal responsibility for the energy you use. That you are willing to pay the real cost of your energy (not the BS subsidized cost that you accept as your "right") which is folded into the subsidization of everything you buy (through oil subsidies for diesel and gasoline transport, government handouts of mineral and drilling rights on our national land and other hidden subsidies that allow business to make "profits" that kick back into campaign funds for politicians.
Yes you all already know all this but you continue to uphold the model of consumer entitlement that says that you deserve cheap prices on goods so that the economy will remain "strong." You still believe that you deserve to have your thermostat on 80F in the winter and 75F in the summer so that you can be "comfortable." You Must have your own car, Must have dishwashers, refrigerators, 5 lights turned on in each room while you sit up until midnight watching your massive TV and playing your game machine simultaneously. Understand the truth, you are the problem, you are the solution.
It's really easy to make fun of those of us trying to reduce consumption. You can vomit statistics produced by the companies that rely on you to continue to buy their crap. While you know the answers, you talk the talk, but Portugal is trying to walk the walk. They are not the only European country moving this way. Holland gives consumers credits for using renewable energy so that the energy cost playing field is leveled NOW, when we need it. Germany is planning to invest massively in solar. Spain has Portugal right next door and the Spanish people have many times the population and land area but they also want to move totally into renewables.
We in the US are miles behind because we the people are miles behind. Let's get moving now and quit carping about how "we can't do THAT": Fine, we can't, what the f*** are you doing instead?
China here: we are subject to constant "hiccups" in gmail and google. This has been a fact of life and often it has to do with physical problems as well as deliberate blockage.
What I mean is that google goes down sometimes and that affects us here, the cables sometimes create disruptions and that causes problems here, the firewall is not exactly a foolproof thing (or ... well, each provider blocks things as well as the firewall, sometimes it is the ISP office that makes decisions. At work if one person googles something inappropriate we all lose google for 15 minutes while the connection gets reset) and sometimes blocks stupid stuff and then unblocks it for no apparent reason. All these things are constant. We hate it but have little choice but accepting it. Our Chinese co-workers are embarrassed but confused about why you would want to go to a site like that anyway.
Because I live outside the US and am a product of both the US university system (UVA, College, 2000) and the Australian University system (USQ, 2007) I can tell you a few things that make the comparison more clear.
Australian Universities follow the British system quite strictly. British people that I was with when I did the Au Master's program told me repeatedly that this was a "standard" (as in not Oxford and not storefront) university offering we were getting. It was, frankly, lame. Most of the work that I did for it I had already done when i was working on my BA- linguistics at UVA. The professors graded harshly, mostly based on whether I was following their personal version of APA rather than on content. When I did run into content problems it was because I had accessed things that they disagreed with and assumed that I couldn't "really understand" because I was a "student". They got me initially pissed off when they insisted that I had to take their "Intro to Linguistics" when I had a BA in linguistics. They insisted that the breadth and depth of the masters course was much more than anything I would have done at the BA level. Then they required that I buy a textbook that I already owned (just not the Aussie version, ) and had used to TEACH A HIGH SCHOOL CLASS! Sorry, i'm still pissed about it.
Now I teach in universities here in Asia. Nowhere have I seen anything that approaches what is available in the US, even in second tier unies in the US. I have worked with some great students, but they just don't get anything like the value from their education that is available to US students.
So why the dissonance here?
1) (this is Asian style) There are asshole professors everywhere. But there are also some absolutely dropdead fantastic professors as well. And they are all people: I had a professor at UVA who was a hardcore classical linguist and a bit of a linguistic troglodyte, but he can teach, his passion for his subject, his control of material and his ability to help students get those really tricky concepts in place where they can live with you forever is amazing. While I know lots of good teachers here, I have yet to meet anyone of his caliber. Oh, Its not fair because I can think of quite a few others at UVA that were equally fantastic, and more modern, too.
2) no matter how wonderful the professor is the students are the other half of the equation. Last year I worked at Soochow University and it was the most painful job I have ever had. The students were paying large sums and expected to pass the course no matter their grade (they did, no fault of mine) and no matter whether they come to class. They were hateful, mean and rude. Now I have students that come to class and struggle to succeed. All equally skilled to begin with but with different motivations.
3) University environment determines much of this. Asian universities are made for only traditionally aged students. Nobody goes back, so you have this homogeneous student body that lives in an academic island. While UVA was certainly an academic island, the effect here is that students are completely pampered, watched, controlled, they have 40 hours of class a week (yeah!) and learn almost nothing from it. They have a single textbook per class that barely covers introductory material. Only when they get to graduate level do they actually have anything approaching real university expectations put on them, think of undergrad as grade13-16 and graduate as beginning your sophomore year.
OK, this is getting too long which i am morally opposed to. The US provides better ed for most students, it is the reality of the world, whether it can get better, duh, it can
15-20 years ago (fuzzy memories, i'm old) a good friend who was already both a rocket scientist AND a nuclear engineer for a big company realized that what he was doing was dead and he had to move on, again. So he started to learn C and switched over to the "new" division where the big company was writing programs about god knows what.
So the parent here is correct, but don't go off whining in your beer, my buddy did it, twice last I know, I "retired" when I was 40 and went back to uni to build a completely different skill set. That is just the way the world works. Frankly, I'm so glad I'm not stuck in the dead end my old "fast-paced, upwardly mobile" job is today.
I know I am too old to get in to this one, but I do have a seven year old ...
My teenager is going to a Canadian school where they have this grading system:
A = 85-100
B= 70-85
C+= 65-70
C= 60-65
C-=55-60
F 55
There is some A and B + and - too, but I forget the whole thing. Compare to my antediluvian system:
A= 90-100
B=80-90
C=70-80
D=60-70
F 60
does somebody want to do an analysis of what the change in grading does to GPA? Not to mention the weird warp with the A covering 15 points and C being almost the equivalent of D while B is C and a little B? And now let us discuss how C, which used to mean "average" now means that you have learned only slightly more than half the required (tested) information while B only means 3/4 of the (I suppose I am going out on a limb to say) IMPORTANT stuff they are teaching in school.
Let me slap some Canadian face here: my son is in first grade in the same city, but he goes to a Chinese school. (Let me make this clear: we live in China, my son goes to a Chinese national school while my daughter goes to an overseas British Columbian/ Canadian school which costs 8 times as much) My son scored 98% on his first grade final math exam (yeah, yeah that part is insane) and was only the third best in the class. He also scored 93% on his Chinese language exam (PinYin and characters, reading and writing) and was the second lowest in his class. 100% in English but that doesn't count.
My daughter had 3 A's and 2B's on her final report card this spring and was on the "Honor roll" (Whale done!!! --gag, gag) but the numbers make no sense. Does she know anything useful or not? Is her education valuable or not, and the same for my son. What do the numbers connect to in terms of real world information control?
When I came back to China 3 years ago the biggest change that I saw was the use of electric motorbikes. The first month almost got me run over a bunch of times cause they were so fast and quiet. Either one alone would have been OK, but while they are not as fast as a car they are faster than most push-bikes so they arrive sooner and you have no sound to gauge approach. Nowadays I drive one maniacally (just like everyone else) and have the automatic responses to them that you need here to survive.
I really ought to stay out of this, but .... I live in a country where we have cell service in about 95-98% of the country. There are a few pockets where there are almost no people and therefore almost no service. The service is provided by three different carriers who, by government decree, must share users across the networks. In other words I get picked up by the strongest tower, for no extra charge, no matter where in the country I am. This seems like such a no-brainer to me that i was totally shocked when I came back to the US last summer with my cheap ass GSM phone, had only two choices of carrier and they did not play together.
I went to the beach with some friends and some people had a signal and others didn't. I did, full power, my bud didn't:: zero, zip. Hey, US people, wake the f*** up and kick some stupid a** because you are being ripped off by these companies.
Now, let's talk about text messages. WTF, i automatically get text messaging for about .... let me convert currency... say. $.0024 per message. Yeah, about 4 for a penny. That is close to the real cost, but our carriers manage to make a profit out of that. When I was in the US the cost was insane, over the top and I had (drumroll please) AT&T, cause I had only two choices for my GSM phone (that works everywhere in the world except with most carriers in the US unless you want a special plan that you pay extra for (maybe, i forget, it was just too stupidly expensive for limited areas, no SMS for free, etc.etc.) sorry friends and family but you are totally getting ripped.
Is there some way for you guys to get your "free enterprise" heads out of your a***** and realize that "free" means that these companies are free to rip you off and you have no freedom to do anything except not have a service. The market is not creating a fair and even playing field, you are being trodden underfoot and those of you who claim to be libertarian are just suckers for a warped view of how "it would be nice if things worked this way but they don't."
Final kick in the groin. The country where I live is about as libertarian as you can get. If you have a business you have the support of the government to stay out of your business except if they get hassled by other governments about your "business activities." You pay very little in tax (there is a 7%VAT) , if anything. Even workers here are better off, a small labor unrest a few months ago has resulted in huge pay raises for workers who are a valued resource now. You have tremendous freedom to do anything involving making money: which, like it or not, is the libertarian objective. This place is a money making machine that really works well for people who live here and don't cause trouble. Even if you do cause trouble, if you are successful in business you get little hassle. Where am I? PR China.
Sorry, you are just another shill for W7. I have a houseful of newbs, from age 48 to 7. We use Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Fedora. My wife (age 48) has trouble using a mouse, just not a close enough connection to make sense to her so she is only comfortable with a trackpad. She will tell you that you are a fool to use anything other than Ubuntu: and she knows since she has used windows xp, os 9, and osX. My older daughter is at university in the US and was suckered by her boyfriend into Win 7. Her computer barely works and she has begged me to replace it with ubuntu. Her 17 year old sister here in China japes at her and uses Kubuntu, although she doesn't even try to use all the config functions, she doesn't want to. Sure she lusts after an iBook, but only because her stylish friends have them. This spring however she has noticed that their iBooks are looking a little tatty and shabby while her rig is still sleek and stylish, to her anyway.
Finally, my 7 year old has been here at work with me in the mornings all week. He switches with ease between Fedora, linux Mint (Dr Ting over in IT, one of my son's buddies), Windows xp and Win7, depending on exactly whose computer it is. He can show people how to do things on IE, Firefox or even Epiphany or Midori. He was just setting up a QQ account yesterday afternoon (IM and email here in China, shabby trash) with some help from another teacher. He is comfortable helping and being helped and with teaching the teachers that computers are just here to do a job, not to be a statement.
Grammar and language Nazi here, the poster above is correct about the use of the indefinite article and Letters. The difficulty comes with the use with the "h" as the initial letter in a word such as the previous poster who says "an" historical. This is still disputed by the old school fools who learned a written standard for something that governs a spoken standard. In other words, if the "h" is written then its sound value need not be considered and you can make a rule that holds across all situations. If the "h" is spoken then you have the difficulty of two variant pronunciations (each calling a different article-- "a" or "an") that can appear with the same spelling. This possibility mind-fucks (this is a classical linguistics term first used by Ferdinand de Saussure in his famous thirteenth introductory lecture on semiotics) the prescriptionists who insist that all rules must apply equally and completely in all situations. All other situations create the kind of linguistic diversity up with which they will not put.
I was at a party the other night trying to avoid getting close to an overweight girl. Living in Asia has the disadvantage of making me really uncomfortable around overweight people. But really, a Thai family of five weighs the same as that girl, she needed to plant her own damn forest to cover the carbon offset, and then she was bitching about being outside cause there was no air-con. Oh dear, i feel a rant coming on...bye