Did you ever note that politicians always say they'll have to cut the most inflammatory items - police, fire, libraries - first? How about their own salaries next time for starters?
I was just listening to the local NPR show in Rochester, and this was brought up by a caller. The guests comment was... "Can't do that. It's against the state's constitution."
"Maybe I'm leaning too much on fond remembrance here, but I prefer the isolated, solitary feel of the first Half-Life to the more character-driven atmosphere in the sequel."
Especially in Ep. 1 when she tagged around with you pretty much THE WHOLE TIME, and gave you directions, directed your attention, etc. ("There must be a fuse box around here. Gordan, see if you can find it.")
It got worse in Ep. 2 when SHE forced you on a major side quest. In HL1, you could kneecap a scientist who got in your way and just keep going. In Ep. 2, you had to save the life of an NPC. Even on the side quest they gave you a sidekick (the Vort).
The odd part is that the solo Antlion Guardian chase was probably the closest either of the episodes got to cashing in on phobias that were so common in HL1. Then the strider attack at the end of Ep. 2 (again, a solo mission) was the BEST part of the game.
Did you notice that only once in HL1 did the player lose control of Gordon? (During the Apprehension level.) That was the one break in the game's continuity, which was HUGE progress from Quake and other level-based games. Though HL2, Ep. 1, and Ep. 2 are mainly contiguous, in Ep. 2 the developers started taking the control from the player so they could tell *their* story. If you listen to the developers' commentary it is quite explicit.
I'll save the spoilers, but the ending of Ep. 2 didn't leave me wanting revenge against the combine, it left me cursing the developers who put *their* story before *my* gameplay.
Too true. The National Board of Medical Examiners are well represented at meetings of the National Council for Measurement in Education and their sessions are very well attended. They are on the cutting edge of implementing what most assessment people have only dreamed about. Complex simulations in computer-based step exams, standardized patients, etc., are all where we would like to go with education in general.
To answer the grandparent: Yes, creating a test for various levels of understanding is trivial for people who know what they are doing. Let me give you an example taken from Wiggns & McTighe (2005):
Three eighth grade standardized tests (two state-wide and one national) all included questions similar to the following:
John lives three miles east of the school. Jill lives four miles north of the school. Measured in miles, how far is it in a straight line from John's house to Jill's house?
60% of the students in all three cases missed this question. Other items on the tests showed that the vast majority of these students knew the Pythagorean theorem, but apparently didn't know that this problem could be solved with it. Follow-up research concluded that the teacher were trying to "teach to the test," but since they held a narrow conception of the types of knowledge that tests could measure (analysis and application in this case), they only taught the rote aspects. In the end, the students were punished for their teacher's mistake.
Another example from the same text (this is from memory, so the details may be different, but the sense is the same):
A bus can seat no more than 20 people, but there are 64 people waiting to take the bus. How many trips must the bus make to transport all 64 people?
This question was open-ended, and many students responded:
3 remainder 4
Clearly, though they could determine the appropriate operation (division) and apply it, they didn't realize the situation called for rounding up. Again, students were taught a rote method and acting with those skills.
I can only speak for this side of the pond, since I'm not well versed in UK testing, but I specialize in educational assessment and the quality of state-sponsored standardized assessments are far below acceptable. Most schools will use expensive, well made psychometric assessments when they work with students with "special needs"; university admissions board require students to spend hundreds of dollars taking similarly high-quality exams; but when a state needs a "math" test, they contract it out to the lowest bidder and get what they pay for.
New York State, for example, has used norm-reference testing techniques (determining the passing score base on group mean) for what is a criterion-reference achievement test (8th grade Math A). The publisher's "technical report" also reported the exam scores to be bi-dimensional (per a principal component analysis), but that the two factors together only explained 20% of the total variance! They excused this by quoting an IRT theorist out of context. (The theorist was explaining when unidimensionality was acceptable in meeting the assumptions of IRT, NOT when unidimensionality was acceptable in a general sense.)
All this is to say that we have the know-how and the skills to create meaningful, educationally useful assessments that don't sacrifice the traditional qualities of score reliability or the validity of those scores' intended interpretations. The problem is that people in the government a) don't have those skills, b) refuse to talk with those of use who do(1), and c) are being blinding by the publishers who want to get a ROI for their test.
I worked as a graduate assistant in a lab that produced foreign language materials. We were *very* early at producing our own DVDs (back when you had to ship a DLT to the replicator) and won a bid to move some PBS language programs to DVD. Of course, each disc had a credits menu that mentioned our university, but not our lab.
So, late one night the four main people working on the project (getting paid a pittance BTW) created a hidden menu with our pictures and the names of the other students who had given their time. We hid the menu in a place where virtually no one would be able to find it: On the credits menu, the menu buttons are organized horizontally. With the "credits" option highlighted, you push up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right (Contra's 30-lives code) and the hidden menu is revealed.
The hidden menu was created with the same style guides as the other menus, so it doesn't look like "we wuz h3r3!"
We didn't show our boss until *after* the DVD was shipped. When we showed it to him, he just laughed. He was a former programmer and understood us completely. But he did add, "It's a good thing you didn't tell me earlier. I would have had to tell you to take it out."
Sorry, I was out yesterday, I hope you get this reply.
These people *do* consider themselves "social scientists," but many use artistic techniques for arriving at their conclusions. Peruse the American Education Research Association's Annual Meeting catalog sometime to get a hint at what these people consider to be science.
As a faculty member, I must say that...... I totally agree.
Some members of our faculty recently read a book on "white privilege" which cited documented falsehoods to justify the author's position.
What's worse is the rise (far more in the social sciences) of "critical" research methodologies. With these, the "researcher" doesn't control for their own bias, but admits to researching in support of their stated biases (usually the empowerment of the disenfranchised).
I told one colleague that when you begin research knowing the answers (rather than the questions), you're a lobbyist, not a researcher. That wasn't well received.
How about setting up a simple script that periodically polls a remote site - say a web page under your control? If it can't reach it, or it reaches it and gets a default response, no action's taken. If on the other hand the page returns an innocuous looking kill code, a small program is run that disables the BIOS? On the server side, you'd be mailed the IP your stolen laptop connected from, which might give you some location info.
I've done the calling home part of this - as I'm sure many here have. It's trivial, but I didn't do it to prevent theft; I did it so I could tunnel to my laptop in my office even when DHCP rotated to another public address.
It's one line of PHP, a really simple db table (though a text file would do). Use crontab and curl to hit the page every hour with a get variable IDing the laptop, so you can use the same script for multiple boxes. It wasn't until a month later when I was doing some DB maintenance that I realized I could use it for theft prevention.
I "pirated" World of Goo. I downloaded it when a friend raved over it, tried it for five minutes, thought "Is this it?" and deleted it. I wonder what percentage of this "piracy" is actually people just trying the game after hearing about it, since I wouldn't have bothered had someone not raved about it. (I don't even know if there is an official demo available.)
This happened to me with Radiohead. When they released their album in a "pay what you want, even nothing" format, I paid zero for it because I had never listen to the band before, and I wasn't sure if I would like it. I found the album interesting, but not something I would ever listen to, so I deleted it.
The next week I saw a music publisher website decrying that so many people had chosen to pay nothing for Radiohead's music and how it showed how screwed up all music fans were.
There's a great video on YouTube of a law professor explaining why you should NEVER talk to the police. The Miranda warning explains that anything your say can be used AGAINST you. Guess what? It doesn't work the other way. Nothing you say to a police officers can be used in your defense. (It's technically hearsay.)
Learning this and talking it over with a few cop friends of mine has completely changed the way I deal with law enforcement.
I've been playing a little Red Alert (1) since it was released for free this year. At the same time, the weather is turning cold and I've had to set up my bicycle on a stationary trainer. Wouldn't it be cool to have an RTS where at least one of your resources was wattage produced from some exercise?
I recently relocated to a rather rural area and I've met a lot of... shall we call them "simple" people. They look like country bumpkins, and many rarely leave the area, but several have surprised me with their insights.
One was an older man who worked construction his whole life. He once flew out to see his son's family in another state. While waiting to board his return flight he was sitting facing the key-pad door that led to the tarmac. He heard one person type "Beep... Beep... Beep... Bip-bip-bip." Then another. He realized that the six-digit code was three different numbers, followed by three identical numbers.
So he watched. After fifteen minutes he got the code. It was something like "264000." He wrote it on his boarding pass. When we handed the pass to the attendant at the gate she asked, "Sir, do you need this number?" He responded, "No, I don't need the code to your locked door over there." And then he boarded the plane.
A few minutes later two airport police officers came on the plane and asked him if he'd mind answering a few questions. He missed his flight (though they took mercy on him and put him on a later flight) while he was read the riot act. At no point did anyone thank him, nor did it seem that they were willing to find fault with their system or people who let out their ubersecret code.
He was wrong for hearing the code. He was wrong for watching the employees type the code.
I appreciate the correction. Not that a post to/. is a big deal, but I did actually check that such an obvious joke hadn't been posted before I submitted it.
Among the items seized were 66 cameras, 31 laptop computers, 20 cell phones, 17 sets of electronic games, 13 pieces of jewelry, 12 GPS devices, 11 MP3 players, eight camera lenses, six video cameras and two DVD players, the affidavit said.
How many times a day do bitter exs break into each others accounts? Nothing ever comes of those incidents.
It probably helps to be a public personality, but there are cases where people breaking into less-than-presidential-candidate-email have found themselves losing to the law:
The reason: Data from fewer than one in five research trials are ever published. Findings from the vast majority of human trials become buried for reasons that may never come to light, according to a new study in The Oncologist. It's published early and online September 24.
It's called publication bias and it exists in most fields. Publisher want to break significant results, so even if your research was extremely well designed, and the fact that you found negative results could be extremely important, they won't publish it.
By the way, the bigger problem is with kids who do the work but don't think. I have lots of students who copy their friends' work, so they have great homework grades, but bomb tests because they have no clue what they're talking about.
Funny, I've had the same experience... but my students are in-practice teachers working on masters degrees.
Nitko & Brookhart's excellent text, Educational Assessment of Students has a section on "The Deadly Zero" and ways to mitigate its effects. About one-third of my graduates students teach in districts with this policy.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just listening to the local NPR show in Rochester, and this was brought up by a caller. The guests comment was... "Can't do that. It's against the state's constitution."
My thought was: W...T...F...?
I'm going to go read that document now.
It is their right, but it's also my right to take issue with it.
Especially in Ep. 1 when she tagged around with you pretty much THE WHOLE TIME, and gave you directions, directed your attention, etc. ("There must be a fuse box around here. Gordan, see if you can find it.")
How would it be to play HL1 with Alyx? http://www.flickr.com/photos/23108889@N06/2212589455/
It got worse in Ep. 2 when SHE forced you on a major side quest. In HL1, you could kneecap a scientist who got in your way and just keep going. In Ep. 2, you had to save the life of an NPC. Even on the side quest they gave you a sidekick (the Vort).
The odd part is that the solo Antlion Guardian chase was probably the closest either of the episodes got to cashing in on phobias that were so common in HL1. Then the strider attack at the end of Ep. 2 (again, a solo mission) was the BEST part of the game.
Did you notice that only once in HL1 did the player lose control of Gordon? (During the Apprehension level.) That was the one break in the game's continuity, which was HUGE progress from Quake and other level-based games. Though HL2, Ep. 1, and Ep. 2 are mainly contiguous, in Ep. 2 the developers started taking the control from the player so they could tell *their* story. If you listen to the developers' commentary it is quite explicit.
I'll save the spoilers, but the ending of Ep. 2 didn't leave me wanting revenge against the combine, it left me cursing the developers who put *their* story before *my* gameplay.
Too true. The National Board of Medical Examiners are well represented at meetings of the National Council for Measurement in Education and their sessions are very well attended. They are on the cutting edge of implementing what most assessment people have only dreamed about. Complex simulations in computer-based step exams, standardized patients, etc., are all where we would like to go with education in general.
To answer the grandparent: Yes, creating a test for various levels of understanding is trivial for people who know what they are doing. Let me give you an example taken from Wiggns & McTighe (2005):
Three eighth grade standardized tests (two state-wide and one national) all included questions similar to the following:
60% of the students in all three cases missed this question. Other items on the tests showed that the vast majority of these students knew the Pythagorean theorem, but apparently didn't know that this problem could be solved with it. Follow-up research concluded that the teacher were trying to "teach to the test," but since they held a narrow conception of the types of knowledge that tests could measure (analysis and application in this case), they only taught the rote aspects. In the end, the students were punished for their teacher's mistake.
Another example from the same text (this is from memory, so the details may be different, but the sense is the same):
This question was open-ended, and many students responded:
Clearly, though they could determine the appropriate operation (division) and apply it, they didn't realize the situation called for rounding up. Again, students were taught a rote method and acting with those skills.
I would give you points if I had any.
I can only speak for this side of the pond, since I'm not well versed in UK testing, but I specialize in educational assessment and the quality of state-sponsored standardized assessments are far below acceptable. Most schools will use expensive, well made psychometric assessments when they work with students with "special needs"; university admissions board require students to spend hundreds of dollars taking similarly high-quality exams; but when a state needs a "math" test, they contract it out to the lowest bidder and get what they pay for.
New York State, for example, has used norm-reference testing techniques (determining the passing score base on group mean) for what is a criterion-reference achievement test (8th grade Math A). The publisher's "technical report" also reported the exam scores to be bi-dimensional (per a principal component analysis), but that the two factors together only explained 20% of the total variance! They excused this by quoting an IRT theorist out of context. (The theorist was explaining when unidimensionality was acceptable in meeting the assumptions of IRT, NOT when unidimensionality was acceptable in a general sense.)
All this is to say that we have the know-how and the skills to create meaningful, educationally useful assessments that don't sacrifice the traditional qualities of score reliability or the validity of those scores' intended interpretations. The problem is that people in the government a) don't have those skills, b) refuse to talk with those of use who do(1), and c) are being blinding by the publishers who want to get a ROI for their test.
(1) Yes, I've tried to bring it up.
I worked as a graduate assistant in a lab that produced foreign language materials. We were *very* early at producing our own DVDs (back when you had to ship a DLT to the replicator) and won a bid to move some PBS language programs to DVD. Of course, each disc had a credits menu that mentioned our university, but not our lab.
So, late one night the four main people working on the project (getting paid a pittance BTW) created a hidden menu with our pictures and the names of the other students who had given their time. We hid the menu in a place where virtually no one would be able to find it: On the credits menu, the menu buttons are organized horizontally. With the "credits" option highlighted, you push up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right (Contra's 30-lives code) and the hidden menu is revealed.
The hidden menu was created with the same style guides as the other menus, so it doesn't look like "we wuz h3r3!"
We didn't show our boss until *after* the DVD was shipped. When we showed it to him, he just laughed. He was a former programmer and understood us completely. But he did add, "It's a good thing you didn't tell me earlier. I would have had to tell you to take it out."
Sorry, I was out yesterday, I hope you get this reply.
These people *do* consider themselves "social scientists," but many use artistic techniques for arriving at their conclusions. Peruse the American Education Research Association's Annual Meeting catalog sometime to get a hint at what these people consider to be science.
http://aera.net/meetings/Default.aspx?menu_id=342&id=4850
As a faculty member, I must say that... ... I totally agree.
Some members of our faculty recently read a book on "white privilege" which cited documented falsehoods to justify the author's position.
What's worse is the rise (far more in the social sciences) of "critical" research methodologies. With these, the "researcher" doesn't control for their own bias, but admits to researching in support of their stated biases (usually the empowerment of the disenfranchised).
I told one colleague that when you begin research knowing the answers (rather than the questions), you're a lobbyist, not a researcher. That wasn't well received.
I've done the calling home part of this - as I'm sure many here have. It's trivial, but I didn't do it to prevent theft; I did it so I could tunnel to my laptop in my office even when DHCP rotated to another public address.
It's one line of PHP, a really simple db table (though a text file would do). Use crontab and curl to hit the page every hour with a get variable IDing the laptop, so you can use the same script for multiple boxes. It wasn't until a month later when I was doing some DB maintenance that I realized I could use it for theft prevention.
This happened to me with Radiohead. When they released their album in a "pay what you want, even nothing" format, I paid zero for it because I had never listen to the band before, and I wasn't sure if I would like it. I found the album interesting, but not something I would ever listen to, so I deleted it.
The next week I saw a music publisher website decrying that so many people had chosen to pay nothing for Radiohead's music and how it showed how screwed up all music fans were.
Interesting that this is in almost total opposition to the Total Perspective Vortex.
There's a great video on YouTube of a law professor explaining why you should NEVER talk to the police. The Miranda warning explains that anything your say can be used AGAINST you. Guess what? It doesn't work the other way. Nothing you say to a police officers can be used in your defense. (It's technically hearsay.)
Learning this and talking it over with a few cop friends of mine has completely changed the way I deal with law enforcement.
I've been playing a little Red Alert (1) since it was released for free this year. At the same time, the weather is turning cold and I've had to set up my bicycle on a stationary trainer. Wouldn't it be cool to have an RTS where at least one of your resources was wattage produced from some exercise?
Pedal faster, build more units/buildings/etc.
Yeah, see, I was getting tired of hearing my hard drive whine, but rather than dampen the noise coming from it, I decided to drown it out: I had kids.
Amen.
I heard an Ad Council ad on the radio a few years ago that dramatized a "Savers Anonymous" meeting.
"Hello, my name is Dave... and... I drive a car... that's SEVEN YEARS OLD!!! (*sob*)"
"Hi, I'm Dana, and last week... I couldn't help myself! I CLIPPED A COUPON!"
Etc.
The whole point was that in this world it is almost politically incorrect to be financially responsible.
Saw this on a bumper sticker:
We're screwed: 2008.
I couldn't summarize my feelings any better.
Amen.
I recently relocated to a rather rural area and I've met a lot of... shall we call them "simple" people. They look like country bumpkins, and many rarely leave the area, but several have surprised me with their insights.
One was an older man who worked construction his whole life. He once flew out to see his son's family in another state. While waiting to board his return flight he was sitting facing the key-pad door that led to the tarmac. He heard one person type "Beep... Beep... Beep... Bip-bip-bip." Then another. He realized that the six-digit code was three different numbers, followed by three identical numbers.
So he watched. After fifteen minutes he got the code. It was something like "264000." He wrote it on his boarding pass. When we handed the pass to the attendant at the gate she asked, "Sir, do you need this number?" He responded, "No, I don't need the code to your locked door over there." And then he boarded the plane.
A few minutes later two airport police officers came on the plane and asked him if he'd mind answering a few questions. He missed his flight (though they took mercy on him and put him on a later flight) while he was read the riot act. At no point did anyone thank him, nor did it seem that they were willing to find fault with their system or people who let out their ubersecret code.
He was wrong for hearing the code. He was wrong for watching the employees type the code.
I appreciate the correction. Not that a post to /. is a big deal, but I did actually check that such an obvious joke hadn't been posted before I submitted it.
And a partridge in a pear... TREEEEEEEEE!
It probably helps to be a public personality, but there are cases where people breaking into less-than-presidential-candidate-email have found themselves losing to the law:
http://news.google.com/news?oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&client=firefox-a&um=1&tab=wn&nolr=1&hl=en&q=%22Larry+Mendte%22&btnG=Search+News
all the way across Nevada.
It's called publication bias and it exists in most fields. Publisher want to break significant results, so even if your research was extremely well designed, and the fact that you found negative results could be extremely important, they won't publish it.
Funny, I've had the same experience... but my students are in-practice teachers working on masters degrees.
I'm completely serious.
Nitko & Brookhart's excellent text, Educational Assessment of Students has a section on "The Deadly Zero" and ways to mitigate its effects. About one-third of my graduates students teach in districts with this policy.
Didn't like Transformers either, eh?