Anti-theft devices? Europe is quite good with public safety as well as Canada. Every place has another method. I'd suggest Jan (and anybody) to stay out of the USA however.
Ugh. I'm not all into the nationalist fervor, but this kind of comment, tossed off so casually, really rubs me the wrong way. I have spent 29 years in the US, living in a farm town for about 10 years, Chicago for another 10, and small cities for the rest. I have NEVER had any kind of physical confrontation (apart from a few schoolyard tussles when I was less than 10 years old). Never been robbed. I have never had my property stolen or defaced. I have never been mugged. Except twice in London. In the same week. It just doesn't make any sense to me when people say things like this.
I hereby declare today a worldwide day of mourning. The American voters have brought shame on their once-great country.
Look, most smart people in the US are pissed, but saying stuff like this is really unconstructive. All you're going to do is start a flame war. Yes, we elected an idiot. Most of us are pissed about it. But that doesn't mean we're going to take your insults lying down, okay? We're still Americans, and we're still going to defend ourselves. He might be a moron, but he's our moron, and just like a retarded little brother, we're going to defend him against outsiders no matter how much he drools on our favorite toys. So let's all act like adults here, and not turn this into a name-calling match.
I would add one thing to this- your statements are correct, as long as you are talking about a programmer who is good at his job and cares about usability. I have met developers that are fearfully good at usability, and developers that are terrible. I'm not equipped to judge which is more common- I'm studying usability in grad school, so my sample is skewed.
CRM isn't about customer service- it's about tracking customer data. It's the crap that got us into this position- a Total Information Awareness for retailers (and other businesses). The one thing you did get right was that it was a joke.... And now it's imploding. Which is why I don't do it for a living anymore. There's no there there anymore.
I'm not an expert, but I believe what the poster above is talking about is that employees are commonly considered costs. Thus, a company that breaks even, with gross income equal to costs, provides their employees with a living without making a profit. 'Profit', in most cases, is profit for shareholders. Thus the concept of non-profit corporations, which are intended to survive without making a profit.
I think a lot of people are missing the point with this..... For Linux fans, even part-timers like myself, EVERY PRODUCT like this is a victory. This is a cool product, a cool idea, and a nice tip-o-the hat to the MythTV team- someone thinks their product is ready for prime time.
I know licensing is important, but it seems to me that we need to support first and ask questions later. Every company that publishes a viable linux-based app or hardware device pushes us closer to true choice in the OS market. I'm not suggesting that we be blind about it, but when I read the comments for this article, the first dozen are arguments about licensing, which is kinda sad. Not one well-moderated comment in support of the product. Are we all on the same team here, or what? I think we need to get better at sticking together.
Mos Def has a style and presentation that is smooth, but a little out there- I think he'll be much better than most people expect. No, I wouldn't have pictured him for the role, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.
Medical transcriptionists typically have access to good equipment, and some work from home on an as-needed basis and might be able to fit you in quickly. They have the added benefit of going from tape directly to English, rather than to short hand. And they are easy to find- put up a note on a bulletin board in your local hospital. But the message is the same- professionals will give you nice, accurate results. Especially if there might be more work in the future.
They have cars kinda like this in Heavy Weather, by Bruce Sterling. The sucky part of it, though, was that when the car's OS crashed, well, you got a really dramatic reminder of the origin of the 'crash' metaphor. So the software has to be stable, and when it fails, it has to fail gracefully, or you're in trouble, especially on the highway.
It brings new meaning to the phrase "Blue Screen of Death." Pray it doesn't use embedded Windows.
In ten years everyone will wonder why USC and Berkley produced all of the decade's best crackers. This project will result in three things:
1. Good dissertations for CS PhDs. 2. More secure software, which will rarely be implemented and even more rarely be implemented well. 3. A whole bunch of research assistants who think they are l33t h4x0rs. And some of them will be right.
I'm currently attending a master's program in HCI at U of M, and most of the students in my school (the School of Information) are library students, intending to become school, public, or private librarians (mostly the first two). I can tell you from my experience that librarians at the grass roots level are NOT in support of any method, high tech or low, that invades the privacy of their users. They take it seriously. VERY seriously. The political atmosphere around here is very anti-TIA, and anti-Patriot act.
I know we can't trust anyone with our privacy, librarians can be subpeoned too, etc. And I urge you to let your local library know about your feelings. But I doubt we'll ever see these things in action, mostly due to the frequent epic battles your local librarians fight to protect your privacy. These mild mannered people are the intellectual equivalent of the Dunedain, guarding the borders of our privacy and never asking for our thanks. They are a powerful, and often overlooked, ally in the fight for privacy. Am I being hyperbolic? A little, but less than you think. Librarians are much cooler, and nerdier, than I ever gave them credit for. And no, not all of them are women.
I just realised I did an exceptionally poor job of explaining financial aid in this country. For undergraduate students, you fill in a federal form, which includes info about your income and your parents' income (if you are a dependent). The schools you apply to assess your 'family contribution'- how much money you can pay- and come up with a combination of loans, grants, and work study (student jobs) to meet your total need, including costs like housing, food, and even a tiny bit of pocket money. Need blind schools do this after you're accepted, so they don't consider their cost in your admission. A few non-need blind schools have set numbers for financial aid, so their ratios of paying to non-paying students remain stable.
What this works out to is this- if you come from a poor family, or even a middle class family with lots of kids in college, it's quite likely that your financial aid 'package' will cover 100% of your need. The more your family can afford, the less aid you get. It causes some awkward situations with middle class families being less able to send their kids to expensive schools than poor families, because the poor families have a $0 in their 'expected family contribution' box, but for the most part, it enables people to go based on their academic, rather than financial, merits. This ignores the bewildering array of private, sports, and professional funding available.
As I pointed out above, the main obstacle in this system is that it's hard to get through the cumbersome financial aid process for a smart kid with good english skills and two college-educated parents. A poor, less confident kid with less savvy parents or weak english skills or both could have a serious problem figuring out how to navigate through the morass. The money's there, it's just not easy enough to get. I consider that a social problem, and a bad one, at that.
Sorry for the two volume novel- I'm passionate about education.
I just don't think that you understand how it works here. My undergrad and graduate schools, like all the schools I have applied to and a majority of schools in the country, has a 'need blind' admissions policy. You get accepted before they even know if you can pay. There are exceptions to this, but they are exceptions, not the rule. Its theoretically possible for a school to have 100% of it's incoming class on 100% financial aid- completely unable to pay. That would be a disaster for a school financially, but it could happen. So at a 'need blind' school, admissions are not at all based on your ability to pay- you get in, they help you find the money, which will be in the form of work, grants, and loans. And that's undergrad- I've never heard of ANY grad program that isn't 'need blind', and some are fully funded- essentially free. So if you are capable of getting in, you will be able to attend- maybe without much of a beer money budget, but you'll be able to go.
My first year undergrad roommate was a chinese kid from the Lower East Side of Manhattan- his parents didn't speak a word of English, his dad worked in a Chinese restauraunt for $5.25 an hour, and their kids went to Tufts, Bryn Mawr, U Penn and Northwestern- that's about $115,000 PER KID- and they all got funded by the government. Yes, they had debt when they got out- probably $50,000, but for someone graduating from one of those schools, $50k over 20 years (which is the typical loan length) isn't that bad. Their post college salary minus college loan payments was probably ten times what their father made in a given year, so it's a good deal in the long run. And state schools are often 1/3 or 1/2 as much.
So if you study and get good grades in secondary school, and you really want to, you can go to college here, no matter how poor you are. The problem is that no one in poorer (inner city or rural) areas is teaching kids that this is possible- they just don't understand that they have these opportunities, and no one wants to take the time to go tell them. Our educational problems are largely social, not economic.
As for requirements, once again, I can't compare because I've never applied to an Australian school. But I would argue that whatever the written requirements are, the quality of candidates at a top program is quite high- with the occasional exception for the legacy (i.e. George Bush Jr.) type students. The philosophy of American schools is that anyone can apply, but we're only going to take the very best of our applicants- so the possibility for an idiot to apply to Harvard Med, for instance, shouldn't be confused with the likelihood they'll be admitted, which is zero.
I guess I'm going to have to step in on this 'buy a place' comment. I'll try not to flame, but I'm pretty angry. In this country, the vast majority of candidates for a given university are admitted based on SAT/ACT standardised tests, secondary schol transcripts, essays, and for better/smaller schools, interviews. I would argue that this is a merit based system. I worked hard for a place at a top 10 school, and my family had neither influence nor money to help me- just encouragement. I paid for it alone, through grants and loans. I think the 'buying a place' thing is a lie perpetuated by people who didn't get into a decent school because they didn't bother to do their homework in 11th grade. I did my homework, I worked hard, and I got in on my own.
There is a small weight given to people with family connections, or George Bush Jr. would be working the fry machine at McDonalds. But after five years in college at a top 10 American school, I never met a person that was a 'legacy' student. I would say these people probably represent less than 5% of admitted students.
As for relative value to schools in other places, I am not qualified to assess that, but I will tell you that name recognition is everything here, to a point. It will get your foot in the door, but it's up to you after that. The name of my school got me great interviews- IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, EDS. But my interviewing skills got me the job. How do I know? Because those places, as well as the place I worked, interviewed hundreds of people. They only hired a few.
So what's the bottom line here- am I getting sued, or not? What about users who used filesharing apps with no username- how're they going to ID those people?
But I guess what I'm really asking here is this: are they suing everyone? Are they settling, or taking everyone into court? Should I even borrow money for grad school, if I'm just going to end up giving it to the RIAA? Who gets the money here, if they do win, the RIAA or the artists who were 'robbed'? I assumed that this was a scare tactic, and I admit that I'm a little scared, but come on! You can't sue every file trader! There must be millions! How much of this sh!t are we going to put up with before people start throwing around the 'b' word? That's right, I said it. BOYCOTT. Any takers?
...when I was in college, and also when I went to work, which got me fired before I learned to control it. Here are some tactics I used to get over it (some of these have been mentioned):
1. Stay busy. If you don't have time to waste, you wont waste it. Or you'll flunk out.
2. Social pressure helps- study in groups, do work in groups. I found letting myself down much easier than letting others down.
3. Routine is king. Get into a routine, especially with regards to sleep.
4. Change your major. If you hate your major or you're doing it because it's trendy/lucrative, change it. Study something you really love. When your textbooks are so fascinating that you stay up late reading them the night the reading is assigned, instead of the night before it's due, you'll find motivation isn't a problem. I changed my major and went from academic probation to the Dean's list.
5. Get a girlfriend (or boyfriend). Preferably someone who likes to party, but is a serious student. My last year of college my girlfriend saved me, in two ways. First, you're not out chasing the ladies (or gentlemen), so you aren't as inclined to hit the bars on, say, a Tuesday. Second, she studied a lot, which left me feeling as if I should also be studying, so I did.
Those things helped me a lot, and I hope they help you. Good luck!
Chicago also has some of the best architecture in the country, all packed into about three square miles. There's a boat tour of Chicago architecture that's so cool my girlfriend's grandmother didn't complain once the whole 3 1/2 hour tour- which made it worth the price alone. There are dozens of buildings by prominent architects in different styles covering the last hundred years or so. Also, in the west burbs there are half a dozen Frank Llyod Wright houses, which are also incredible. I could go on... But if you are interested in architecture, Chicago is THE place, on top of having four of the top six museums in the country.
And I have one. It's a love/hate relationship - I love what I paid for it (great value) and hate how it breaks about once a week. Once again, you get what you pay for...
You're right- the task is spatial rotation (I wrote a paper on it for a psych course in college). They gave women a picture of shape, made of a group of attached cubes similar to a DNA strand or something, and asked them to choose which of four additional shapes were a rotated version of the same shape.
Men scored better than women across the population, although the difference was slight. The results are reproduceable, which is to say if I give out the survey to 500 american college freshmen (and women), the women consistently average a tiny bit lower on this task.
The task is specific, rarely seen in nature, and the results, as mentioned above, differ only slightly. draw you conclusions as you will.
Aetrix, you're spot on with the part of your argument against Lamarckian evolution. I'm just not sure it applies to this discussion- what about the influence of Darwin?
I think one can make an argument for intelligence as inheritable. *If* we assume that one could inherit intelligence, and a part of intelligence is spatial awareness, then wouldn't people with better spatial sense be more likely to make it back home, and thus more apt to pass on their genes?
I'm not trying to sh*t on you here, I'm really interested in getting to the bottom of this. What do you think?
Similar theories account for a demonstrated superiority of women over men in extremely fine motor skills- things like berry picking, not spear throwing. This is an rarely-discussed part of the theory, and although it goes along with the women as foragers theory, it's often left out of popular recaps because it weakens the man = physical / women = social dichotomy.
It also has a big impact with things like computers, where women, overall and *controlled for other factors* should be slightly better with the mouse than men, due to their somewhat improved fine motor skills.
I still think it's mostly social factors that are holding women back in the computer world. I just don't think anyone plops them down in front of a computer and says "here, learn this, you'll have to feed yourself one day." It's not 'cool' for girls to program- it's only 'cool' for them to learn IM and play out their social lives in one more medium. That's what we need to address. Instead of buying your daughter a bigger monitor, spend some time with her, and let her know that it is OK for girls to learn about programming, OS's, and other 'geeky' stuff.
Games Workshop is once again trying to funnel money to their own retail stores and their own web site, rather than independent retailers. They have a consistent history, from the late eighties, when I started to play their games, of screwing independents whenever possible- for a while they were forcing game stores to become "Chapter Approved" to sell their stuff, which means you sign an agreement giving them more money.
This policy of only them being allowed to sell their merchandise via the Internet is just more of the same.They are doing their best to become the Microsoft of the gaming world, and it's the reason I quit buying things from them ten YEARS ago. It's a damn shame, too, because their creative arm is the best in the business, by far. I made the switch to pen and paper games, like Gurps, and eventually computer games.
I think as Games Workshop continues to alienate their customers with sketchy sales practices, aggressive pricing, and constantly re-releasing newer versions of old models, forcing a collector to re-buy his army every few years to participate in tournaments, they will eventually piss off their players to the point that they will seek other things to do with their spare time. There's no shortage of other options, including intelligent, geek-friendly gaming companies like Steve Jackson Games. [I have no affiliation, I just think they're cool.]
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Anti-theft devices? Europe is quite good with public safety as well as Canada. Every place has another method. I'd suggest Jan (and anybody) to stay out of the USA however.
Ugh. I'm not all into the nationalist fervor, but this kind of comment, tossed off so casually, really rubs me the wrong way. I have spent 29 years in the US, living in a farm town for about 10 years, Chicago for another 10, and small cities for the rest. I have NEVER had any kind of physical confrontation (apart from a few schoolyard tussles when I was less than 10 years old). Never been robbed. I have never had my property stolen or defaced. I have never been mugged. Except twice in London. In the same week. It just doesn't make any sense to me when people say things like this.
I hereby declare today a worldwide day of mourning. The American voters have brought shame on their once-great country.
Look, most smart people in the US are pissed, but saying stuff like this is really unconstructive. All you're going to do is start a flame war. Yes, we elected an idiot. Most of us are pissed about it. But that doesn't mean we're going to take your insults lying down, okay? We're still Americans, and we're still going to defend ourselves. He might be a moron, but he's our moron, and just like a retarded little brother, we're going to defend him against outsiders no matter how much he drools on our favorite toys. So let's all act like adults here, and not turn this into a name-calling match.
Or you can get a MS in Usability, like me, and spend the rest of your life fixing other peoples' crappy webpages for the rest of your life.
I would add one thing to this- your statements are correct, as long as you are talking about a programmer who is good at his job and cares about usability. I have met developers that are fearfully good at usability, and developers that are terrible. I'm not equipped to judge which is more common- I'm studying usability in grad school, so my sample is skewed.
CRM isn't about customer service- it's about tracking customer data. It's the crap that got us into this position- a Total Information Awareness for retailers (and other businesses). The one thing you did get right was that it was a joke.... And now it's imploding. Which is why I don't do it for a living anymore. There's no there there anymore.
I'm not an expert, but I believe what the poster above is talking about is that employees are commonly considered costs. Thus, a company that breaks even, with gross income equal to costs, provides their employees with a living without making a profit. 'Profit', in most cases, is profit for shareholders. Thus the concept of non-profit corporations, which are intended to survive without making a profit.
-sandbenders
I think a lot of people are missing the point with this..... For Linux fans, even part-timers like myself, EVERY PRODUCT like this is a victory. This is a cool product, a cool idea, and a nice tip-o-the hat to the MythTV team- someone thinks their product is ready for prime time.
I know licensing is important, but it seems to me that we need to support first and ask questions later. Every company that publishes a viable linux-based app or hardware device pushes us closer to true choice in the OS market. I'm not suggesting that we be blind about it, but when I read the comments for this article, the first dozen are arguments about licensing, which is kinda sad. Not one well-moderated comment in support of the product. Are we all on the same team here, or what? I think we need to get better at sticking together.
It's leap day, not April Fools. Now what am I supposed to think? This can't be serious....
Insert 'Free as in beer' VS 'Free as in Speech' joke here.
Mos Def has a style and presentation that is smooth, but a little out there- I think he'll be much better than most people expect. No, I wouldn't have pictured him for the role, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.
Medical transcriptionists typically have access to good equipment, and some work from home on an as-needed basis and might be able to fit you in quickly. They have the added benefit of going from tape directly to English, rather than to short hand. And they are easy to find- put up a note on a bulletin board in your local hospital. But the message is the same- professionals will give you nice, accurate results. Especially if there might be more work in the future.
They have cars kinda like this in Heavy Weather, by Bruce Sterling. The sucky part of it, though, was that when the car's OS crashed, well, you got a really dramatic reminder of the origin of the 'crash' metaphor. So the software has to be stable, and when it fails, it has to fail gracefully, or you're in trouble, especially on the highway.
It brings new meaning to the phrase "Blue Screen of Death." Pray it doesn't use embedded Windows.
In ten years everyone will wonder why USC and Berkley produced all of the decade's best crackers. This project will result in three things:
1. Good dissertations for CS PhDs.
2. More secure software, which will rarely be implemented and even more rarely be implemented well.
3. A whole bunch of research assistants who think they are l33t h4x0rs. And some of them will be right.
I'm currently attending a master's program in HCI at U of M, and most of the students in my school (the School of Information) are library students, intending to become school, public, or private librarians (mostly the first two). I can tell you from my experience that librarians at the grass roots level are NOT in support of any method, high tech or low, that invades the privacy of their users. They take it seriously. VERY seriously. The political atmosphere around here is very anti-TIA, and anti-Patriot act.
I know we can't trust anyone with our privacy, librarians can be subpeoned too, etc. And I urge you to let your local library know about your feelings. But I doubt we'll ever see these things in action, mostly due to the frequent epic battles your local librarians fight to protect your privacy. These mild mannered people are the intellectual equivalent of the Dunedain, guarding the borders of our privacy and never asking for our thanks. They are a powerful, and often overlooked, ally in the fight for privacy. Am I being hyperbolic? A little, but less than you think. Librarians are much cooler, and nerdier, than I ever gave them credit for. And no, not all of them are women.
I just realised I did an exceptionally poor job of explaining financial aid in this country. For undergraduate students, you fill in a federal form, which includes info about your income and your parents' income (if you are a dependent). The schools you apply to assess your 'family contribution'- how much money you can pay- and come up with a combination of loans, grants, and work study (student jobs) to meet your total need, including costs like housing, food, and even a tiny bit of pocket money. Need blind schools do this after you're accepted, so they don't consider their cost in your admission. A few non-need blind schools have set numbers for financial aid, so their ratios of paying to non-paying students remain stable.
What this works out to is this- if you come from a poor family, or even a middle class family with lots of kids in college, it's quite likely that your financial aid 'package' will cover 100% of your need. The more your family can afford, the less aid you get. It causes some awkward situations with middle class families being less able to send their kids to expensive schools than poor families, because the poor families have a $0 in their 'expected family contribution' box, but for the most part, it enables people to go based on their academic, rather than financial, merits. This ignores the bewildering array of private, sports, and professional funding available.
As I pointed out above, the main obstacle in this system is that it's hard to get through the cumbersome financial aid process for a smart kid with good english skills and two college-educated parents. A poor, less confident kid with less savvy parents or weak english skills or both could have a serious problem figuring out how to navigate through the morass. The money's there, it's just not easy enough to get. I consider that a social problem, and a bad one, at that.
Sorry for the two volume novel- I'm passionate about education.
I just don't think that you understand how it works here. My undergrad and graduate schools, like all the schools I have applied to and a majority of schools in the country, has a 'need blind' admissions policy. You get accepted before they even know if you can pay. There are exceptions to this, but they are exceptions, not the rule. Its theoretically possible for a school to have 100% of it's incoming class on 100% financial aid- completely unable to pay. That would be a disaster for a school financially, but it could happen. So at a 'need blind' school, admissions are not at all based on your ability to pay- you get in, they help you find the money, which will be in the form of work, grants, and loans. And that's undergrad- I've never heard of ANY grad program that isn't 'need blind', and some are fully funded- essentially free. So if you are capable of getting in, you will be able to attend- maybe without much of a beer money budget, but you'll be able to go.
My first year undergrad roommate was a chinese kid from the Lower East Side of Manhattan- his parents didn't speak a word of English, his dad worked in a Chinese restauraunt for $5.25 an hour, and their kids went to Tufts, Bryn Mawr, U Penn and Northwestern- that's about $115,000 PER KID- and they all got funded by the government. Yes, they had debt when they got out- probably $50,000, but for someone graduating from one of those schools, $50k over 20 years (which is the typical loan length) isn't that bad. Their post college salary minus college loan payments was probably ten times what their father made in a given year, so it's a good deal in the long run. And state schools are often 1/3 or 1/2 as much.
So if you study and get good grades in secondary school, and you really want to, you can go to college here, no matter how poor you are. The problem is that no one in poorer (inner city or rural) areas is teaching kids that this is possible- they just don't understand that they have these opportunities, and no one wants to take the time to go tell them. Our educational problems are largely social, not economic.
As for requirements, once again, I can't compare because I've never applied to an Australian school. But I would argue that whatever the written requirements are, the quality of candidates at a top program is quite high- with the occasional exception for the legacy (i.e. George Bush Jr.) type students. The philosophy of American schools is that anyone can apply, but we're only going to take the very best of our applicants- so the possibility for an idiot to apply to Harvard Med, for instance, shouldn't be confused with the likelihood they'll be admitted, which is zero.
I guess I'm going to have to step in on this 'buy a place' comment. I'll try not to flame, but I'm pretty angry. In this country, the vast majority of candidates for a given university are admitted based on SAT/ACT standardised tests, secondary schol transcripts, essays, and for better/smaller schools, interviews. I would argue that this is a merit based system. I worked hard for a place at a top 10 school, and my family had neither influence nor money to help me- just encouragement. I paid for it alone, through grants and loans. I think the 'buying a place' thing is a lie perpetuated by people who didn't get into a decent school because they didn't bother to do their homework in 11th grade. I did my homework, I worked hard, and I got in on my own.
There is a small weight given to people with family connections, or George Bush Jr. would be working the fry machine at McDonalds. But after five years in college at a top 10 American school, I never met a person that was a 'legacy' student. I would say these people probably represent less than 5% of admitted students.
As for relative value to schools in other places, I am not qualified to assess that, but I will tell you that name recognition is everything here, to a point. It will get your foot in the door, but it's up to you after that. The name of my school got me great interviews- IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, EDS. But my interviewing skills got me the job. How do I know? Because those places, as well as the place I worked, interviewed hundreds of people. They only hired a few.
So what's the bottom line here- am I getting sued, or not? What about users who used filesharing apps with no username- how're they going to ID those people?
But I guess what I'm really asking here is this: are they suing everyone? Are they settling, or taking everyone into court? Should I even borrow money for grad school, if I'm just going to end up giving it to the RIAA? Who gets the money here, if they do win, the RIAA or the artists who were 'robbed'? I assumed that this was a scare tactic, and I admit that I'm a little scared, but come on! You can't sue every file trader! There must be millions! How much of this sh!t are we going to put up with before people start throwing around the 'b' word? That's right, I said it. BOYCOTT. Any takers?
...when I was in college, and also when I went to work, which got me fired before I learned to control it. Here are some tactics I used to get over it (some of these have been mentioned):
1. Stay busy. If you don't have time to waste, you wont waste it. Or you'll flunk out.
2. Social pressure helps- study in groups, do work in groups. I found letting myself down much easier than letting others down.
3. Routine is king. Get into a routine, especially with regards to sleep.
4. Change your major. If you hate your major or you're doing it because it's trendy/lucrative, change it. Study something you really love. When your textbooks are so fascinating that you stay up late reading them the night the reading is assigned, instead of the night before it's due, you'll find motivation isn't a problem. I changed my major and went from academic probation to the Dean's list.
5. Get a girlfriend (or boyfriend). Preferably someone who likes to party, but is a serious student. My last year of college my girlfriend saved me, in two ways. First, you're not out chasing the ladies (or gentlemen), so you aren't as inclined to hit the bars on, say, a Tuesday. Second, she studied a lot, which left me feeling as if I should also be studying, so I did.
Those things helped me a lot, and I hope they help you. Good luck!
Chicago also has some of the best architecture in the country, all packed into about three square miles. There's a boat tour of Chicago architecture that's so cool my girlfriend's grandmother didn't complain once the whole 3 1/2 hour tour- which made it worth the price alone. There are dozens of buildings by prominent architects in different styles covering the last hundred years or so. Also, in the west burbs there are half a dozen Frank Llyod Wright houses, which are also incredible. I could go on... But if you are interested in architecture, Chicago is THE place, on top of having four of the top six museums in the country.
And I have one. It's a love/hate relationship - I love what I paid for it (great value) and hate how it breaks about once a week. Once again, you get what you pay for...
You're right- the task is spatial rotation (I wrote a paper on it for a psych course in college). They gave women a picture of shape, made of a group of attached cubes similar to a DNA strand or something, and asked them to choose which of four additional shapes were a rotated version of the same shape.
Men scored better than women across the population, although the difference was slight. The results are reproduceable, which is to say if I give out the survey to 500 american college freshmen (and women), the women consistently average a tiny bit lower on this task.
The task is specific, rarely seen in nature, and the results, as mentioned above, differ only slightly. draw you conclusions as you will.
Aetrix, you're spot on with the part of your argument against Lamarckian evolution. I'm just not sure it applies to this discussion- what about the influence of Darwin?
I think one can make an argument for intelligence as inheritable. *If* we assume that one could inherit intelligence, and a part of intelligence is spatial awareness, then wouldn't people with better spatial sense be more likely to make it back home, and thus more apt to pass on their genes?
I'm not trying to sh*t on you here, I'm really interested in getting to the bottom of this. What do you think?
Similar theories account for a demonstrated superiority of women over men in extremely fine motor skills- things like berry picking, not spear throwing. This is an rarely-discussed part of the theory, and although it goes along with the women as foragers theory, it's often left out of popular recaps because it weakens the man = physical / women = social dichotomy.
It also has a big impact with things like computers, where women, overall and *controlled for other factors* should be slightly better with the mouse than men, due to their somewhat improved fine motor skills.
I still think it's mostly social factors that are holding women back in the computer world. I just don't think anyone plops them down in front of a computer and says "here, learn this, you'll have to feed yourself one day." It's not 'cool' for girls to program- it's only 'cool' for them to learn IM and play out their social lives in one more medium. That's what we need to address. Instead of buying your daughter a bigger monitor, spend some time with her, and let her know that it is OK for girls to learn about programming, OS's, and other 'geeky' stuff.
Games Workshop is once again trying to funnel money to their own retail stores and their own web site, rather than independent retailers. They have a consistent history, from the late eighties, when I started to play their games, of screwing independents whenever possible- for a while they were forcing game stores to become "Chapter Approved" to sell their stuff, which means you sign an agreement giving them more money.
This policy of only them being allowed to sell their merchandise via the Internet is just more of the same.They are doing their best to become the Microsoft of the gaming world, and it's the reason I quit buying things from them ten YEARS ago. It's a damn shame, too, because their creative arm is the best in the business, by far. I made the switch to pen and paper games, like Gurps, and eventually computer games.
I think as Games Workshop continues to alienate their customers with sketchy sales practices, aggressive pricing, and constantly re-releasing newer versions of old models, forcing a collector to re-buy his army every few years to participate in tournaments, they will eventually piss off their players to the point that they will seek other things to do with their spare time. There's no shortage of other options, including intelligent, geek-friendly gaming companies like Steve Jackson Games. [I have no affiliation, I just think they're cool.]