[...][T]his is a natural response to the rise of the DVR. Quite so. Neilsen has been issuing ratings numbers on how many people actually watch commercials, and advertisers are using those numbers to determine how much they are willing to pay. If the networks want ad money at the same rate, they need to deliver the attention of the audience to the advertisers' products, and, as other posters have noted, we go back to something akin to television at its inception.
No, "throwing your vote away" is when you don't vote at all -- which is what the majority of the US population did at the last presidential elections.
I somewhat like the system they have in place in Australia for voting (New South Wales at least). Voting is compulsory, and if you don't vote, you can be fined. Sure it would probably only work here long enough for one candidate to be elected on a platform of removing the fines for not voting, but I like the idea that there is a punisher administered for not exercising one's rights/taking part in the decision of who will shape the immediate future.
When I was in biopsych class about 2 or 3 years ago, this type of issue was discussed. The evidence at that time was that the brains of everyone with Alzheimer's deteriorated at a similar rate but that those with more education as well as those who continued learning throughout life showed fewer symptoms.
The hypothesis we entertained was that because learning new things leads to new connections in the brain through dendritic growth, the brains inate plasticity routed around the damaged areas through the new connections. Admittedly, I haven't RTFA, but it doesn't sound like this study says anything that new.
look at the grammer and spelling. A little too good right? This guy works for the CIA!!!!! THERE USING THE ALIENS AS COVER SO WE DON'T REALISE THEIR USING FASTFOOD TO GIVE US MIND CONTROL DRUGS!!!!!
Fat is a side affect to hide the REAL issue! They couldn't get past our AFDBs so they tried something else!
I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the possibility of one of these things being left inside after a surgery. If doctors can miss an eight inch or larger retractor when closing up a patient, what is stopping them from missing one of the few little robots with which they are doing remote surgery?
Granted, the interface would probably have each robot indicated as to status (in body or out) and it might not be an issue, but there's always the possibility of sensor or total failure.
Also, if one were left inside and not noticed, imagine a recall instruction when another operation was over. The thought of having a little robot trying to force itself out of your body...*shudder*
I was going to mod up an AC, but for some reason I felt like posting.
Someone has probably already put this out further down the thread, but I would not encourage pharmaceuticals as the first option when dealing with ADHD/ADD. I've not seen any research on adults, but with children and adolescents, coffee often works just as well as Ritalin for relieving ADHD/ADD symptoms. It's also much less expensive, so I would encourage trying coffee as the first option before more expensive medications.
However, I could be wrong. I don't have an advanced psych degree, just a baccalaureate.
I was hoping I wouldn't be the only one to have to reply that there are window managers out there that are, imo, exponentially nicer than the desktop environments out there. E or WindowMaker being my two preferred window managers, I have not noticed these slow load times unless, as a previous poster stated, I attempt to run KDE programs.
It seems, though, that more and more people are moving toward the desktop environments rather than window managers, and I am quite confused as to why. Is it familiarity with them from Solaris or some other variant of UNIX? Is it the similarity to MS Windows with the desktop icons and what is essentially a start bar? If anyone actually reads this, could that someone please enlighten me?
I've no idea how good this comment will be as it is going to be a small snippet of something I'll probably put down in my journal some day (like my last post that I'm too lazy to link to now). I'd like to address this particular bit of your post:
"That used to be "magic" and was the subject of religion. Now it's just "science", but nothing really changed."
What I suggest is that science is just as much based on faith as is religion. Science is not the search for truth so much as it is the search for useful explanations of anything.
As a hypothetical example, people used to sacrifice W number of goats to Jack the god of plants at the start of crop sowing to ensure a good harvest. Sometimes this would appease Jack and other times they would have a less than stellar harvest. Along comes scientists who tell these people that good harvests have nothing to do with the supernatural. That sure blood is a good fertilizer, but W number of goats don't have enough blood to fertilize all of their fields and killing that many goats would just be wasteful. These people should instead use X fertilizer because it contains Y molecules which are great food for Z plants which these people are growing. The people use the fertilizer and get more predictable results than with the sacrificing.
Certainly the scientific way turned out to be quite useful. The farmers now had a more reliable way to ensure good harvests. This does not, however, prove that the fertilizer used on the fields did not please Jack the god of plants more than the sacrificed goats and because of this he ensured a good harvest by allowing the plants to use the food in the soil to their best advantage. Rather, we take it on faith that Jack the god of plants had nothing to do with the harvest and that the qualities of the fertilizer and the plants are sufficient to explain the outcome.
Or, to put it in a way perhaps more palatable to hard-line adherents of scientific truth that detest comparisons with any sort of religion, what happens if (more likely when) somewhere down the line study finds that all we currently believe about physics (for example) is completely off. This current understanding of physics, though useful in that it helped us develop numerous ideas and products that have been very beneficial, is as utterly wrong in the face of the new knowledge of physics as a child believing its face will remain contorted for the rest of its life if it continues making funny faces. So, this future shows that the current theories of physics are not nearly truth. All of the study in those theories has been for nothing though those who performed the research believed they were learning truths about the physical realm (world/universe/what have you) and finding new truths. This future time shows it was not truth, yet it was one time believed to be. Does that not make the previous beliefs faith based? (the truth refered to here being scientific truth)
The reason for the writing, and thinking about it this should have been at the top, is the way that many fans of science proclaim that science can find some actual/absolute/what have you truth about the nature of things. That is probably possible as far as scientific truth goes. However, scientific truth is only absolute truth if one chooses to believe that there is nothing that exists that we cannot touch, see, hear, smell, or taste with our senses or constructed aids to those senses. It is entirely possible that there are entities whose actions account for the things we observe, yet these entities do not share the characteristics of other entities around us and had little to no contact with us, so we did not develop means by which to observe said entities. The same could be said for various forces or whatnot, but this view is not scientific since this cannot be observed and, therefore, cannot be tested. To outright dismiss this and other such possibilities is not necessarily wrong, but in taking up this belief, one is in effect saying "I take on faith that nothing whi
Of course, like the other replies, I'll state my opinion on the described feminist objection to pornography.
Does porn violate women by turning them into objects to be gawked at? Perhaps. What else violates women by turning them into objects to be gawked at? Being sexually attractive to anyone (male or female) and being in any one place at any one time to be seen by any one of the people who finds her sexually attractive.
The same can be said for men as well. If I am walking down a street and someone sees me and upon seeing me finds me sexually attractive, I have now become nothing but a sexual object to be gawked at as far as that person is concerned. I highly doubt that some woman who sees me walking on the street and finds me sexually attractive is thinking "I wonder if he has a Ph.D." Rather, I'd wager she's more likely thinking "I wonder if he'd give it to me the way I like it."
I have no idea if any of that actually served to get my point across, so I'll just sum up: Everyone is a sexual object to anyone who finds him or her sexually attractive.
I would also add that there is nothing wrong with gazing upon those you find attractive. Unless they find it disturbing, in which case you shouldn't be doing that anymore. But this is all something I should probably just rant about in my journal.
Another useful tool not yet mentioned is checkinstall. You run it in place of make install, and it builds whatever package you use (rpm, deb, slack) and installs it with the proper tools for that package. You need no make uninstall as you can use your package utilities to uninstall or upgrade later.
I would also assert that this "if you don't like it, leave" mentality is unAmerican. The proper attitude should be "if you don't like it, vote and change it." Certainly, if there were a mass exodous of citizens from the country, that would change things because there would be not enough workforce to keep the infrastructure running. However, short of that mass exodous, leaving the country will not change anything. Voting, however, has changed much.
For all those people who love to say "if you don't like it here, leave," I'm considering turning them in to homeland security as terrorists because they are trying to undermine the American way. I'm not going to do it, but it's a fun idea.
I'm glad someone actually brought this idea into the discussion, thought I'd have to do it. We were having a discussion of a similar sort not too long ago in a photography class I was taking.
The debate over digital vs. film photography is like the debate on cds vs. vinyl. There is a place for both, but the newer technology will not eradicate the older anytime soon. Digital photography does not yet have the resolution of film but will someday. Even with the resolution, images of the same scene taken with digital cameras do not look the same as those taken with film. It is all in the eye of the beholder, but prints from film negatives have a more pleasant feel to them just as audio on vinyl can (perhaps often) have a more pleasant feel to the same audio on cd.
There is the point that digital images can remove grain. However, it is the grain in a film image that can make it great. Some feel that audio on vinyl sounds better than that of cd because of the barely audible background hiss of the needle in the groove. Some musicians, notably Portishead, use the audio characteristics of vinyl for effect, recording music they want to sample to vinyl then sampling off that vinyl for the final track. Some photographers, like me if I could get it right, do the same with the grain of film stock.
After all that, it just seems to come down to one thing. Just as audio tape and cds have not completely displaced vinyl from the world of music, digital photography will not displace film photography. Like the parent said, artists (and people in general) are drawn to certain mediums. If someone likes film over digital, they'll use film (even if the major producers cease production and they have to make their own).
"My whole philosophy is that it's private property, it's reasonable for the bars to ask you to do this to get in, and at the end of the day, you don't HAVE to go there. You don't like their policies, don't go."
I like your attitude. It makes me wish there were more people with the same attitude so we wouldn't have this rash of legislation banning smoking in bars and night clubs. I'm not a smoker, but it's asinine to force everyone to stop smoking just because you want to frequent a particular bar or club. You know what the environment is like. If you do not want to be in that environment, don't go.
I may have been bleeding some of the research results between viewing general media violence and the increase in aggression (especially toward women) in those who do not like pornography that are made to watch pornography (the same is not true for those who do like pornography). I have much more information and citations on that, but I'm reticent to go digging through my mounds of material from a pschology and law research course.
At any rate, two researchers who call into question the conclusion that viewing antisocial portrayals is highly associated with antisocial behavior based on its, at times, extremely modest effect. [Freedman, J. L. (1988). Television violence and aggression: What the evidence shows. In S. Oskamp (Ed.) Television as a social issue. Applied social psychology annual, Vol.8. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. (p. 407)] and [McGuire, W. J. (1986). The myth of massive media impact: Savagings and salvagings. In G. Comstock (Ed.), Public communication and behavior, Vol. 1. Oralando, Fla.: Academic Press. (pp. 260, 407)]
This is way too long for the short response I indended. The main point was that if you do find the citations for the study, please post it/them as I'd be interested in reading them.
I am not completely familiar with the video game studies you are referring to (the one with college students playing doom or the like?), but I am assuming they are similar to some studies I am familiar with. One in particular found that when children saw an adult interacting aggressively (violently) with an inflatable doll (either live watching or seeing a video tape), that the children would act more aggressively with the doll than those who had not seen the aggressive interaction. These findings are similar to those found in more recent studies of younger children watching more violent programming.
I will address two caveats with these types of studies. The first study I mentioned, and subsequent studies like it, show only short-term (minutes after exposure) effects. The more recent studies with habitually more aggressive children and violent television did not control for family dynamics or the possibility that children who are more aggressive naturally seek out more violent stimulation.
So, the findings of these studies are interesting, but I would say hardly conclusive evidence that violent media can make children more violent. This is assuming the children have half-decent parents who can point out that this stuff is not real.
I can find citations for one or some of the studies I mentioned given a few hours to look through my myriad texts if they are wanted.
You just covered most all of what I did in replying to another post. I should have known others here would have ample knowledge on the subject. Although I am curious what your thoughts on the guilty knowledge test are as compared with the control question test.
We covered this fairly well in a recent psychology and law seminar course I took.
The short version: The control question test is crap. The guilty knowledge test seems to be a good test.
Long version:
Polygraphs only measure autonomic nervous system response. A difference in their charts could be stress associated with lying, but it could equally be startle from a loud noise outside the interview room, uncomfortability with the particular question in general, annoyance that you've been asked the same question multiple times, or any number of other things.
As you stated, the baseline of the control question test (CQT) is worthless. It's all a trick to convince the testee(sp?) that the polygraph machine is an all powerful detector of false information. It is also very easily fooled by simple techniques. Polygraphers will say it has a 95% or better accuracy rate, but there is evidence that the CQT can have a one-third rate of false positives. The unreliability of the CQT is the reason why polygraph evidence is inadmissible in most courts.
The guilty knowledge test (GKT) is much more difficult to set up but more reliable in its results. The GKT works best in murder cases, and also in robbery cases as well. The police must keep certain aspects of the crime from the media, such as type of weapon used or where the body was found for example, and use those for the test.
The suspect is then attatched to a polygraph and asked questions such as "When you killed X, did you use a hunting knife, baseball bat,.45 pistol?" and responses are measured. Heightened responses, as well as the actual answer given, for the actual weapon used are interpreted as the suspect having knowledge that a particular weapon was used in the crime. Over a certain number of questions (I cannot recall the number) the probability that someone will have the highest reactions to the actual answers to the questions who did not have anything to do with the crime is very small, even if you were imagining how you would commit the crime.
From what I've seen, this test has a much higher reliability rate than the control question test though it is used about 0% of the time. It does, however, rely on the suspect not having been shown crime scene photos and the evidence to be used in the questioning not being leaked.
Why is it that I always think I've never made sense when I reach the end of anything I write?
I shall preface all further comment by stating that I am not a very muscular or athletic person (do very little exercise [less then] and weigh ~130). Also, it appears that you are already out of the school system, so this may or may not apply. Now...
The administration is ineffectual and apathetic in most any school because they are often sued when they step in. At some point someone will sue because they feel their child has been unjustly dealt with by the school. The child (= 18 yrs) could be the worst abuser of others in the school, but that parent doesn't want their child punished for it.
Because the administration is ineffective, we are left with few appealing options. The option I champion is defending yourself.
Let's use the example of when I first moved into the school district from which I graduated high school. When I first showed up, there was one guy that just wouldn't leave me alone. I was slightly unhinged at the time, so I began to choke him when he would aggrivate me.
Then the school year ended (I moved in during the final quarter of my seventh-grade year) and the next began. This particular student continued to annoy me and escalated into hurling blunt objects at me. I then proceeded to use the environment to my advantage (grass on an slope can be slippery), place him on the ground, and kick him until he damn near vomited.
After this, no one attempted any sort of physical or verbal abuse. Granted, in some places this can get you shot/stabbed/all sorts of nastiness, but at least they won't be calling you a bitch and beating on you every day.
Even if you don't come out on top, you'll often gain more respect from others simply by trying to fight back. Just know the easily exploited areas of the human body and attack them. And if you fight back and lose, maybe it'll be seen as really pathetic that this/these person(s) are constantly assaulting you and they'll lose respect for doing it or just stop (pure speculation).
All of this goes only for single (double at most) assailants. If they come in groups or their friends don't understand that an altercation with one unarmed individual does not require their assistance, you'd need special help.
At the end it seems that I may have come off as an ass. If so, I am probably being too gruff due to my annoyance with modern school practice with regard to bullying and its resistance. The "don't fight back, go get a teacher" doctrine just teaches kids to not be self-sufficent but appeal to authority figures to solve any problem they might have.
Anyway, defending yourself is a good-thing from my point of view.
As a side note, my negative attitude toward the public school system comes from the poor teaching methods used by many public school teachers because (second reason) they never wanted to be teachers in the first place, don't like kids, and are only there to get a paycheck. I had an English teacher who attempted to remove a book from my hand while I was quietly reading during class after finishing the assignment.
Also, I believe that the new tendency for schools to be evaluated by their students' scores on standardized tests will lead to, if it hasn't already, an even more sub-standard education because all that will be taught to students is what will be on the test.
I don't have anything more to say than ckaminski did, just that I used the example of appellate judges because I am more familiar with that. As far as I know, amicus briefs are filed any time there is an interested party that wishes to clarify the court's understanding of certain issues.
I just wanted to add one thing that you probably already knew..
"Judges are not scientific experts and cannot be expected to judge the scientific methods used except in the most trivial experiments or studies."
Judges, at least in the Appellate (I should know how to spell that after taking a class just last semester) level, have help understanding scientific and other issues that they are not knowledgeable of through amicus curiae briefs.
These are essentially research papers put together by interested parties that attempt to inform a judge about anything scientifically/psychologically/etc. complicated.
Of course, amicus briefs can be filed by neutral parties or groups in favor of either side, so judges must weigh what both sides offer. But, hopefully, they can get a good idea of whether x evidence or testimony should be allowed in.
Why do I always think I've not made any sense at the end of a post?
I was going to write something very interesting, but my mind has just gone blank, so I'll just ramble.
The correlations between aggression and TV are not that solid. In way too much summation, the studies (the ones I've heard of at least) found that the children who exhibited the most aggressive behavior also watched the most (in terms of time) violent programming. This is all well and good, but none of the studies could say that it was not the children who were more aggressive to begin with that sought out the violent programming more frequently. I guess Bhutan would have been the best place to test this possibility, so I'll probably be asking around in a few months to see if anyone did and is publishing a study on this.
Another study found that when a young child (sorry, cannot remember the exact age group though I did see the video footage) saw an adult act aggressively toward an inflatable toy (smacking around one of those blow-up toys with the weight at the bottom so when you smack it around it always returns to standing up) the young child acted in a similar manner.
It's also similar to the studies done on pornography and aggression. Older studies found that viewing pornography led to more aggressive attitudes. Newer studies found that it was only the people who were offended by/didn't like/etc. pornography that had this aggressive shift in attitude (I have the article handy if you'd like a citation).
Aside from the inconclusiveness of the correlations on aggression, the results are only for the short-term, usually only a few minutes after the stimulus and not retested later, iirc.
There also seems to be an effect of parental guidance if my informal and unstructured questions to other people are trustworthy. I, and the many others I've talked to, have watched some very violent programming from about 8 or 10 through the present and plan on continuing to do so. Neither they, nor I have become overly aggressive from all of this viewing of violent material. We all believe that the most significant factor in this was our parents telling us at an early age that TV was not real and if we did the things we saw on TV there would be real consequences (pain, trouble, etc.) that were much different from TV. So, for what it's worth, that appears to be quite a mitigating factor in the acting out of observed behavior. This, of course, requires active parenting and not just letting the TV be a babysitter.
After all that, I guess all I was trying to say is that TV is not the only thing to blame. A previous poster asked whether it could have been any of the other elements brought on by the modernization of Bhutan by the king. All of these could have been factors. I'd just like to see more, and more in-depth, studies before primarily blaming TV/media.
Also, I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence.
Hopefully that made sense. Why is it that when I'm not intoxicated I always think I've not been coherent?
Slashdot Mirror
No, "throwing your vote away" is when you don't vote at all -- which is what the majority of the US population did at the last presidential elections.
I somewhat like the system they have in place in Australia for voting (New South Wales at least). Voting is compulsory, and if you don't vote, you can be fined. Sure it would probably only work here long enough for one candidate to be elected on a platform of removing the fines for not voting, but I like the idea that there is a punisher administered for not exercising one's rights/taking part in the decision of who will shape the immediate future.
I'm certain someone else has said this, but...
When I was in biopsych class about 2 or 3 years ago, this type of issue was discussed. The evidence at that time was that the brains of everyone with Alzheimer's deteriorated at a similar rate but that those with more education as well as those who continued learning throughout life showed fewer symptoms.
The hypothesis we entertained was that because learning new things leads to new connections in the brain through dendritic growth, the brains inate plasticity routed around the damaged areas through the new connections. Admittedly, I haven't RTFA, but it doesn't sound like this study says anything that new.
NO ONE LISTEN TO THIS POSTER!!!
look at the grammer and spelling. A little too good right? This guy works for the CIA!!!!! THERE USING THE ALIENS AS COVER SO WE DON'T REALISE THEIR USING FASTFOOD TO GIVE US MIND CONTROL DRUGS!!!!!
Fat is a side affect to hide the REAL issue! They couldn't get past our AFDBs so they tried something else!
I know I shouldn't respond to an AC on grammar issues, but I'm putting off more important things, so why not?
"Those who know more than I" is correct grammar. Test it by inserting a verb after: Those who know more than I (do). You speak better than I (can/do).
I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the possibility of one of these things being left inside after a surgery. If doctors can miss an eight inch or larger retractor when closing up a patient, what is stopping them from missing one of the few little robots with which they are doing remote surgery?
Granted, the interface would probably have each robot indicated as to status (in body or out) and it might not be an issue, but there's always the possibility of sensor or total failure.
Also, if one were left inside and not noticed, imagine a recall instruction when another operation was over. The thought of having a little robot trying to force itself out of your body...*shudder*
I was going to mod up an AC, but for some reason I felt like posting.
Someone has probably already put this out further down the thread, but I would not encourage pharmaceuticals as the first option when dealing with ADHD/ADD. I've not seen any research on adults, but with children and adolescents, coffee often works just as well as Ritalin for relieving ADHD/ADD symptoms. It's also much less expensive, so I would encourage trying coffee as the first option before more expensive medications.
However, I could be wrong. I don't have an advanced psych degree, just a baccalaureate.
Thanks for the reply. All good reasons and well said. If I had mod points and hadn't ruined my ability to use them by posting, I'd mod you up.
I was hoping I wouldn't be the only one to have to reply that there are window managers out there that are, imo, exponentially nicer than the desktop environments out there. E or WindowMaker being my two preferred window managers, I have not noticed these slow load times unless, as a previous poster stated, I attempt to run KDE programs.
It seems, though, that more and more people are moving toward the desktop environments rather than window managers, and I am quite confused as to why. Is it familiarity with them from Solaris or some other variant of UNIX? Is it the similarity to MS Windows with the desktop icons and what is essentially a start bar? If anyone actually reads this, could that someone please enlighten me?
I've no idea how good this comment will be as it is going to be a small snippet of something I'll probably put down in my journal some day (like my last post that I'm too lazy to link to now). I'd like to address this particular bit of your post:
"That used to be "magic" and was the subject of religion. Now it's just "science", but nothing really changed."
What I suggest is that science is just as much based on faith as is religion. Science is not the search for truth so much as it is the search for useful explanations of anything.
As a hypothetical example, people used to sacrifice W number of goats to Jack the god of plants at the start of crop sowing to ensure a good harvest. Sometimes this would appease Jack and other times they would have a less than stellar harvest. Along comes scientists who tell these people that good harvests have nothing to do with the supernatural. That sure blood is a good fertilizer, but W number of goats don't have enough blood to fertilize all of their fields and killing that many goats would just be wasteful. These people should instead use X fertilizer because it contains Y molecules which are great food for Z plants which these people are growing. The people use the fertilizer and get more predictable results than with the sacrificing.
Certainly the scientific way turned out to be quite useful. The farmers now had a more reliable way to ensure good harvests. This does not, however, prove that the fertilizer used on the fields did not please Jack the god of plants more than the sacrificed goats and because of this he ensured a good harvest by allowing the plants to use the food in the soil to their best advantage. Rather, we take it on faith that Jack the god of plants had nothing to do with the harvest and that the qualities of the fertilizer and the plants are sufficient to explain the outcome.
Or, to put it in a way perhaps more palatable to hard-line adherents of scientific truth that detest comparisons with any sort of religion, what happens if (more likely when) somewhere down the line study finds that all we currently believe about physics (for example) is completely off. This current understanding of physics, though useful in that it helped us develop numerous ideas and products that have been very beneficial, is as utterly wrong in the face of the new knowledge of physics as a child believing its face will remain contorted for the rest of its life if it continues making funny faces. So, this future shows that the current theories of physics are not nearly truth. All of the study in those theories has been for nothing though those who performed the research believed they were learning truths about the physical realm (world/universe/what have you) and finding new truths. This future time shows it was not truth, yet it was one time believed to be. Does that not make the previous beliefs faith based? (the truth refered to here being scientific truth)
The reason for the writing, and thinking about it this should have been at the top, is the way that many fans of science proclaim that science can find some actual/absolute/what have you truth about the nature of things. That is probably possible as far as scientific truth goes. However, scientific truth is only absolute truth if one chooses to believe that there is nothing that exists that we cannot touch, see, hear, smell, or taste with our senses or constructed aids to those senses. It is entirely possible that there are entities whose actions account for the things we observe, yet these entities do not share the characteristics of other entities around us and had little to no contact with us, so we did not develop means by which to observe said entities. The same could be said for various forces or whatnot, but this view is not scientific since this cannot be observed and, therefore, cannot be tested. To outright dismiss this and other such possibilities is not necessarily wrong, but in taking up this belief, one is in effect saying "I take on faith that nothing whi
Of course, like the other replies, I'll state my opinion on the described feminist objection to pornography.
Does porn violate women by turning them into objects to be gawked at? Perhaps. What else violates women by turning them into objects to be gawked at? Being sexually attractive to anyone (male or female) and being in any one place at any one time to be seen by any one of the people who finds her sexually attractive.
The same can be said for men as well. If I am walking down a street and someone sees me and upon seeing me finds me sexually attractive, I have now become nothing but a sexual object to be gawked at as far as that person is concerned. I highly doubt that some woman who sees me walking on the street and finds me sexually attractive is thinking "I wonder if he has a Ph.D." Rather, I'd wager she's more likely thinking "I wonder if he'd give it to me the way I like it."
I have no idea if any of that actually served to get my point across, so I'll just sum up:
Everyone is a sexual object to anyone who finds him or her sexually attractive.
I would also add that there is nothing wrong with gazing upon those you find attractive. Unless they find it disturbing, in which case you shouldn't be doing that anymore. But this is all something I should probably just rant about in my journal.
Another useful tool not yet mentioned is checkinstall. You run it in place of make install, and it builds whatever package you use (rpm, deb, slack) and installs it with the proper tools for that package. You need no make uninstall as you can use your package utilities to uninstall or upgrade later.
I like it
I would also assert that this "if you don't like it, leave" mentality is unAmerican. The proper attitude should be "if you don't like it, vote and change it." Certainly, if there were a mass exodous of citizens from the country, that would change things because there would be not enough workforce to keep the infrastructure running. However, short of that mass exodous, leaving the country will not change anything. Voting, however, has changed much.
For all those people who love to say "if you don't like it here, leave," I'm considering turning them in to homeland security as terrorists because they are trying to undermine the American way. I'm not going to do it, but it's a fun idea.
I, too, love this game. I loved its predecessor as well. Short comment for me, I was just happy to see someone else with such good taste.
I'm glad someone actually brought this idea into the discussion, thought I'd have to do it. We were having a discussion of a similar sort not too long ago in a photography class I was taking.
The debate over digital vs. film photography is like the debate on cds vs. vinyl. There is a place for both, but the newer technology will not eradicate the older anytime soon. Digital photography does not yet have the resolution of film but will someday. Even with the resolution, images of the same scene taken with digital cameras do not look the same as those taken with film. It is all in the eye of the beholder, but prints from film negatives have a more pleasant feel to them just as audio on vinyl can (perhaps often) have a more pleasant feel to the same audio on cd.
There is the point that digital images can remove grain. However, it is the grain in a film image that can make it great. Some feel that audio on vinyl sounds better than that of cd because of the barely audible background hiss of the needle in the groove. Some musicians, notably Portishead, use the audio characteristics of vinyl for effect, recording music they want to sample to vinyl then sampling off that vinyl for the final track. Some photographers, like me if I could get it right, do the same with the grain of film stock.
After all that, it just seems to come down to one thing. Just as audio tape and cds have not completely displaced vinyl from the world of music, digital photography will not displace film photography. Like the parent said, artists (and people in general) are drawn to certain mediums. If someone likes film over digital, they'll use film (even if the major producers cease production and they have to make their own).
No need to go that far. We all lose track of articles at some point. Thanks for the effort of looking.
"My whole philosophy is that it's private property, it's reasonable for the bars to ask you to do this to get in, and at the end of the day, you don't HAVE to go there. You don't like their policies, don't go."
I like your attitude. It makes me wish there were more people with the same attitude so we wouldn't have this rash of legislation banning smoking in bars and night clubs. I'm not a smoker, but it's asinine to force everyone to stop smoking just because you want to frequent a particular bar or club. You know what the environment is like. If you do not want to be in that environment, don't go.
I may have been bleeding some of the research results between viewing general media violence and the increase in aggression (especially toward women) in those who do not like pornography that are made to watch pornography (the same is not true for those who do like pornography). I have much more information and citations on that, but I'm reticent to go digging through my mounds of material from a pschology and law research course.
At any rate, two researchers who call into question the conclusion that viewing antisocial portrayals is highly associated with antisocial behavior based on its, at times, extremely modest effect. [Freedman, J. L. (1988). Television violence and aggression: What the evidence shows. In S. Oskamp (Ed.) Television as a social issue. Applied social psychology annual, Vol.8. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. (p. 407)] and [McGuire, W. J. (1986). The myth of massive media impact: Savagings and salvagings. In G. Comstock (Ed.), Public communication and behavior, Vol. 1. Oralando, Fla.: Academic Press. (pp. 260, 407)]
This is way too long for the short response I indended. The main point was that if you do find the citations for the study, please post it/them as I'd be interested in reading them.
Just a couple things.
I am not completely familiar with the video game studies you are referring to (the one with college students playing doom or the like?), but I am assuming they are similar to some studies I am familiar with. One in particular found that when children saw an adult interacting aggressively (violently) with an inflatable doll (either live watching or seeing a video tape), that the children would act more aggressively with the doll than those who had not seen the aggressive interaction. These findings are similar to those found in more recent studies of younger children watching more violent programming.
I will address two caveats with these types of studies. The first study I mentioned, and subsequent studies like it, show only short-term (minutes after exposure) effects. The more recent studies with habitually more aggressive children and violent television did not control for family dynamics or the possibility that children who are more aggressive naturally seek out more violent stimulation.
So, the findings of these studies are interesting, but I would say hardly conclusive evidence that violent media can make children more violent. This is assuming the children have half-decent parents who can point out that this stuff is not real.
I can find citations for one or some of the studies I mentioned given a few hours to look through my myriad texts if they are wanted.
You just covered most all of what I did in replying to another post. I should have known others here would have ample knowledge on the subject. Although I am curious what your thoughts on the guilty knowledge test are as compared with the control question test.
We covered this fairly well in a recent psychology and law seminar course I took.
.45 pistol?" and responses are measured. Heightened responses, as well as the actual answer given, for the actual weapon used are interpreted as the suspect having knowledge that a particular weapon was used in the crime. Over a certain number of questions (I cannot recall the number) the probability that someone will have the highest reactions to the actual answers to the questions who did not have anything to do with the crime is very small, even if you were imagining how you would commit the crime.
The short version: The control question test is crap. The guilty knowledge test seems to be a good test.
Long version:
Polygraphs only measure autonomic nervous system response. A difference in their charts could be stress associated with lying, but it could equally be startle from a loud noise outside the interview room, uncomfortability with the particular question in general, annoyance that you've been asked the same question multiple times, or any number of other things.
As you stated, the baseline of the control question test (CQT) is worthless. It's all a trick to convince the testee(sp?) that the polygraph machine is an all powerful detector of false information. It is also very easily fooled by simple techniques. Polygraphers will say it has a 95% or better accuracy rate, but there is evidence that the CQT can have a one-third rate of false positives. The unreliability of the CQT is the reason why polygraph evidence is inadmissible in most courts.
The guilty knowledge test (GKT) is much more difficult to set up but more reliable in its results. The GKT works best in murder cases, and also in robbery cases as well. The police must keep certain aspects of the crime from the media, such as type of weapon used or where the body was found for example, and use those for the test.
The suspect is then attatched to a polygraph and asked questions such as "When you killed X, did you use a hunting knife, baseball bat,
From what I've seen, this test has a much higher reliability rate than the control question test though it is used about 0% of the time. It does, however, rely on the suspect not having been shown crime scene photos and the evidence to be used in the questioning not being leaked.
Why is it that I always think I've never made sense when I reach the end of anything I write?
I shall preface all further comment by stating that I am not a very muscular or athletic person (do very little exercise [less then] and weigh ~130). Also, it appears that you are already out of the school system, so this may or may not apply. Now...
The administration is ineffectual and apathetic in most any school because they are often sued when they step in. At some point someone will sue because they feel their child has been unjustly dealt with by the school. The child (= 18 yrs) could be the worst abuser of others in the school, but that parent doesn't want their child punished for it.
Because the administration is ineffective, we are left with few appealing options. The option I champion is defending yourself.
Let's use the example of when I first moved into the school district from which I graduated high school. When I first showed up, there was one guy that just wouldn't leave me alone. I was slightly unhinged at the time, so I began to choke him when he would aggrivate me.
Then the school year ended (I moved in during the final quarter of my seventh-grade year) and the next began. This particular student continued to annoy me and escalated into hurling blunt objects at me. I then proceeded to use the environment to my advantage (grass on an slope can be slippery), place him on the ground, and kick him until he damn near vomited.
After this, no one attempted any sort of physical or verbal abuse. Granted, in some places this can get you shot/stabbed/all sorts of nastiness, but at least they won't be calling you a bitch and beating on you every day.
Even if you don't come out on top, you'll often gain more respect from others simply by trying to fight back. Just know the easily exploited areas of the human body and attack them. And if you fight back and lose, maybe it'll be seen as really pathetic that this/these person(s) are constantly assaulting you and they'll lose respect for doing it or just stop (pure speculation).
All of this goes only for single (double at most) assailants. If they come in groups or their friends don't understand that an altercation with one unarmed individual does not require their assistance, you'd need special help.
At the end it seems that I may have come off as an ass. If so, I am probably being too gruff due to my annoyance with modern school practice with regard to bullying and its resistance. The "don't fight back, go get a teacher" doctrine just teaches kids to not be self-sufficent but appeal to authority figures to solve any problem they might have.
Anyway, defending yourself is a good-thing from my point of view.
As a side note, my negative attitude toward the public school system comes from the poor teaching methods used by many public school teachers because (second reason) they never wanted to be teachers in the first place, don't like kids, and are only there to get a paycheck. I had an English teacher who attempted to remove a book from my hand while I was quietly reading during class after finishing the assignment.
Also, I believe that the new tendency for schools to be evaluated by their students' scores on standardized tests will lead to, if it hasn't already, an even more sub-standard education because all that will be taught to students is what will be on the test.
Now I really don't think it'll make sense
I don't have anything more to say than ckaminski did, just that I used the example of appellate judges because I am more familiar with that. As far as I know, amicus briefs are filed any time there is an interested party that wishes to clarify the court's understanding of certain issues.
Then again, I'm not in law school.
I just wanted to add one thing that you probably already knew..
"Judges are not scientific experts and cannot be expected to judge the scientific methods used except in the most trivial experiments or studies."
Judges, at least in the Appellate (I should know how to spell that after taking a class just last semester) level, have help understanding scientific and other issues that they are not knowledgeable of through amicus curiae briefs.
These are essentially research papers put together by interested parties that attempt to inform a judge about anything scientifically/psychologically/etc. complicated.
Of course, amicus briefs can be filed by neutral parties or groups in favor of either side, so judges must weigh what both sides offer. But, hopefully, they can get a good idea of whether x evidence or testimony should be allowed in.
Why do I always think I've not made any sense at the end of a post?
I was going to write something very interesting, but my mind has just gone blank, so I'll just ramble.
The correlations between aggression and TV are not that solid. In way too much summation, the studies (the ones I've heard of at least) found that the children who exhibited the most aggressive behavior also watched the most (in terms of time) violent programming. This is all well and good, but none of the studies could say that it was not the children who were more aggressive to begin with that sought out the violent programming more frequently. I guess Bhutan would have been the best place to test this possibility, so I'll probably be asking around in a few months to see if anyone did and is publishing a study on this.
Another study found that when a young child (sorry, cannot remember the exact age group though I did see the video footage) saw an adult act aggressively toward an inflatable toy (smacking around one of those blow-up toys with the weight at the bottom so when you smack it around it always returns to standing up) the young child acted in a similar manner.
It's also similar to the studies done on pornography and aggression. Older studies found that viewing pornography led to more aggressive attitudes. Newer studies found that it was only the people who were offended by/didn't like/etc. pornography that had this aggressive shift in attitude (I have the article handy if you'd like a citation).
Aside from the inconclusiveness of the correlations on aggression, the results are only for the short-term, usually only a few minutes after the stimulus and not retested later, iirc.
There also seems to be an effect of parental guidance if my informal and unstructured questions to other people are trustworthy. I, and the many others I've talked to, have watched some very violent programming from about 8 or 10 through the present and plan on continuing to do so. Neither they, nor I have become overly aggressive from all of this viewing of violent material. We all believe that the most significant factor in this was our parents telling us at an early age that TV was not real and if we did the things we saw on TV there would be real consequences (pain, trouble, etc.) that were much different from TV. So, for what it's worth, that appears to be quite a mitigating factor in the acting out of observed behavior. This, of course, requires active parenting and not just letting the TV be a babysitter.
After all that, I guess all I was trying to say is that TV is not the only thing to blame. A previous poster asked whether it could have been any of the other elements brought on by the modernization of Bhutan by the king. All of these could have been factors. I'd just like to see more, and more in-depth, studies before primarily blaming TV/media.
Also, I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence.
Hopefully that made sense. Why is it that when I'm not intoxicated I always think I've not been coherent?