Unless this reaction process can produce ATP or Glucose as an output, it will be useless to try and 'embed' in plant cells. From the, very sketchy on details, article, it seems that the output is a compound that is relatively inert. To be useful and scale-able, any improvements to the Calvin Cycle need to have glucose and oxygen as outputs and sunlight and CO2 as inputs.
-- You're quite right though, there's no escaping the fact that he wasn't really Herbert's baron.
But when I saw the movie, Lynch's Dune, my reaction to Baron Harkonnen was visceral and emotional. Lynch did a fantastic job of communicating in just a few scenes how morally bankrupt and, not to put too fine a point on it, Eveeell, the Baron was. THAT was totally consistent with Herbert's books, the Harkonnen name was still a shorthand for degeneracy thousands of years later.
For me it was the movie and then the books. The tone and feeling of the books made it to the screen in Lynch's version. These were totally absent from the modern movie versions (I was so pissed at it, I started yelling at the screen after 5 minutes and had to stop watching after 10).
The sonic doo-hickey was a movie shorthand for Paul's (via his mother and superior trainers) martial skill. Plus, it looked good.
I don't fault Lynch, he did a good job of converting a very dense book to the screen and delivering enough emotional impact that I read the books and am still talking about them 25 years later.
+1 Culture DOES vary from company to company, department to department. A culture is defined by a bunch of things: what behaviors are rewarded, relationship between employees and managers, relationship between employees, where is the focus (outside innovation and productivity or inside atmosphere and procedures?). There is no single 'correct' culture for developers, it really comes down to what kind of culture the developer wants to work in. Some developers want innovation and creativity to be the focus, some want to have structure and order. Some developers enjoy work because they like their coworkers, some are competitive and are in it for the recognition and rewards.
I work for a psychological test development company and we have done a lot of research on this very topic. Success is based on the "fit" between the person and the position. There is no one-size-fits-all position, just as there is no one type of developer.
Being faster? That's just cheating. On reading the headline, I thought they had developed an algorithm that predicted your next move, which would have been much more impressive. You DO get a ~40% improved chance of winning with this strategy:
When your opponent loses, his next move will be to beat whatever your move was on that round.
move 1) opp: rock you: paper # opponent loses to paper, so his next move will be to win over paper move 2) opp: scissors you: rock # opponent loses to rock, so his next move will be to win over rock move 3) opp: paper you: scissors # opponent loses to scissors, so his next move will be to win over scissors etc.
It's self-reinforcing because after losing several throws in a row, opp becomes frustrated and less analytical, making it harder for them to see the pattern they are developing.:)
But that isn't absolute prediction, that's just playing on your opponent's human instinct. The robot hand isn't predicting anything.
o Sony Bloggie o Nokia N96 - and it was able to connect to the internet through that phone with no additional installed anything in the Netherlands o Wife's iPhone o a drawer full of mp3/mp4 players and cameras
I didn't catch the repeated 'plug into' theme until after I had posted.
I prefer Linux to Windows and OS X. Everything I plug into my computer just works or the software to make it work is just a few clicks away. The interface is pretty and both my new laptop and older desktop are still snappy and reactive after years of service (Windows just tends to get slower and slower, even with a reinstall). The whole mac needs to be replaced seemingly every 6 months because Apple came out with a new whiz-bang piece of hardeware. I need to reboot the windows computers in my office often because they are constantly losing the thread and locking up or forgetting where the USB mouse is or flipping the keyboard layout setting to 'UK' for no apparent reason whenever a user's back is turned. The Macs do strange and mysterious things with files and are (I'll say it out loud) NOT intuitive at all. In the last month in a relatively hertergenous environment, I have spent roughly 95% of my user support time on windows and mac issues. It's not because my users don't know what they are doing, it's just that the os they are using is failing them. Even esoteric and weird things I plug into my laptop are recognized by Ubuntu. This isn't 'It just works'. This is 'It works really well and intuitively'. The prospect of programming on an Ipad is laughable and while toting a netbook to a user convention is more reasonable that lugging around a laptop, I would go blind in a week and develop severe spinal injuries if I was forced to do actual work on one of them. Laptops and desktops will go away when computers can read our minds. Until that happens, I will keep using and recommending Ubuntu, because it works really well and intuitively.
This was almost attempted in the early 70's. Look up the "Hartman Value Profile". It was shot down in flames, I guess the concept of Civil Rights has changed a bit since then . . .
My laptop, which is picky and prone to weirdness, had no problems with the upgrade. I think I clicked a total of three on screen prompts, rebooted, and everything just worked. I haven't dug too deeply into all of the new improvements yet (no time), but I am once again impressed with how well the system operates.
Past releases had clean graphical interfaces on top of a solid OS. Koala is really pretty AND is still a solid OS.
Couldn't they approach the 3 or 4 largest linux distros/repositories and ask? I, also, got my NVIDIA driver from a repository, not the NVIDIA web site.
It's not about revenue, at least direct revenue. Microsoft has absolutely no intention of ever actually putting it's software on the OLPC. The strategy here is to delay or stop OLPC adoption cold. IF there are rumors that an MS version of the OLPC is 'just around the corner' compatible with those 'thousands of educational programs' then a lot of buyers will wait for the new version to come out. This is what killed the Osborne lo these many years ago. The sales people kept talking about the next bigger better faster version which meant that no one wanted to buy the version that was on the market NOW.
I laughed out loud when I read the title to this article, and kept chuckling when I actually read the article. This is all about MS just trying to through a monkey wrench in the OLPC machinery, and NOTHING to do with a serious effort on their part to bring their fantastic product to developing world.
I was worrying about the problem with a musician friend of mine in early '96. One of those, "wouldn't it be great if we could do this?" kinds of talks where you imagine doing a performance with a huge machine behind you not making any physical noise but affecting audience members' physiology. A few days later, I was singing in the shower when it hit me, 'harmonics'! You can play two tones together that have a harmonic at a much lower frequency! Long story short, I used a tone generator and laid down a series of tones on a DAT tape. One for the left channel, and a slightly different one on the right channel. When you looked at the signals together on an oscilloscope, you can see where the harmonic peaks occur and 'tune' for the frequencies you want. I went with a DAT tape because I needed perfect reproduction. A bad tape speed or bleed from one channel to the other would mess it up. The oscilloscope used was actually a mixing program on a computer (don't remember which one now). The harmonics created in this way are not uniform, especially in an unknown performance space. You end up with areas where the harmonic is produced and areas where two different tones are playing. As a solution to this, we did the following during the performance:
have your crowd be moving
have your speakers change distance between them
map out performance spaces ahead of time and identify 'hot spots' for audience.
I thought I was pretty hot shit coming up with this idea in the shower. Then a friend did some research and found out that the British army employed just this method (play two tones to get an infrasound freq) as a method of crowd control in 1973. The army discontinued it's use when it caused seizures in some people with epilepsy. Reported side effects for us (the people doing the performance) and from our first (and only) audience for this thing:
discomfort 25%
nausea 15%
paranoia 5%
no effect 55%
1) Your manager [or your chain of management] was/were completely incompetent bozos, or else
2) Unbeknownst to you, THEY took the credit [with the higher-ups] for the 1.2 million in savings, and THEY pocketed the year-end performance bonuses.
Oh, it was nothing so sinister. The structure of the company (okay, it was a big bank) is extremely rigid. Every title is allowed to make a certain range of salary before you need to be promoted to another title. And I WAS promoted. I increased my salary by 35% within 3 years, quite a feat within a traditional and traditionally slow moving industry. When you are in a big company with that kind of formal structure, it's really difficult to reward high performance. Which is why most high performers move out of those kinds of organizations after a while:)
Another benefit (usually) of small companies; you are paid for what you do, not what the HAY number on your function says you should be paid.
I have worked for large corporations (22,000 employee bank) and very small companies (12 people) and my personal preference is to work with small groups of people who are fired up by interests similar to mine and who are good fits personality-wise. The big company was more financially secure, carried more prestige, and offered great and solid retirement options. On the other side, it was next to impossible to affect change, my contributions (while recognized in the form of raises and titles) didn't really make a big difference to the overall picture. Even coming up with a system that saved 1.2 million a year in expenses warranted only an 'attaboy'. Because, in a company controlling 60 billion in assets, 1.2 million isn't really that big a deal! The small company offered much more freedom, personal responsibility, and allowed me to make a direct and substantial impact on the bottom line of the whole company. I was in direct communication with the owner of the company, not to a manager with a senior manager with an executive with an executive vp to the CEO.
Best advice: Play to your strengths and go with work that motivates you. You will spend about 60% of your life at work. You should spend that time doing things that motivate, inspire, and energize you.
- Oakbox
disclaimer: I am a programmer for career coaches:)
'the dominant impression gained from reading these studies is that finding accurate correlations between file-sharing and loss of revenue for the music industry is tremendously difficult.'
Proving that a correlation is causative instead of coincidental IS very difficult. You could also blame the drop in CD revenue on other factors during this same time frame. You could make the case that Global Warming is the cause of lower sales.
It's better to say 'we don't have a listing for that locality' than to frustrate a lot of job seekers. I've made the assumption that you haven't turned on the 'local listings' option because it looks much better to say "We have 800 positions in Eastern Montana!" than to say you have none in Billings.
You know what would be slick? Searching on area codes and the first three digits of a phone number. That would give the employer and the job seeker a really quick way to drill in on locality. You wouldn't have to even GIVE listings of locality beyond country name. You could just ask 'What are the first six digits of your phone number?'
Your company has a culture, every company has a culture. The culture of the company tells you and everyone else what they value. If your preferred culture and the values you hold do not match up with the culture and the values of your employer, prepare for an unhappy future. Because the culture of a company is difficult to change and your values change very slowly over time.
For the OP: If they are explicitly asking you to study on your own time and you don't want to, say, "no". If you are not getting paid to do it and you don't want to do it, don't do it. I read another post above about making a formal letter to the boss, "I need XYZ to do the job and I am telling you that if XYZ does not happen, there will be problems later on." XYZ = [training, more help, coaching, etc]
More about culture: There are 4 basic cultures. Read up about the early work of 'Robert E. Quinn' and the 'Competing Values Framework'. In a nutshell, your company is most strongly aligned with one of the following cultures:
- Open : we like things loose and social, we invent and grow, we are creative
- Market : show me the money, productivity, bottom line
- Hierarchy: planning, structure, infrastructure, procedures, chain of command, quality
- Clan : people are our most important asset (and actually MEAN that)
On the values side, look up 'Edgar H Schein' and his values framework. He identified a list of what people values and how different corporate cultures match or oppose those values.
The bottom line of all this rambling is this; be aware of what you need from your work and whether or not your company is providing for those needs. If it isn't, maybe it's time to look for another company or another department.
It looks to me like the Hartman Value Profile has entered the realm of pop psychology. It's something poeople want to have, so they'll believe it.
I find just the opposite to be true. No one wants to believe that there are things about yourself that you cannot change.
Fourth, many (even most) psychological tests are easily gamed if you understand what the test is for and how it works.
This is a qualitative call and is called the 'transparency' of a test. Can you see through the test to see how your answers are going to affect the outcome? There are several different strategies for making a test less transparent. In the case of the HVP, there is actually a calculation possible which measures whether or not you are telling the truth. The only way to game it is to be a) intimately familiar with the instrument (something that takes a lot of time and planning) or b) lift someone else's statement order that you want to be 'like'.
In closing, simply let me caution you against believing any psychological test to be accurate as a stand-alone evaluation.
I agree with that, no test is 100% accurate. (the Hartman is actually two separate tests) Mostly, you are happy to get a test validated to the point where it is in the 80th percentile range. That's why psychologists (real ones, anyway) usually give a battery of tests that slightly overlap in some of the traits being measured. This gives a higher overal confidence in the scores and also gives a greater chance that 'gaming' is weeded out. You may be able to see through one or two tests, but (again) unless you are intimately familiar with all of the instruments and the models behind them, your gaming will show up to a trained observer.
There are a lot of trash tests out there. And there's a lot of places where they can fall down: - Transparency: any single test probably fails here due to (possible) familiarity of the subject with what the test is measuring. After you know what INTP means the Meyers-Briggs test results become less reliable. - Based on a faulty model: Is it based on intrinsic traits described by Jung, is it more behavioural and based on Skinner, or axiological as in the HVP? Did the test designer just make something up? - Bad math: Is the test properly validated with the correct population? Is the instrument even measuring what you THINK it's measuring? - Social desirability: The very wording used in a test may have cultural weights that don't make the jump from one language to another or even one REGION to another. In the case of the HVP, once you read about it some more you will see that the Hartman institute is VERY touchy about changes to wording. Social desirability is answering a test how you think you are 'supposed' to answer a test. Well designed tests take this into account.
Caution and prudence are necessary, I wouldn't trust just one test by itself 100%. But I could probably trust it 70%:) And if you are running a company where only 1 in 3 candidates you hire fit into your culture and make good employees, that 70% starts looking mighty attractive. Psychological testing hasn't really caught on in the states, it's easier to fire people if they don't work out. Here in the Netherlands (and for much of Europe) it's a different story all together. It's very expensive to a company to let someone go. That's why I think companies are looking for ANY advantage they can get in the hiring process.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless this reaction process can produce ATP or Glucose as an output, it will be useless to try and 'embed' in plant cells. From the, very sketchy on details, article, it seems that the output is a compound that is relatively inert. To be useful and scale-able, any improvements to the Calvin Cycle need to have glucose and oxygen as outputs and sunlight and CO2 as inputs.
That's just freaky, I just finished re-reading "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson last night and this story pops up.
-- You're quite right though, there's no escaping the fact that he wasn't really Herbert's baron.
But when I saw the movie, Lynch's Dune, my reaction to Baron Harkonnen was visceral and emotional. Lynch did a fantastic job of communicating in just a few scenes how morally bankrupt and, not to put too fine a point on it, Eveeell, the Baron was. THAT was totally consistent with Herbert's books, the Harkonnen name was still a shorthand for degeneracy thousands of years later.
For me it was the movie and then the books. The tone and feeling of the books made it to the screen in Lynch's version. These were totally absent from the modern movie versions (I was so pissed at it, I started yelling at the screen after 5 minutes and had to stop watching after 10).
The sonic doo-hickey was a movie shorthand for Paul's (via his mother and superior trainers) martial skill. Plus, it looked good.
I don't fault Lynch, he did a good job of converting a very dense book to the screen and delivering enough emotional impact that I read the books and am still talking about them 25 years later.
+1
Culture DOES vary from company to company, department to department. A culture is defined by a bunch of things: what behaviors are rewarded, relationship between employees and managers, relationship between employees, where is the focus (outside innovation and productivity or inside atmosphere and procedures?). There is no single 'correct' culture for developers, it really comes down to what kind of culture the developer wants to work in. Some developers want innovation and creativity to be the focus, some want to have structure and order. Some developers enjoy work because they like their coworkers, some are competitive and are in it for the recognition and rewards.
I work for a psychological test development company and we have done a lot of research on this very topic. Success is based on the "fit" between the person and the position. There is no one-size-fits-all position, just as there is no one type of developer.
- Richard
Being faster? That's just cheating. On reading the headline, I thought they had developed an algorithm that predicted your next move, which would have been much more impressive. You DO get a ~40% improved chance of winning with this strategy:
When your opponent loses, his next move will be to beat whatever your move was on that round.
move 1) opp: rock you: paper # opponent loses to paper, so his next move will be to win over paper
move 2) opp: scissors you: rock # opponent loses to rock, so his next move will be to win over rock
move 3) opp: paper you: scissors # opponent loses to scissors, so his next move will be to win over scissors
etc.
It's self-reinforcing because after losing several throws in a row, opp becomes frustrated and less analytical, making it harder for them to see the pattern they are developing. :)
But that isn't absolute prediction, that's just playing on your opponent's human instinct. The robot hand isn't predicting anything.
Fiction comes to life?
In the Baroque Cycle, the background story is all about a special, heavy form of gold with magical powers.
Neat.
Farmville is worth more than EA like AOL was worth more than Time-Warner.
. . . it's not.
- oakbox
This reads more like a commercial than an article for Slashdot.
What's up with that?
Or am I simply not seeing the big picture here?
- oakbox
i wonder what you plug into your computer....
:-)
o Sony Bloggie
o Nokia N96 - and it was able to connect to the internet through that phone with no additional installed anything in the Netherlands
o Wife's iPhone
o a drawer full of mp3/mp4 players and cameras
I didn't catch the repeated 'plug into' theme until after I had posted.
- oakbox
I prefer Linux to Windows and OS X. Everything I plug into my computer just works or the software to make it work is just a few clicks away. The interface is pretty and both my new laptop and older desktop are still snappy and reactive after years of service (Windows just tends to get slower and slower, even with a reinstall). The whole mac needs to be replaced seemingly every 6 months because Apple came out with a new whiz-bang piece of hardeware. I need to reboot the windows computers in my office often because they are constantly losing the thread and locking up or forgetting where the USB mouse is or flipping the keyboard layout setting to 'UK' for no apparent reason whenever a user's back is turned. The Macs do strange and mysterious things with files and are (I'll say it out loud) NOT intuitive at all.
In the last month in a relatively hertergenous environment, I have spent roughly 95% of my user support time on windows and mac issues. It's not because my users don't know what they are doing, it's just that the os they are using is failing them.
Even esoteric and weird things I plug into my laptop are recognized by Ubuntu. This isn't 'It just works'. This is 'It works really well and intuitively'.
The prospect of programming on an Ipad is laughable and while toting a netbook to a user convention is more reasonable that lugging around a laptop, I would go blind in a week and develop severe spinal injuries if I was forced to do actual work on one of them.
Laptops and desktops will go away when computers can read our minds. Until that happens, I will keep using and recommending Ubuntu, because it works really well and intuitively.
- oakbox
This was almost attempted in the early 70's. Look up the "Hartman Value Profile". It was shot down in flames, I guess the concept of Civil Rights has changed a bit since then . . .
My laptop, which is picky and prone to weirdness, had no problems with the upgrade. I think I clicked a total of three on screen prompts, rebooted, and everything just worked. I haven't dug too deeply into all of the new improvements yet (no time), but I am once again impressed with how well the system operates.
Past releases had clean graphical interfaces on top of a solid OS. Koala is really pretty AND is still a solid OS.
-Oakbox
Couldn't they approach the 3 or 4 largest linux distros/repositories and ask? I, also, got my NVIDIA driver from a repository, not the NVIDIA web site.
- Oakbox
William Shakespeare made between 6 and 10 pounds for each of his screenplays.
Those stories about telling what brand of cigarettes a person was smoking from space seem a lot more plausible.
It's not about revenue, at least direct revenue.
Microsoft has absolutely no intention of ever actually putting it's software on the OLPC.
The strategy here is to delay or stop OLPC adoption cold. IF there are rumors that an MS version of the OLPC is 'just around the corner' compatible with those 'thousands of educational programs' then a lot of buyers will wait for the new version to come out.
This is what killed the Osborne lo these many years ago. The sales people kept talking about the next bigger better faster version which meant that no one wanted to buy the version that was on the market NOW.
I laughed out loud when I read the title to this article, and kept chuckling when I actually read the article. This is all about MS just trying to through a monkey wrench in the OLPC machinery, and NOTHING to do with a serious effort on their part to bring their fantastic product to developing world.
My son likes(d) Super Mario Brothers and Cars. Pokemon is a complete nightmare if your child cannot read well.
I was worrying about the problem with a musician friend of mine in early '96. One of those, "wouldn't it be great if we could do this?" kinds of talks where you imagine doing a performance with a huge machine behind you not making any physical noise but affecting audience members' physiology. A few days later, I was singing in the shower when it hit me,
'harmonics'! You can play two tones together that have a harmonic at a much lower frequency!
Long story short, I used a tone generator and laid down a series of tones on a DAT tape. One for the left channel, and a slightly different one on the right channel. When you looked at the signals together on an oscilloscope, you can see where the harmonic peaks occur and 'tune' for the frequencies you want. I went with a DAT tape because I needed
perfect reproduction. A bad tape speed or bleed from one channel to the other would mess it up. The oscilloscope used was actually a mixing program on a computer (don't remember which one now).
The harmonics created in this way are not uniform, especially in an unknown performance space. You end up with areas where the harmonic is produced and areas where two different tones are playing. As a solution to this, we did the following during the performance:
have your crowd be moving
have your speakers change distance between them
map out performance spaces ahead of time and identify 'hot spots' for
audience.
I thought I was pretty hot shit coming up with this idea in the shower. Then a friend did some research and found out that the British army employed just this method (play two tones to get an infrasound freq) as a method of crowd control in 1973. The army discontinued it's use when it caused seizures in some people with epilepsy.
Reported side effects for us (the people doing the performance) and from our first (and only) audience for this thing:
discomfort 25%
nausea 15%
paranoia 5%
no effect 55%
Anyway, that's the coolest thing I've ever built.
Sorry for the delay in responding to this.
:)
1) Your manager [or your chain of management] was/were completely incompetent bozos, or else
2) Unbeknownst to you, THEY took the credit [with the higher-ups] for the 1.2 million in savings, and THEY pocketed the year-end performance bonuses.
Oh, it was nothing so sinister. The structure of the company (okay, it was a big bank) is extremely rigid. Every title is allowed to make a certain range of salary before you need to be promoted to another title. And I WAS promoted. I increased my salary by 35% within 3 years, quite a feat within a traditional and traditionally slow moving industry. When you are in a big company with that kind of formal structure, it's really difficult to reward high performance. Which is why most high performers move out of those kinds of organizations after a while
Another benefit (usually) of small companies; you are paid for what you do, not what the HAY number on your function says you should be paid.
I have worked for large corporations (22,000 employee bank) and very small companies (12 people) and my personal preference is to work with small groups of people who are fired up by interests similar to mine and who are good fits personality-wise.
:)
The big company was more financially secure, carried more prestige, and offered great and solid retirement options. On the other side, it was next to impossible to affect change, my contributions (while recognized in the form of raises and titles) didn't really make a big difference to the overall picture. Even coming up with a system that saved 1.2 million a year in expenses warranted only an 'attaboy'. Because, in a company controlling 60 billion in assets, 1.2 million isn't really that big a deal!
The small company offered much more freedom, personal responsibility, and allowed me to make a direct and substantial impact on the bottom line of the whole company. I was in direct communication with the owner of the company, not to a manager with a senior manager with an executive with an executive vp to the CEO.
Best advice: Play to your strengths and go with work that motivates you. You will spend about 60% of your life at work. You should spend that time doing things that motivate, inspire, and energize you.
- Oakbox
disclaimer: I am a programmer for career coaches
'the dominant impression gained from reading these studies is that finding accurate correlations between file-sharing and loss of revenue for the music industry is tremendously difficult.'
Proving that a correlation is causative instead of coincidental IS very difficult. You could also blame the drop in CD revenue on other factors during this same time frame. You could make the case that Global Warming is the cause of lower sales.
You know what would be slick? Searching on area codes and the first three digits of a phone number. That would give the employer and the job seeker a really quick way to drill in on locality. You wouldn't have to even GIVE listings of locality beyond country name. You could just ask 'What are the first six digits of your phone number?'
Oh shit, I should have patented this idea.
I caught that too. I just assumed he was being humorous.
Your company has a culture, every company has a culture. The culture of the company tells you and everyone else what they value. If your preferred culture and the values you hold do not match up with the culture and the values of your employer, prepare for an unhappy future. Because the culture of a company is difficult to change and your values change very slowly over time.
For the OP: If they are explicitly asking you to study on your own time and you don't want to, say, "no". If you are not getting paid to do it and you don't want to do it, don't do it. I read another post above about making a formal letter to the boss, "I need XYZ to do the job and I am telling you that if XYZ does not happen, there will be problems later on." XYZ = [training, more help, coaching, etc]
More about culture: There are 4 basic cultures. Read up about the early work of 'Robert E. Quinn' and the 'Competing Values Framework'. In a nutshell, your company is most strongly aligned with one of the following cultures:
- Open : we like things loose and social, we invent and grow, we are creative
- Market : show me the money, productivity, bottom line
- Hierarchy: planning, structure, infrastructure, procedures, chain of command, quality
- Clan : people are our most important asset (and actually MEAN that)
On the values side, look up 'Edgar H Schein' and his values framework. He identified a list of what people values and how different corporate cultures match or oppose those values.
The bottom line of all this rambling is this; be aware of what you need from your work and whether or not your company is providing for those needs. If it isn't, maybe it's time to look for another company or another department.
- Richard
It looks to me like the Hartman Value Profile has entered the realm of pop psychology. It's something poeople want to have, so they'll believe it.
:) And if you are running a company where only 1 in 3 candidates you hire fit into your culture and make good employees, that 70% starts looking mighty attractive. Psychological testing hasn't really caught on in the states, it's easier to fire people if they don't work out. Here in the Netherlands (and for much of Europe) it's a different story all together. It's very expensive to a company to let someone go. That's why I think companies are looking for ANY advantage they can get in the hiring process.
I find just the opposite to be true. No one wants to believe that there are things about yourself that you cannot change.
Fourth, many (even most) psychological tests are easily gamed if you understand what the test is for and how it works.
This is a qualitative call and is called the 'transparency' of a test. Can you see through the test to see how your answers are going to affect the outcome? There are several different strategies for making a test less transparent. In the case of the HVP, there is actually a calculation possible which measures whether or not you are telling the truth. The only way to game it is to be a) intimately familiar with the instrument (something that takes a lot of time and planning) or b) lift someone else's statement order that you want to be 'like'.
In closing, simply let me caution you against believing any psychological test to be accurate as a stand-alone evaluation.
I agree with that, no test is 100% accurate. (the Hartman is actually two separate tests) Mostly, you are happy to get a test validated to the point where it is in the 80th percentile range. That's why psychologists (real ones, anyway) usually give a battery of tests that slightly overlap in some of the traits being measured. This gives a higher overal confidence in the scores and also gives a greater chance that 'gaming' is weeded out. You may be able to see through one or two tests, but (again) unless you are intimately familiar with all of the instruments and the models behind them, your gaming will show up to a trained observer.
There are a lot of trash tests out there. And there's a lot of places where they can fall down:
- Transparency: any single test probably fails here due to (possible) familiarity of the subject with what the test is measuring. After you know what INTP means the Meyers-Briggs test results become less reliable.
- Based on a faulty model: Is it based on intrinsic traits described by Jung, is it more behavioural and based on Skinner, or axiological as in the HVP? Did the test designer just make something up?
- Bad math: Is the test properly validated with the correct population? Is the instrument even measuring what you THINK it's measuring?
- Social desirability: The very wording used in a test may have cultural weights that don't make the jump from one language to another or even one REGION to another. In the case of the HVP, once you read about it some more you will see that the Hartman institute is VERY touchy about changes to wording. Social desirability is answering a test how you think you are 'supposed' to answer a test. Well designed tests take this into account.
Caution and prudence are necessary, I wouldn't trust just one test by itself 100%. But I could probably trust it 70%