I know they *say* that this can't/shouldn't be done, but it's also entirely possible that employers would like to see what *legal* drugs one happens to be taking.
I have seasonal affective disorder (a.k.a. winter depression) that is managed by taking St John's Wort about four months out of the year. Yes, I still drag my ass to work on time, and I still maage to be reasonably productive. But I don't need someone to decide that I can't do my data-entry-at-a-desk job because I'm on meds.
Not to mention, if you follow the "drink 8 glasses of water a day" advice and occasionally consume alcohol and/or caffeine in addition to that, it can screw with drug tests because the specific gravity of your urine gets so low that they think you deliberately diluted the sample. (This happened to me the one and only time I've taken a drug test, and I was *highly* annoyed.)
I find this disturbing for a few different reasons:
1. Our lovely lawsuit-happy society, and the risk of problems on space flights. "Space tourists" could end up suing if something went wrong, eventually bankrupting the industry and putting a stop to space exploration. This would just suck.
2. Imagine the stupidity that has the potential to ensue with the "corporatization" of space. Case in point: Would you really, honestly want to have say, MS or a similarly large company claiming ownership of space, or someone trying to patent oxygen?:)
3. Rocket launches use a lot of fuel. Way to run out of fossil fuels that much faster. Could be bad. *shrug*
X-envelope-info: To: "'fenwick@xxxxx.xxx'" Subject: Cthulu for Dummies Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 13:47:45 -0500
Dear Sir or Madam:
I am writing to you about a matter of great importance to our company, namely, the protection of our intellectual property. We would appreciate it if you would review this letter and respond by June 1, 1998.
As you may know, IDG Books Worldwide ("IDGB") publishes and distributes globally a line of reference books known as the "...For Dummies(R)" series. The "...For Dummies(R)" series has been in existence since November 1991 and has enjoyed unprecedented success. In fact, there are over 50 million "...For Dummies(R)" books in print and the books have been translated into 38 languages. The "...For Dummies(R)" series includes, among many other titles, Windows(R) For Dummies(R), The Internet For Dummies(R), Politics For Dummies(R), Personal Finance For Dummies(R), and Fitness For Dummies(R). IDGB also licenses and distributes numerous line extensions and ancillary products based on the "...For Dummies(R)" series, including musical CDs, clothing, toys, and calendars.
The "...For Dummies(R)" series is immediately recognizable by, among other things, the trademark "...For Dummies(R)." The "...For Dummies(R)" trademark appears not only on the books themselves but also on trade and consumer advertising, in catalogs, on point of sale displays, on giveaway items, on IDGB's Web site, and on other promotional material distributed around the world. IDGB has made a considerable investment in promoting the identification of its "...For Dummies(R)" trademark to its distributors and customers. As a result, and as evidenced by the many articles written and comments received from distributors, customers, and the press, it is clear that IDGB's "...For Dummies(R)" trademark is widely identified with IDGB. In short, this trademark is an extremely valuable asset of IDGB.
It has come to our attention that you have published an article on the www.sonic.net Web site (specifically, http://www.sonic.net/fenwick/chaos/cthudum.html) entitled "Cthulu for Dummies." Unfortunately, this title uses and infringes IDGB's federally registered "...For Dummies(R)" trademark. In addition, it is highly likely that visitors could be misled into believing that this article was authorized by or is associated with IDGB.
We hope that this matter can be resolved quickly and amicably. Accordingly, we request that you remove the infringing material from the Web page and anywhere else it appears and provide IDGB with your written assurances that you will refrain from infringing its trademarks. Please be advised that if this matter cannot be immediately resolved, IDGB is fully prepared to enforce its rights. We look forward to hearing from you on or before June 1, 1998.
Sincerely,
Terri Morgan Manager, Legal Services IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. 919 East Hillsdale Boulevard, Suite 400 Foster City, CA 94404 650/655-3040 - V 650/655-3299 - F legal@idgbooks.com
Now, mind you, this was a humor site that is now known as Cthulu for Morons... how anyone could have taken this as being sanctioned by IDG is completely beyond me. Sheesh.
Perhaps (and I'm not saying this is right) this is a question of the feeling that what is posted here is within the community and what is published in a book is outside of the community.
I agree that if one wants to maintain absolute privacy about one's personal life, one should not say anything about it to anyone -- electronically or otherwise.:) But some people do see/. as a community of people like themselves, and would be willing to share more here than with those perceived as outsiders.
I'm not saying that this makes the hellmouth book a BAD idea. Quite the contrary. But it is a way to explain people's reactions to the book, and even some of the negativity that gets tossed at Katz (who's seen as "not one of us" by many here).
Heck, I've got more in common with Katz than with the average prototypical/. reader. Sometimes I wonder if I should even post here.:)
Re:Stock market news not SlashWorthy(tm)
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
·
· Score: 2
Well, yes and no.
I actually think that Rob posting this particular story in this particular way was the right thing to do. I am sick of hearing about it probably as much as Rob himself is (then again, I also work for accountants).
There are plenty of reasons this could be seen as news for nerds, though:
1. Lots of people on/. probably either have employee stock options through this company or are otherwise invested in tech stocks, and have lost a lot of money. Of course, they'd have to be complete idiots to not be aware of that as it is.:)
2. Some folks in various little startups who had their stock crash (like a friend of mine who saw her company's stock go from $100 to $27 in the past two weeks) are worried that they are going to lose their jobs. THAT angle, IMHO, is a legit one for/. to pursue.
3. As a result of all this, some people either in the industry or studying to join the industry are taking a lot of flack from more conservative and traditional businesspeople who have used the past two weeks to say "Ha-ha, told you so!" And hostility toward geeks tends to turn a story into/. material.;)
But they're not as good as all that. It's possible, even EASY, to be a good test-taker who has no motivation.
In my completely unscientific experience, the correlation between (old) SAT scores and college success falls apart at about 1300 or thereabouts (at least for those I knew who took them in 11th-12th grade rather than 7th or 8th; the correlation falls apart a bit sooner for those of us who took them young). And it wasn't just lack of success, it was crashing and burning in a BIG and spectacular way in more than one case.
As it is, I'm trying to go on to grad school with less-than-stellar grades and only a minor in my chosen field, and I'm hoping that my excellent showing on the GRE general test and what I hope will be a considerable improvement from 62nd percentile on the subject test will be enough to make up for my "nontraditional background."
I could also mention (from my experiences taking the GED) that standardized tests tend to be biased toward mainstream matters of opinion. "The United States has a nearly classless society" was the "right", factual answer on the GED test I happened to take. Not even an SAT or GRE, a GED of all things! Most folks who are taking that test aren't smartass teenagers like I was who are trying to go to college a little early rather than sit around in high school....
I know, nobody's come up with anything better yet, and I'm shooting myself in the foot by complaining (since I am a highly skilled standardized test-taker), but the standardized testing system is horribly broken.
First of all, race makes a handy metaphor for class in the U.S. since anyone talking about the "lower class" must be a dirty Commie (everyone's middle class, and all the children are above average, blahblahblah). So enough with the racism complaints (not directed at the previous poster, but at the thread in general). "Non-white" seems to be the only way to describe "dirt-poor" that will make it into public discourse.
This, of course, creates a problem. Namely, the rich non-whites are getting into college just fine, and poor kids (white and otherwise) are left to rot.
Next problem: As others on this thread have already pointed out, the SAT questions are biased towards the upper-middle-class suburban life. Someone from Appalachia or from the "concrete jungle" is going to have a serious problem with those questions. One example that's always stuck with me (not an SAT, but another standardized test for younger kids) that I saw back in my days of work-study work for an educational consultant was this:
You were playing with your friend's ball and lost it. What do you do? 1. Buy him a new one and pay for it (answer worth 2 points) 2. Look all over for it, try to find it (answer worth 1 point) 3. I'd just cry; say I'm sorry; apologize (answer worth 0 points)
Um, do we see a slight problem here? The damn test is using "throw money at the problem" as the right answer! That's NOT going to work for kids that have no money.
Speaking of throwing money at the problem... when preparing for the SATs, high school students from solidly middle-class to upper-middle class families with white-collar, college educated parents have a HUGE advantage. Make that several:
1. The parents have probably had to go through the standardized testing process at some point, and can sit down with their little wannabe college students and grill them.
2. They can also afford SAT prep courses.
3. They can also (sometimes) afford private schools, and/or to live in places where the public schools are good.
4. In some cases, there's a difference between merely getting into a specific college and getting into said college with enough money to go there. The kids who got (at most) 1200 on their SATS and come from rich families are a "level playing field" for the kids who got 1500 and are on full (or nearly full) scholarship.
I know a lot of this from personal experience. I was homeschooled from 3rd-6th grade, and every year I went to take the Iowa tests with the kids in school. The first year, I ran into a severe crisis on the math section that can best be summed up as "lots of problems really fast." All my other scores were in at least the 75th percentile (most were in the 95th plus), but this one was somewhere around 38th percentile. Mom thought something was strange about this and asked me what was going on. I explained, and she started drilling me on fast-paced timed arithmetic tests. I think I jumped up to 97th percentile on that same section the following year.
And as for the concept of the SATs et al testing "what you need to know to succeed in college," they do no such thing. Again from personal experience. I was in Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth program. A prerequisite for admission to said program was scoring at least 430 on the old Verbal and 500 on the old Math SAT at the time I participated. Some of us did fabulously well in life. Some of us who were big fish in small ponds in high school got to college and realized that we might be intelligent, we might be brilliant standardized-test takers, but we didn't know how to study! I was screwed the first time I had to write a research paper in college. Didn't know what in the H-E-double hockey sticks I was doing. I also tested out of (or nearly so) classes that I really should have taken, and the holes in my mathematical, scientific, and music theory background came back to haunt me again and again in college.
One of my friends from CTY summer camp? She got a 1500 on the SAT when she was 12 years old. She received early admission to the same college program I did, then transferred to Alfred -- and flunked out. Last time I talked to her, she was working fast-food. So much for high SAT scores predicting success, huh? She wasn't the only one in a similar situation, just the most drastic example I can think of to show how completely the SAT doesn't predict success on a damn thing other than taking standardized tests.
And yes, I know that a poor and hard-working kid can beat the odds, study on his/her own, and make it into a good college. (I went to school with quite a lot of them.) I also know that, again, the playing field isn't level. They worked a lot harder to get where they are than those of us who had money and/or parents in an educational field.
This issue is so incredibly complex that writing off any one approach as "laughable" is, itself, laughable.
Just another for-all-practical-purposes-meaningless statistic to nonetheless feel overwhelmed by, I suppose.
If there were a billion pages to look at, I don't know when I'd have the time to do anything else, being the info-junkie that I am. Fortunately, a sufficient quantity of these pages do not interest me.:)
Then, too, I wonder how many of these pages are de facto duplicates? ("Department of redundancy department, redundant division speaking...") For instance, I'm right in the middle of moving my pages off of geocities and onto drak.net. At the moment, the pages that I've put up on drak.net that were part of my old geocities page still exist on geocities because I'm not done moving everything yet, and can't shut down my old page until EVERYthing is transported. I went through a similar process when I moved TO geocities from my college web page two and a half years ago.
That also makes me wonder more about this statistic. Are there one billion ACTIVE pages, or merely one billion pages that have ever existed? If the former, how many pages have ever existed? That would be an interesting question....
Well, by making this post I'm probably creating yet another page and adding to the noise and confusion. Consider it my chaotic deed for the day.:)
I haven't been around/. as much as I would've liked recently (no more net-access at work), and it's nice to be remembered and respected as a valuable contributor.
And now, Why I Don't Hate Jon Katz:
He's the reason I found/. in the first place. Yep, I'm part of the Hellmouth influx. (Yeah, yeah, I know.) I was bitter, bored at work, and in need of a good debate or several (think "The Argument Clinic" sketch from Monty Python, here).
At least early on, Katz articles were what kept me here. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but since I am NOT a "computer science geek", I'm more likely to be able to post to the threads that spin off of his articles, and actually have something worthwhile to say, than to many of the others.
I'm not a computer expert. I play one at work, on occasion -- people in my department will call me (the pseudo-technical writer who's really being more of a secretary right now) with computer problems because I get there faster than the real tech support, who work in another building in another part of the city. I'm a highly competent end-user of just about anything that gets thrown at me. I am in NO way a programmer. I wrote a few things in LOGO and BASIC as a kid, and took a single Pascal course from an incompetent professor, and that's as far as I ever went.
For me (and for the others out there like me), I think Katz provides an important bridge between typical/. and mainstream media. Admittedly, I've been disappointed with some of the stories he's posted. But I am still more disappointed by the onslaught of "This isn't news for nerds!" flaming that tends to follow. If/. were the purely technical site that the folks who posted those flames seem to want, there would be no user fable2112 on this board. And there would be no person behind the userid fable2112 actually learning more about the technical end of things, not only to be able to hold her own in conversations with her CS major boyfriend and her CIS professor father, but also because it's becoming interesting in its own right.
"When I think of Slashdot, I don't think of Holland, MI."
You probably don't think of Rochester, NY either. So what? Geeks live everywhere.:)
And this small-town library could exist almost anywhere. If the tactic works in Holland, MI, it could work other places as well... and this is not a good thing.
Libraries are supposed to be there to provide information. Period. Admittedly, people should have better sense than to look at porn on library Web terminals (not even because it's porn, but because of all those damn extra pages that open up... it makes a real mess for the next person, who is probably trying to look for something that isn't porn and probably didn't really want to see several screens of barely-legal lesbian threesomes *heh*).
And this "does your library carry the Banned Books list?" thing makes me absolutely FURIOUS. The best Christmas present I've ever gotten from ANYone (this was one from my dad) was the "Celebrate Freedom -- Read a Banned Book" sweatshirt... and EVERY SINGLE BOOK on the shirt. Let's see... banned books listed on that shirt... 1984, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Separate Peace... you get the idea.
In one of the Rochester suburbs, a friend of mine who teaches 11th grade English had to stop teaching Toni Morrison's Beloved because parents complained. Sheesh. If you don't like the book, have your kid opt-out of the assignment -- it's usually allowed. But don't ruin it for the rest of the 11th graders whose parents DIDN'T complain.:P
And of course, there's the whole problem of the way most censorware is designed, which is another matter entirely.
I suppose, if SafeSurf were more widely used, I could understand the general terminals being set to level 7 (meant for adults but not porn) and the terminals in the children's areas to level 3 (technical references). That would be reasonable.
Or again, if my old idea about creating.xxx and.kid domains could be implemented... terminals in the children's portion of the library could be restricted to.kid-only domains, and terminals in the rest of the library could block.xxx domains. Not a perfect solution, and it'll probably never happen, but it makes an interesting theory.:)
(Voluntarily forgoing my +1 because I know this is on the edge of flamebait...)
"People" suffering from "diseases" NEVER bring it on themselves, EVER? Wake up and smell the cigarettes burning.
My mom's best friend has two inoperable tumors on her lungs. She's about 50 years old. And the crazy woman is still smoking!:P
And more to the point, have fun telling your doctor that you're an innocent victim when your fast food, Mountain Dew, and lack of sleep catch up with you....
I'm sure doc will be doing his/her very best not to laugh.
(And yeah, I know, I'm something of a hypocrite here, since I'm starting to be a bit of a caffeine addict and I'm theoretically 20 or so pounds overweight... but when my number comes up, I'm not going to cry that I'm an innocent victim, and I'm taking at least reasonably good care of myself meanwhile.)
The other problem is that sweatshop-like expectations already exist in tech fields. Remember the "high-tech sweatshop" article from a few months back? I see plenty of possibilities for abuse of at-home workers here.
At a company that shall remain nameless that I used to work for, a "capacity planning" study was going on. Basically, they wanted the "average" time it took someone to perform each and every possible job function. And given the way management worked at that company, if it normally took me 4 minutes to do Task A, and a Task A-like item that was a bit abnormal came across my desk and took me 15 minutes to handle properly, I'd be in trouble.
In fact, since the volume of work we handled varied so frequently, the department was continually barraged with "What do you people DO all day?" by other departments as well as by our own managers. Um, we try to keep on top of all the ridiculous little projects you keep assigning us, that don't do much beyond eat time anyhow. They also cut our department from six people to four during the year I was there, and rumor has it my position wasn't replaced either (this from a former co-worker that claimed the place went to hell in a handbasket when I left... *smirk*... it was already there, believe me!)
That experience just left a bad taste in my mouth.:P
... not to mention, it's nice to see the media focusing on something useful for a change, instead of Monica Lewinsky etc.
What was it an old medical text my friend was looking through said? "A wise physician always states the case is grave, that he may be praised for his good work if he brings his patient back to health, yet is known to have seen the truth of the illness should the patient die."
It was important to be prepared for problems. And this is one case in which information, and information overkill, was probably MUCH BETTER than lack of official information, and people left to fill in the gaps based on rumor.
I don't know if the rest of the country had it as together as Rochester seemed to, but there was always a remarkable lack of panic here (aside from a few bored paranoid suburbanite slackers who wanted the apocalypse to happen so they could lead an army into battle for real). My biggest fear was of the Y2K bug in people's brains, and given the way my neighborhood generally responds to things like snow emergencies, I realized that despite some Cassandra types saying "don't be in a big city!" I was safest right here, three miles from downtown Rochester.
And I was right. The worst thing that happened was that my friend Devon decided to be a smartass and trip the circuit breaker at midnight. We could see lights on from across the street, so nobody got worried, but he seems to be having trouble re-setting his VCR.
I made half-joking, half-serious "stockpiles" of various sorts, but now I have enough toiletries and pasta for several months. Nothing wrong with that; I bought on sale. Everything went well.
I saw just enough in the way of "little things" get screwed up (like a friend's ISP giving him an error message to the effect of "Our records show your account will be created on June 26, 2097. Please try back after that date.") to be fully aware of just how much worse things could have been.
I work for a power company. A power company that owns a nuclear plant. And did I mention that it's really damn cold in upstate NY, and the heat going off would NOT have been good? Fortunately, they had the sense to start dealing with Y2K-related issues back in 1996 or so, and we had no problems on the big night.
First of all, most Christian holidays were superimposed on either Jewish or Pagan holidays to begin with, back when Christianity was a small splinter sect of Judaism that was getting persecuted.
Secondly, Independence Day, Labor Day, even New Year's day are essentially secular holidays.
Most "bank holidays" present an excuse to run around the mall, rather than focusing on the original religious or cultural meaning of the holiday. Yep, even Thanksgiving and Christmas. Why the heck do you think Blockbuster is open on those days? (I know, my boyfriend works there and worked Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day.) Because families would rather consume canned entertainment than TALK TO EACH OTHER. But I digress.
Then, of course, are the folks that really fry me: my fellow non-Christians who want BOTH sets of holidays off from work. They request their holidays off, and then complain because they have to work on Christmas Eve. Oh, the horror!:P
Re:Since /. apparently can't laugh at itself..
on
Humpday Quickies
·
· Score: 3
Yep, that one's pretty good. But my personal favorite in this vein is Slashnull.
You know, I'm getting a little tired of this particular comment, though admittedly it's got a different twist from the usual. And I don't want to read 500 posts of M$ $ux! either.:)
Some of us aren't into computers as much of anything other than a relatively well-informed end-user. We're just interested in weird little intellectual things that seem to go over most people's heads. I know my fair share of "science geeks," and my own interests are radio broadcasting (my reason for doing a communication major) and English (I'm starting to chip away at an MA).
I'd like to think I'm a relatively valuable contributor, even though my posting frequency is down due to lack of netaccess from work. Apparently, according to my karma score, I'm not the only one who thinks so.:)
And yeah, I know I'm all kinds of off-topic here, sorry. But it's something that needs to be said, because "this isn't news for nerds!" seems to be the favorite flame around here.:(
The problem is the arrogance of people in assuming that they have the solution to all the world's problems -- whether the solutions are technological in nature or not.
I mean, sure I'm grateful for the set of circumstances that surround my life (I may complain sometimes, but they could have been so much worse). But things aren't universally "better" for people now than they were X number of years ago. It all depends on who you are and where you happen to be at the time.
And unfortunately, sometimes in "fixing" a problem, we actually manage to make our problems worse. The widespread use of pesticides and antibiotics have caused resistant strains of the stuff we were trying to get rid of to develop, for instance.
There were certainly problems with the 1950s love affair with "progress." I've seen the old videos with DDT being sprayed directly on kids to show how wonderfully safe it supposedly was. (Something that was not very well thought out IMHO.) Now, I see the same people who perpetuate the War On Some Drugs on the one hand throwing Prozac at women and Ritalin at active boys on the other. Is this, honestly, progress? I don't think so, sorry.
Basically, especially in the US, when ANYthing goes wrong tonight (and something inevitably will), it will be blamed on the rollover, whether or not that is actually the case. Not good.
Mother Nature might not be Y2K compliant, and some storm somewhere could very well knock power off. And in Rochester, the local telephone company has been telling people "Don't pick up your phone at 12:01 to see if it works; you might overload the circuits," which leads me to believe that people might not be Y2K compliant even if machinery is.
Basically, there is a day that is on the "cusp" of two signs. Some people born on that day are one sign, some are another. It has to do with the time and location of the person's birth, in that case. In fact, any astrology that goes beyond just your sun sign makes use of the time and place of birth as well as just the date (and I've found that the more-complex astrology has a degree of specificity and accuracy that the simple newspaper column lacks, but I still don't base my life on it).
Why do I know this? Mostly because I was born on the Libra/Scorpio cusp (October 23rd). I spent several years insisting I was a Scorpio because my mom's a Libra and we look sufficiently alike that for a while I heard "You must be Diane's daughter!" constantly and was sick of it and didn't want to be like mom. Then I had a natal chart done and well, it turns out I'm a Libra after all.:)
Ever tried talking to actual teachers about what they do? I have.
Teaching isn't as horrible and underpaid as some make it out to be, but it sure as heck isn't a "cushy" job, either. Especially not in this day and age.
As for firing "incompetent" teachers, who makes that decision? By what standards? It'd be really easy to stick a teacher with less-intelligent or less-cooperative kids as an act of deliberate sabotage so that teacher could be fired for "incompetence" by someone with an axe to grind. Better yet (this works best on male teachers), make accusations of sexual impropriety. Bye-bye, teacher.
Very good points. I wish I had some moderator points right now.:)
Something else I'd add: Stop scaring off the bright but strange college kids. Someone I went to college with has decided against teaching thanks to the post-Littleton crackdown on kids in black. Why? He WAS one of those kids. He would have been a brilliant teacher, too. It pisses me right off.
Not this anti-teacher's-union ranting again. *rolls eyes*
Funny how the/.ers who are so rabidly for freedom of speech and freedom of information don't seem to realize that the tenure system was developed for exactly that reason. IOW, teachers are protected from being fired by a school board over political disagreements. And in this day and age of Religious Right attempts to control school boards, that's INCREDIBLY important.
While I agree that it should be easier to remove an incompetent teacher, this is unfortunately open to all sorts of abuses. A good friend of mine is a high school English teacher, and if he didn't have tenure, he probably would have been fired because some irate parents (one of whom was on the school board, IIRC) complained about dirty words in a book he assigned to high school juniors.
Abolish the unions, and tenure? OK, fine, but don't come crying to me when freedom of speech evaporates and creation science is taught as fact.:P
Slashdot Mirror
I know they *say* that this can't/shouldn't be done, but it's also entirely possible that employers would like to see what *legal* drugs one happens to be taking.
I have seasonal affective disorder (a.k.a. winter depression) that is managed by taking St John's Wort about four months out of the year. Yes, I still drag my ass to work on time, and I still maage to be reasonably productive. But I don't need someone to decide that I can't do my data-entry-at-a-desk job because I'm on meds.
Not to mention, if you follow the "drink 8 glasses of water a day" advice and occasionally consume alcohol and/or caffeine in addition to that, it can screw with drug tests because the specific gravity of your urine gets so low that they think you deliberately diluted the sample. (This happened to me the one and only time I've taken a drug test, and I was *highly* annoyed.)
Someone moderate this up?
I find this disturbing for a few different reasons:
1. Our lovely lawsuit-happy society, and the risk of problems on space flights. "Space tourists" could end up suing if something went wrong, eventually bankrupting the industry and putting a stop to space exploration. This would just suck.
2. Imagine the stupidity that has the potential to ensue with the "corporatization" of space. Case in point: Would you really, honestly want to have say, MS or a similarly large company claiming ownership of space, or someone trying to patent oxygen?
3. Rocket launches use a lot of fuel. Way to run out of fossil fuels that much faster. Could be bad. *shrug*
Now, mind you, this was a humor site that is now known as Cthulu for Morons
Perhaps (and I'm not saying this is right) this is a question of the feeling that what is posted here is within the community and what is published in a book is outside of the community.
:) But some people do see /. as a community of people like themselves, and would be willing to share more here than with those perceived as outsiders.
/. reader. Sometimes I wonder if I should even post here. :)
I agree that if one wants to maintain absolute privacy about one's personal life, one should not say anything about it to anyone -- electronically or otherwise.
I'm not saying that this makes the hellmouth book a BAD idea. Quite the contrary. But it is a way to explain people's reactions to the book, and even some of the negativity that gets tossed at Katz (who's seen as "not one of us" by many here).
Heck, I've got more in common with Katz than with the average prototypical
Well, yes and no.
/. probably either have employee stock options through this company or are otherwise invested in tech stocks, and have lost a lot of money. Of course, they'd have to be complete idiots to not be aware of that as it is. :)
/. to pursue.
/. material. ;)
I actually think that Rob posting this particular story in this particular way was the right thing to do. I am sick of hearing about it probably as much as Rob himself is (then again, I also work for accountants).
There are plenty of reasons this could be seen as news for nerds, though:
1. Lots of people on
2. Some folks in various little startups who had their stock crash (like a friend of mine who saw her company's stock go from $100 to $27 in the past two weeks) are worried that they are going to lose their jobs. THAT angle, IMHO, is a legit one for
3. As a result of all this, some people either in the industry or studying to join the industry are taking a lot of flack from more conservative and traditional businesspeople who have used the past two weeks to say "Ha-ha, told you so!" And hostility toward geeks tends to turn a story into
But they're not as good as all that. It's possible, even EASY, to be a good test-taker who has no motivation.
In my completely unscientific experience, the correlation between (old) SAT scores and college success falls apart at about 1300 or thereabouts (at least for those I knew who took them in 11th-12th grade rather than 7th or 8th; the correlation falls apart a bit sooner for those of us who took them young). And it wasn't just lack of success, it was crashing and burning in a BIG and spectacular way in more than one case.
As it is, I'm trying to go on to grad school with less-than-stellar grades and only a minor in my chosen field, and I'm hoping that my excellent showing on the GRE general test and what I hope will be a considerable improvement from 62nd percentile on the subject test will be enough to make up for my "nontraditional background."
I could also mention (from my experiences taking the GED) that standardized tests tend to be biased toward mainstream matters of opinion. "The United States has a nearly classless society" was the "right", factual answer on the GED test I happened to take. Not even an SAT or GRE, a GED of all things! Most folks who are taking that test aren't smartass teenagers like I was who are trying to go to college a little early rather than sit around in high school
I know, nobody's come up with anything better yet, and I'm shooting myself in the foot by complaining (since I am a highly skilled standardized test-taker), but the standardized testing system is horribly broken.
Here's the problem:
... when preparing for the SATs, high school students from solidly middle-class to upper-middle class families with white-collar, college educated parents have a HUGE advantage. Make that several:
First of all, race makes a handy metaphor for class in the U.S. since anyone talking about the "lower class" must be a dirty Commie (everyone's middle class, and all the children are above average, blahblahblah). So enough with the racism complaints (not directed at the previous poster, but at the thread in general). "Non-white" seems to be the only way to describe "dirt-poor" that will make it into public discourse.
This, of course, creates a problem. Namely, the rich non-whites are getting into college just fine, and poor kids (white and otherwise) are left to rot.
Next problem: As others on this thread have already pointed out, the SAT questions are biased towards the upper-middle-class suburban life. Someone from Appalachia or from the "concrete jungle" is going to have a serious problem with those questions. One example that's always stuck with me (not an SAT, but another standardized test for younger kids) that I saw back in my days of work-study work for an educational consultant was this:
You were playing with your friend's ball and lost it. What do you do?
1. Buy him a new one and pay for it (answer worth 2 points)
2. Look all over for it, try to find it (answer worth 1 point)
3. I'd just cry; say I'm sorry; apologize (answer worth 0 points)
Um, do we see a slight problem here? The damn test is using "throw money at the problem" as the right answer! That's NOT going to work for kids that have no money.
Speaking of throwing money at the problem
1. The parents have probably had to go through the standardized testing process at some point, and can sit down with their little wannabe college students and grill them.
2. They can also afford SAT prep courses.
3. They can also (sometimes) afford private schools, and/or to live in places where the public schools are good.
4. In some cases, there's a difference between merely getting into a specific college and getting into said college with enough money to go there. The kids who got (at most) 1200 on their SATS and come from rich families are a "level playing field" for the kids who got 1500 and are on full (or nearly full) scholarship.
I know a lot of this from personal experience. I was homeschooled from 3rd-6th grade, and every year I went to take the Iowa tests with the kids in school. The first year, I ran into a severe crisis on the math section that can best be summed up as "lots of problems really fast." All my other scores were in at least the 75th percentile (most were in the 95th plus), but this one was somewhere around 38th percentile. Mom thought something was strange about this and asked me what was going on. I explained, and she started drilling me on fast-paced timed arithmetic tests. I think I jumped up to 97th percentile on that same section the following year.
And as for the concept of the SATs et al testing "what you need to know to succeed in college," they do no such thing. Again from personal experience. I was in Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth program. A prerequisite for admission to said program was scoring at least 430 on the old Verbal and 500 on the old Math SAT at the time I participated. Some of us did fabulously well in life. Some of us who were big fish in small ponds in high school got to college and realized that we might be intelligent, we might be brilliant standardized-test takers, but we didn't know how to study! I was screwed the first time I had to write a research paper in college. Didn't know what in the H-E-double hockey sticks I was doing. I also tested out of (or nearly so) classes that I really should have taken, and the holes in my mathematical, scientific, and music theory background came back to haunt me again and again in college.
One of my friends from CTY summer camp? She got a 1500 on the SAT when she was 12 years old. She received early admission to the same college program I did, then transferred to Alfred -- and flunked out. Last time I talked to her, she was working fast-food. So much for high SAT scores predicting success, huh? She wasn't the only one in a similar situation, just the most drastic example I can think of to show how completely the SAT doesn't predict success on a damn thing other than taking standardized tests.
And yes, I know that a poor and hard-working kid can beat the odds, study on his/her own, and make it into a good college. (I went to school with quite a lot of them.) I also know that, again, the playing field isn't level. They worked a lot harder to get where they are than those of us who had money and/or parents in an educational field.
This issue is so incredibly complex that writing off any one approach as "laughable" is, itself, laughable.
Just another for-all-practical-purposes-meaningless statistic to nonetheless feel overwhelmed by, I suppose.
If there were a billion pages to look at, I don't know when I'd have the time to do anything else, being the info-junkie that I am. Fortunately, a sufficient quantity of these pages do not interest me.
Then, too, I wonder how many of these pages are de facto duplicates? ("Department of redundancy department, redundant division speaking
That also makes me wonder more about this statistic. Are there one billion ACTIVE pages, or merely one billion pages that have ever existed? If the former, how many pages have ever existed? That would be an interesting question
Well, by making this post I'm probably creating yet another page and adding to the noise and confusion. Consider it my chaotic deed for the day.
I haven't been around
And now, Why I Don't Hate Jon Katz:
He's the reason I found
At least early on, Katz articles were what kept me here. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but since I am NOT a "computer science geek", I'm more likely to be able to post to the threads that spin off of his articles, and actually have something worthwhile to say, than to many of the others.
I'm not a computer expert. I play one at work, on occasion -- people in my department will call me (the pseudo-technical writer who's really being more of a secretary right now) with computer problems because I get there faster than the real tech support, who work in another building in another part of the city. I'm a highly competent end-user of just about anything that gets thrown at me. I am in NO way a programmer. I wrote a few things in LOGO and BASIC as a kid, and took a single Pascal course from an incompetent professor, and that's as far as I ever went.
For me (and for the others out there like me), I think Katz provides an important bridge between typical
"When I think of Slashdot, I don't think of Holland, MI."
:)
... and this is not a good thing.
... it makes a real mess for the next person, who is probably trying to look for something that isn't porn and probably didn't really want to see several screens of barely-legal lesbian threesomes *heh*).
... and EVERY SINGLE BOOK on the shirt. Let's see ... banned books listed on that shirt ... 1984, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Separate Peace ... you get the idea.
:P
.xxx and .kid domains could be implemented ... terminals in the children's portion of the library could be restricted to .kid-only domains, and terminals in the rest of the library could block .xxx domains. Not a perfect solution, and it'll probably never happen, but it makes an interesting theory. :)
You probably don't think of Rochester, NY either. So what? Geeks live everywhere.
And this small-town library could exist almost anywhere. If the tactic works in Holland, MI, it could work other places as well
Libraries are supposed to be there to provide information. Period. Admittedly, people should have better sense than to look at porn on library Web terminals (not even because it's porn, but because of all those damn extra pages that open up
And this "does your library carry the Banned Books list?" thing makes me absolutely FURIOUS. The best Christmas present I've ever gotten from ANYone (this was one from my dad) was the "Celebrate Freedom -- Read a Banned Book" sweatshirt
In one of the Rochester suburbs, a friend of mine who teaches 11th grade English had to stop teaching Toni Morrison's Beloved because parents complained. Sheesh. If you don't like the book, have your kid opt-out of the assignment -- it's usually allowed. But don't ruin it for the rest of the 11th graders whose parents DIDN'T complain.
And of course, there's the whole problem of the way most censorware is designed, which is another matter entirely.
I suppose, if SafeSurf were more widely used, I could understand the general terminals being set to level 7 (meant for adults but not porn) and the terminals in the children's areas to level 3 (technical references). That would be reasonable.
Or again, if my old idea about creating
(Voluntarily forgoing my +1 because I know this is on the edge of flamebait
"People" suffering from "diseases" NEVER bring it on themselves, EVER? Wake up and smell the cigarettes burning.
My mom's best friend has two inoperable tumors on her lungs. She's about 50 years old. And the crazy woman is still smoking!
And more to the point, have fun telling your doctor that you're an innocent victim when your fast food, Mountain Dew, and lack of sleep catch up with you
I'm sure doc will be doing his/her very best not to laugh.
(And yeah, I know, I'm something of a hypocrite here, since I'm starting to be a bit of a caffeine addict and I'm theoretically 20 or so pounds overweight
The other problem is that sweatshop-like expectations already exist in tech fields. Remember the "high-tech sweatshop" article from a few months back? I see plenty of possibilities for abuse of at-home workers here.
At a company that shall remain nameless that I used to work for, a "capacity planning" study was going on. Basically, they wanted the "average" time it took someone to perform each and every possible job function. And given the way management worked at that company, if it normally took me 4 minutes to do Task A, and a Task A-like item that was a bit abnormal came across my desk and took me 15 minutes to handle properly, I'd be in trouble.
In fact, since the volume of work we handled varied so frequently, the department was continually barraged with "What do you people DO all day?" by other departments as well as by our own managers. Um, we try to keep on top of all the ridiculous little projects you keep assigning us, that don't do much beyond eat time anyhow. They also cut our department from six people to four during the year I was there, and rumor has it my position wasn't replaced either (this from a former co-worker that claimed the place went to hell in a handbasket when I left
That experience just left a bad taste in my mouth.
... not to mention, it's nice to see the media focusing on something useful for a change, instead of Monica Lewinsky etc.
What was it an old medical text my friend was looking through said? "A wise physician always states the case is grave, that he may be praised for his good work if he brings his patient back to health, yet is known to have seen the truth of the illness should the patient die."
It was important to be prepared for problems. And this is one case in which information, and information overkill, was probably MUCH BETTER than lack of official information, and people left to fill in the gaps based on rumor.
I don't know if the rest of the country had it as together as Rochester seemed to, but there was always a remarkable lack of panic here (aside from a few bored paranoid suburbanite slackers who wanted the apocalypse to happen so they could lead an army into battle for real). My biggest fear was of the Y2K bug in people's brains, and given the way my neighborhood generally responds to things like snow emergencies, I realized that despite some Cassandra types saying "don't be in a big city!" I was safest right here, three miles from downtown Rochester.
And I was right. The worst thing that happened was that my friend Devon decided to be a smartass and trip the circuit breaker at midnight. We could see lights on from across the street, so nobody got worried, but he seems to be having trouble re-setting his VCR.
I made half-joking, half-serious "stockpiles" of various sorts, but now I have enough toiletries and pasta for several months. Nothing wrong with that; I bought on sale. Everything went well.
I saw just enough in the way of "little things" get screwed up (like a friend's ISP giving him an error message to the effect of "Our records show your account will be created on June 26, 2097. Please try back after that date.") to be fully aware of just how much worse things could have been.
I work for a power company. A power company that owns a nuclear plant. And did I mention that it's really damn cold in upstate NY, and the heat going off would NOT have been good? Fortunately, they had the sense to start dealing with Y2K-related issues back in 1996 or so, and we had no problems on the big night.
First of all, most Christian holidays were superimposed on either Jewish or Pagan holidays to begin with, back when Christianity was a small splinter sect of Judaism that was getting persecuted.
Secondly, Independence Day, Labor Day, even New Year's day are essentially secular holidays.
Most "bank holidays" present an excuse to run around the mall, rather than focusing on the original religious or cultural meaning of the holiday. Yep, even Thanksgiving and Christmas. Why the heck do you think Blockbuster is open on those days? (I know, my boyfriend works there and worked Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day.) Because families would rather consume canned entertainment than TALK TO EACH OTHER. But I digress.
Then, of course, are the folks that really fry me: my fellow non-Christians who want BOTH sets of holidays off from work. They request their holidays off, and then complain because they have to work on Christmas Eve. Oh, the horror!
Yep, that one's pretty good. But my personal favorite in this vein is Slashnull.
Shadowrun fans, go to town!
You know, I'm getting a little tired of this particular comment, though admittedly it's got a different twist from the usual. And I don't want to read 500 posts of M$ $ux! either.
Some of us aren't into computers as much of anything other than a relatively well-informed end-user. We're just interested in weird little intellectual things that seem to go over most people's heads. I know my fair share of "science geeks," and my own interests are radio broadcasting (my reason for doing a communication major) and English (I'm starting to chip away at an MA).
I'd like to think I'm a relatively valuable contributor, even though my posting frequency is down due to lack of netaccess from work. Apparently, according to my karma score, I'm not the only one who thinks so.
And yeah, I know I'm all kinds of off-topic here, sorry. But it's something that needs to be said, because "this isn't news for nerds!" seems to be the favorite flame around here.
The problem is the arrogance of people in assuming that they have the solution to all the world's problems -- whether the solutions are technological in nature or not.
I mean, sure I'm grateful for the set of circumstances that surround my life (I may complain sometimes, but they could have been so much worse). But things aren't universally "better" for people now than they were X number of years ago. It all depends on who you are and where you happen to be at the time.
And unfortunately, sometimes in "fixing" a problem, we actually manage to make our problems worse. The widespread use of pesticides and antibiotics have caused resistant strains of the stuff we were trying to get rid of to develop, for instance.
There were certainly problems with the 1950s love affair with "progress." I've seen the old videos with DDT being sprayed directly on kids to show how wonderfully safe it supposedly was. (Something that was not very well thought out IMHO.) Now, I see the same people who perpetuate the War On Some Drugs on the one hand throwing Prozac at women and Ritalin at active boys on the other. Is this, honestly, progress? I don't think so, sorry.
Basically, especially in the US, when ANYthing goes wrong tonight (and something inevitably will), it will be blamed on the rollover, whether or not that is actually the case. Not good.
Mother Nature might not be Y2K compliant, and some storm somewhere could very well knock power off. And in Rochester, the local telephone company has been telling people "Don't pick up your phone at 12:01 to see if it works; you might overload the circuits," which leads me to believe that people might not be Y2K compliant even if machinery is.
Slashdot != "the public."
:)
Plain and simple.
The "public" mentality is probably much closer to Time magazine than to Slashdot. Sad but true.
Basically, there is a day that is on the "cusp" of two signs. Some people born on that day are one sign, some are another. It has to do with the time and location of the person's birth, in that case. In fact, any astrology that goes beyond just your sun sign makes use of the time and place of birth as well as just the date (and I've found that the more-complex astrology has a degree of specificity and accuracy that the simple newspaper column lacks, but I still don't base my life on it).
Why do I know this? Mostly because I was born on the Libra/Scorpio cusp (October 23rd). I spent several years insisting I was a Scorpio because my mom's a Libra and we look sufficiently alike that for a while I heard "You must be Diane's daughter!" constantly and was sick of it and didn't want to be like mom. Then I had a natal chart done and well, it turns out I'm a Libra after all.
Teaching isn't as horrible and underpaid as some make it out to be, but it sure as heck isn't a "cushy" job, either. Especially not in this day and age.
As for firing "incompetent" teachers, who makes that decision? By what standards? It'd be really easy to stick a teacher with less-intelligent or less-cooperative kids as an act of deliberate sabotage so that teacher could be fired for "incompetence" by someone with an axe to grind. Better yet (this works best on male teachers), make accusations of sexual impropriety. Bye-bye, teacher.
Something else I'd add: Stop scaring off the bright but strange college kids. Someone I went to college with has decided against teaching thanks to the post-Littleton crackdown on kids in black. Why? He WAS one of those kids. He would have been a brilliant teacher, too. It pisses me right off.
Funny how the
While I agree that it should be easier to remove an incompetent teacher, this is unfortunately open to all sorts of abuses. A good friend of mine is a high school English teacher, and if he didn't have tenure, he probably would have been fired because some irate parents (one of whom was on the school board, IIRC) complained about dirty words in a book he assigned to high school juniors.
Abolish the unions, and tenure? OK, fine, but don't come crying to me when freedom of speech evaporates and creation science is taught as fact.