Wedding Photographers are also not only working against the clock, but they only get one day.
Not only that, but think for a moment about the number of billable hours in a wedding photographer's week. (This is the same as for a wedding musician -- something which I've looked into as a musician.) There aren't a heck of a lot of weddings between 9am and 5pm M-F. Generally, a wedding photographer has to make his entire weekly gross in a weekend. How many weddings per weekend do you think they can do? How often? I don't know how it works for photographers, but for musicians, if you managed to book three a weekend (Sat day, Sat eve and Sun day) steadily you're doing fantastic. Now factor in the fact that if they're doing that as their main job (i.e. no other day job) they're doing sole-proprietor work subject to self-employment tax; they're paying for solo health insurance if any; etc.
Do the math. What a wedding photographer has to charge per wedding just to make a living is staggeringly high. And that's true for every professional who primarily sells services for weddings which requires attending the wedding (e.g. not including florists).
But, if you're using a blog that way, why not just provide an email address for people to use to contact you, with you publishing valid messages to the blog and deleting spam? A "friends and family" blog isn't going to attract so many comments that this wouldn't work. You still don't have to open up your blog to the whole world. You're the boss, it's your blog -- moderate it. You know?
You have totally missed the point. I can't tell from the traffic on my personal email lists what my subscribers are discussing with their friends on other email list. With blogs I can and so I might very well wind up in a discussion with someone I've never met before who is a friend-of-a-friend.
BTW, I run three list servers and am subscribed to something like 75 lists, ranging from big open discussion lists to little private discussions of a few friends; take it from me, blogs work differently.
Talking to you about blogs reminds me of trying to explain email to my mother in 1989 and the web to her in 1994. It's really quite pointless; you aren't going to get it by making comparisons to media you already know. You're saying things that are the moral equivalent to "why not just use email lists instead of usenet news groups" (to which the answer is that sometimes email list a a perfectly good substitute for usenet -- but it isn't the same thing and if you want usenet for usenet's properties, you need to use usenet. You should check out the new medium for yourself, and then the whole topic will make far more sense.
You're blogging to publish your thoughts to the world, right?
That's what I thought, until about 2 weeks ago.
My friends managed to get me to finally sign up for a livejournal. I now Get It.
The idea of a blog as existing all alone, broadcasting to the public like a radio tower is, while a perfectly valid one, hardly the one which has people flocking to the "blogosphere". The way these people are using these blogs is far more like a cross between chat (short, chatty msgs) and email (asynchronous), but with aspects which are neither and are interesting in their own right.
It's an asynchronous medium where the topic subjects are the people; as such it's immensely well suited to groups of existing friends keeping in daily touch, while separated by their jobs or great distances.
While the spam problem can be solved by limiting posting to accounts known to you, this could discourage or prevent useful "FOAF" effects. For instance, I wound up today at the LJ of someone I had never met previously, who was asking a question I knew an answer to; she didn't know me from Adam, but I was able to reply to her question in her blog.
The provision was only to prevent the government from creating a state controlled religion not to separate religion from government.
How utterly wrong.
One of the primary forces for the founders to get government completely out of the religion racket (and vice versa) was the history in England of the tug of war between the Catholics (papists) and the Protestants. Each time the crown changed heads to someone on the other side, that became the new official religion, and the country was plunged into bloody violence as the losers were oppressed, churches burned, etc. This went on for about a century. By the time the founders of US started trying to build a new country, they were pretty clear that allowing the government to take any stand for any religion at all was the last thing on earth they wanted.
Christians find it convenient to forget that the recent history of the Founders' day was one of Christians slaughtering Christians in sectarian violence. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation were not so long in the past, when Adams and Jefferson took up their pens. They had a very different point of view that you do on the consequences of letting a government in any way endorse a religion.
In short, I needed the syllabus and bibliography of a "Anthropology 101" undergrad course, which focused on theory and not practice. Lo! I have all I requested.
Oh, and I just discovered this course that I am so interested in? Enrollment is limited to Anthropology Majors and Minors. So even when I was an MIT undergrad, I wouldn't have been able to take this course. Let's hear it for the MIT OCW!
A lot of the course notes aren't particularly useful without a teacher actually explaining things to you. [...]
While some of the notes may be useful and educational, I don't think it replaces a real, live professor explaning things and available to answer questions.
Well, no, but then replacing real, live professors is not the point. I consider it, in part, an FM to R before hastling a person with ignorant questions.
Case in point: I discovered that a topic I'm interested is considered an obscure sub-branch of the field of anthropology. I have friends who are anthropologists, and they're happy to answer my questions until the cows come home (and talk about their research until long after that), but the one question they don't have a handy answer to and never have time to work up is this:
What are the foundational texts of this field, which I have to read to get just enough broad overview (to then be able to follow the specialty discussions I'm interested in), and to provide me with a "score-card" of "schools of thought" so I can keep track to the sides in various academic debates?
In short, I needed the syllabus and bibliography of a "Anthropology 101" undergrad course, which focused on theory and not practice. Lo!
I have all I requested.
Since RIAA reserved the right to file suit against her again, what happens if they do (or if others use the "I own a Mac, I couldn't possibly be using Kazaa" defense)? If she truly owns a Mac, then she couldn't possibly have installed Kazaa. If I don't own a Mac but claim I do, is the burden of proof on me to prove I own a Mac, or on RIAA to prove I don't?
Since this is a civil, not a criminal, case, at this stage of the proceedings nobody was anywhere near a courthouse, so I don't think the notion of "burden of proof" quite applies (yet).
Presumably, what just happened is that her lawyer wrote a nice letter to the RIAA which said, in essence, "My client is a Mac user and we would be thoroughly delighted to embarrass the bejesus out of you in both a court of law and the international press. Name a date and courthouse, punk, and bring it on." Then the RIAA decided that maybe the didn't want to find out conclusively one way or the other whether she was a mac user.
That said, (and IANAL) the standard of proof for civil cases is not the familiar "beyond a reasonable doubt" of civil cases, but much lower. That is why the alleged victims of alleged crimes who didn't prevail in criminal cases sometimes attempt to sue, because, the rules being different, it is easier to get a judgment against someone in civil suit. But it works the other way around, too.
I think this means that she would only have to convince a judge it was implausible she could have been using kazaa, not impossible.
The last time I compared the two (admitedly a while ago) PHP had many more features and was the much better choice. (Even if they were priced the same, which they are not.)
I use both. PHP is more powerful, in that you can write more sophisticated code. However, CF is vastly better for prototyping of your typical web app; its abstractions are vastly more appropriate for the sorts of typical db/html tasks than PHP's are.
PHP gets its powerful flexibility by being really general -- it's kind of like simplified perl -- which makes doing typical and common tasks into spaghetti. The classical example is looping over the results of a db query. In PHP you actually have to write out a frigging loop, and assign rows to variables and shit. In-fucking-credible. In the sorts of real systems grownups use to develop web apps -- think Vignette StoryServer's tcl -- the languages have ways to implicitly loop over stuff, because that's so typical to working with db rows. (Gee! Ya think?)
And that's how CF works. The result is about 100 times more elegant and readable.
(You can rub Smarty over your PHP, which helps, but you still have to write all sorts of should-be-automatic-stuff out long-hand every freeking time. Smarty improves the situation, but doesn't solve the basic problem.)
Which is not to say I'm unwilling to harsh on CF. My feelings towards it are not, shall we say, unalloyed delight. But PHP and CF each suck in different ways, and really are appropriate to different projects.
In my professional experience, most web projects, bluntly, don't need more power than CF. It takes very little to exceed CF's capacities, but most companys' web sites don't get that far.
In the golden age of science fiction writing, which for most people I think is the 50's and 60's, in the future amazing things seemed possible and there was am optimism that things like space travel, flying cars, robots etc. might actually happen for ordinary people, perhaps even within the lifetime of the young people that read the fiction.
It was more than optimism, it was romanticization. It's very hard for us now to romanticize technology because it's so quotidian! Frankly, we live in a SF world.
SF has always been about evoking a sense of wonder. That's one of the oldest saws in the field of SF. But it's damn hard to get all exited about technology when it's such an every-day thing. In the "golden age" of SF, new inventions, new technologies, simple novelty was a big deal. Today it's ho-hum. It's not that the changes are dull, it's that it's an excitement we're accustomed to -- "Dude, look at this new wireless gadget I got!" -- not an excitement which sparks any sort of wonder.
Thank goodness. I'd rather live SF than read SF!
Imagine if a 50's science fiction writer had thought of the web. A story about buying a book on Amazon from your cubicle at work (most peoples reality today) somehow doesn't seem as exciting as flying to another planet with a cheeky robot.
Furthermore, we now all suspect -- from our experiences of going through the information revolution -- that flying to another planet, when it happens, will be as exciting as taking a bus, and that traveling with a cheeky robot will be as romantic as any other irritatingly mis-configured consumer electronics!
We're (to quote Kipling) "Too wonder-stale to wonder."
I don't entirely see that as a bad thing. When I was but an egg, I read SF and covetted living in the worlds there depicted. Now I do.
The thing is, I bet there are a lot of cases where one or two bad guys not necessarily right at the top can turn a whole company crooked (or at least semi-crooked) just because everyone else is too apathetic - or frightened - to shop them.
Ignorant. Too ignorant or oblivious to even notice they are being screwed until it is too late.
The case that Cringley describes, the founder of the Corp got ousted through boardroom manuevering. Do you think he would have seen that coming in a million years? If you incorporated your little company, and owned 80% of the common stock, would you have realized how vulnerable you were to being screwed by the company lawyer? Would you have realized that you could be shut out of the company -- and deprived of all profit -- through a procedural ploy?
And if the founder of the corp didn't figure it out, despite having to deal with these jackals regularly, how would anyone else below him in the organization figure it out? Hell, the person he hired to counsel him on this sort of thing was the person who turned out to be working for the enemy.
The sorts of things Cringley is talking about happen at the top of a company's food chain. There are simply fewer people in that pool, and that means bugs in the policies and procedures are less likely to be noticed. Effectively the company was legally 0nz3rd. The company he described got the corporation-equivalent of rooted, though a vulnerability in the terms of incorporation.
In practice, I make sure everything is stored in plain ascii and run grep alot.
I'm pretty shocked that no one in this entire discussion so far has done what I do. Now, I don't expect normal people to use a system like mine, because it require thinking like a coder. But this is slashdot!
I use the constellation of nmh (which stores every msg as an independent file, and allows nested folders and permits sim-linked folders and messages), procmail (which happily filters directly into nmh-style folders if you want it to), and my own domain name, with catch-all email.
I simply write a procmail rule to snag emails and park them where I want them, on reasonable conceptual bases. This is greatly facilitated by using different email addresses for different purposes. For instance, using the Andrew-style plus convention (MyBusinessUsername+company.com@myDomainname.com)
to sort vendors. I sign up for email lists that way, and then use procmail on the "Received" headers instead of the TO headers. Works like a charm.
When I have a particularly active project, I make a higher-level symlink folder for it. So for instance, when I had a folder $myMusicAccout/$bandName/gigs/$gigname/playlist, I would make an alias $gigname at the top level while that gig was being planned, then blow it away after the gig.
Yes. The process of manufacturing silk thread from silkworm cocoons involves boiling the cocoons to get the stickiness off, so that they then can be unwound (yes, *unwound*; silk is not spun from many short fibers like cotton or linen, but from twisting together several extremly long fibers each of which is an unreeled cocoon. That is why silk fabric is so smooth and glossy: almost no little fiber ends sticking out of the thread.)
Have you ever used it to record?? You can tweak every aspect of the performance with a graphical interface. You can ADD bends, slides, vibrato, glissando, or even NEW "fun pitch effects" that the voice human isn't capable of.
And of course being able to change key / mode after the singer has left is pretty cool too.
I just see it as a different thing than "singing". I.e. I can appreciate a good auto-tune performance, and also a good acapella (though I would be annoyed if they turned out to be using autotune and didn't tell me! I would be appreciating the wrong aspect of the performance).
Completely legitimate for recording. But it begs the question of what's the purpose of this in live performance.
Interestingly, the comes down to yet another tussle in the tug-o-war between composers and performers which really started up in the 15th or early 16th century, and has been roiling ever since.
The people who write music -- the composers, the songwriters, the arrangers -- conceive of music in an abstracted form, and they plan it out. Their artistry is in laying out the blueprints for an idealized performance. The people who execute music -- the singers and instrumentalists, and, today, the sound engineers on live shows -- conceive of music in a specific instance -- this performance, right here, right now -- and their artistry is in spontaneously generating an expressive interpretation of that blueprint.
Since the Renaissance, the people who create the blueprints for music (the composers) and the people who execute the blueprints for music (the performers) have been fighting it out, as to who has control. Composers flamed performers for adding notes, for ornamenting and editing, for not following the plans. Performers... well, performers went on blithely ignoring composers, until composers started demanding control of the hiring of performers for important gigs, and the great age of classical (monomanaiacal, micromanaging) composers was born.
This tool is a tool for the writers of music to control the execution of music. It's a composerly control, not a performerly control. Which is not to say those two roles are always separate people. I'm both, and many other musicians are too. The issue here, is that there's a difference between being a performer -- even in a big electronic performance venue -- and a recording artist. Being a recording artist is very much about "writing" music -- even if it's done in bits, instead of neums or notes! -- it's about making the most perfect possible record of the abstract idea of the music. As such, the autotuner fits right in.
But where does it fit in with performance? It sounds like it doesn't. Yes, the planner of a piece of music, the person recording it can use it to put into a record what is otherwise impossible, but the executer of music cannot use it in realtime to expressively execute music.
Which has an interesting consequence which I've already been observing in amateur venues. Because of the ubiquity of highly professional, highly pitch-accurate music on the radio and other media, the ignorant listening-public of today have a greater expectation/demand for pitch accuracy than perhaps ever before in human history. Quite simply, their ears are accustomed to it, even if they don't consciously know it. Thus people's tolerance for the pitch flaws of live performance is getting lower and lower.
One of two things is going to happen. Because of the arms race for ever more accurate pitch, either rock stars on tour will all start relying on autotuners, to get them consistently to the super-human level of accuracy their public expects, or as a culture we will no longer conflate being a recording artist with being a performer, and there will be a division of labor, and concomitant division of tastes, with some people preferring the fresh, raw sound of live performance, and other preferring the pristine, well-
PS: "Perfect pitch" to me means "being able to identify notes by ear without a reference" rather than "being able to sing on-key" (though I guess the two usually go together).
I'm a singer. You are right about what "perfect pitch" means, but the article suggests one of the purposes of the autotuner is for those nights when a singer physically can't execute the more extreme notes. Being able to execute as passage is more than knowing how it's supposed to sound (which is what perfect pitch gives you); the production of vocal music is very athletic. If you have a head cold or a sore throat messing with your high/low notes, and an arena filled with 50,000 screaming fans who paid upwards of $50/seat, well, yes, I can see where the pressure for an autotuner comes from.
This is still the antichrist, though. Definitionally, it eradicates blue notes, bends, and fun pitch effects -- what does it do to glissandos?
And, frankly, it offends me as a singer. The craft of singing is, like 60%, the mastery of making pitch and rhythm to nigh-superhuman levels of precision. Sure you could make a machine do it, but that's like having a forklift compete in a weightlifting competition. What's the point?
So is NYC or Detroit somehow far more superior to the west coast?
Well, *yes*. Obviously. *Duh*.
Slightly more seriously: Yes, the NE has power outages from time to time, but you seem to either be trolling or not understand the sheer scale of this one. Go find a map and figure out the geographical scale of a power outage which stretches from NYC to Toronto to Ottowa to Detroit.
1) What law is this? There is no federal education system, schools are run locally.
Um, speed limits are set locally, too. (I presume you know about the speed limit issue.)
I don't know what level of Federal control there is or is not in such mandatory school legislation, but I am quite certain it is possible for it to be a Federal issue (even if it's not based on Federal law), with the level of Federal funding there is for education.
No, seriously. Forget for a moment about "big brother" fears. This sort of thing would be GREAT for the kids who were beat up for being nerdy (like me), fat, etc. You could just say to the teacher, "If you don't do something about (PERSON X) and (PERSON Y) picking on me, I'll just tell the Principal to review the tapes." Maybe that would help get some results.
A lot of kids (myself included) come away from the public school system with a REALLY negative attitude, since kids are basically allowed to beat the snot out of each other and no one does anything. The resulting perception is that authority figures are cold, ineffectual, and utterly apathetic. This might help alleviate that problem.
On the contrary, the little hoodlums will continue to blithely doing as they have always done to such as you and I. After all, if they assalted us under the watchful eye of the teacher before, why do you think it should be any different with a camera?
No, it will greatly exacerbate precisely the perception you cite: Big Brother is watching you, and doesn't give a rats ass whether you live or die. If you thought your perception of authority figures was bad, wait for the generation that grew up with their abuse recorded for posterity -- and ignored.
Is a camera going to punish someone? No, merely gather information for a punisher to act upon. But that information is already available; the problem is no one wants to act on it.
A camera is a bluff, and every student knows that. If school staff wanted to know what some kids are doing to other kids, that information is already available to them. But they don't want to have to do anything about it. So they issue vague, idle threats, like "The camera will record you doing it" (so what?), to discourage behavior they don't want to have to intervene in. The punishments will still be a slap on the wrist -- and as often administered to both offender and victim, than just the offender -- and the abuse will continue.
Direct supervision and coaching are something very different from surveillance. You may be right, but nobody's suggested using the Biloxi webcams for giving teacher any sort of supervisory feedback -- only security monitoring. Essentially this system is being set up so it is more likely only to be used against teachers -- the tapes will only be reviewed if there is an allegation of a problem -- than for their professional benefit.
I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but I am adamant we be honest about what is going on.
Let me be clear: I'm not weighing in on one side or the other about the webcams. But some of the rationales for them are amazingly specious, and I think honest rational discourse requires me to call them out as such.
Cameras will do anything BUT interfere with teaching. There are two possible scenarios: a) teachers begin to ignore the cameras and carry on as always or hopefully b) they will realize that the cameras are 100% coverage of their daily teaching and can be used for/against them during review time. They would hopefully improve their teaching and in-class behavior. This could only lead to a better teaching experience IMHO.
Really? Why on earth do you think that? You seem to be presuminng that good teaching is not against the rules. In my limited HS teaching experience (11th & 12th grade English) I regularly had to bend the rules to deliver the education the kids actually needed, instead of what the Powers That Be required. For instance, I had a HS Senior reading at a 4th grade level; I decided to assign her special material much below grade level to try and meet her where she was and get her to advance -- as opposed to pretending there was no problem and passing her just to make myself look good (which is how she made it to 12th grade with a 4th grade reading level, to begin with). I mention that because it was the least egregious case of rule-bending for the sake of education I can remember.
I presume that you think most teachers are slackers who need to be forced to really do their jobs. Actually, I mostly agree with that! But I hardly think surveillance will work; it mostly will cause them to slack off in ways which make them look busy: assigning reams of mindless redundant exercises, responding to questions with punative "assignments" meant to discourge future questions, etc. It's remarkably easy for a teacher to invent ways of appearing "educational" and "hard-working", which are just ways of goofing off.
Re:could you point me to the research please
on
The Introvert Advantage
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Someone arguing that "It has nothing to do with brain chemistry", when challenged to back that up writes:
MY own experience, and from most other introverts I've spoken to.
How splendid for you. Meanwhile, Dr. Jerome Kagan at Harvard University is busily doing studies which link brain chemistry to temperament, in particular introversion. In some of the most compelling recent news, infants identified as more socially timid, and then discovered to have brain chemistry and respiratory traits in common, have been followed in a longitudinal study; the subjects are now in their teens, and still temperamentally distinct.
I gave up the review early on...right about here: "It's temperament, hard wired in your genetic code, and cannot be altered." That's taking determinism a bit too far, I think. Genetic, perhaps -- but unalterable? Personality is not as incorrigible as that.
You seem to misunderstand the concept of "temperament". Temperament is an overall predisposition. That predisposition is not an iron law that cannot be broken. It is a tendency.
Saying temperament is in-born, or saying that a temperamental trait such as introversion is in-born, is asserting that a person has a life-long predispostion, not that he will always behave in accordance with that predisposition. Or put another way, it is asserting what a person's behavioral path-of-least-resistance is.
You also seem to misunderstand what is meant by
"Introversion":
Introverts need to learn a little extroversion just to get along in life.
No, introverts need to learn how to be socially adept, which is quite a different thing from being an extrovert. Indeed, many extroverts need to learn to be socially adept -- just because you really like being around people doesn't mean you're good at socializing!
Saying introverts need to learn a little extroversion to get along in life is like saying that for a man to learn to fly he has to learn to flap his arms like birds flap their wings. While it is possible for a man to learn to fly, it's not by flapping his arms; while it's possible for an introvert to be socially adept, it's not by the same skills as the extrovert.
Is personality, or certain personality traits immutable? I would have thought that with the right stimulation it would be highly mutable. Thats ignoring the fact that we are intelligent enought to recognise our own patterns of behaviour and can suppress our natural instincts if we make that choice.
For the issue of immutablility of traits, more generally,
I cannot too highly to you recommend Listening to Prozac. This book has been woefully mischaracterized as a "pro-Prozac" screed, when it is a very thoughtful rumination about the philosophical ramifications of our personalities being materially determined by our brain chemistries. The author goes into considerable detail about research into the connection of brain chemistry and personality traits, also into the history of the politics of that research (which is also fascinating). To summarize, there is considerable evidence that people are born with hardwired predispositions (which is not the same thing as behaviors), the altering of which can only be changed by changing the matter of the brain. It's a fantastically interesting, thoughtful, and well-researched book; I commend it to you.
It's worth remembering that first reaction, because some people are trying to rewrite the history. Faced with public opposition to cloning and ```designer babies,'' commentators frequently say that we'll get used to them, pointing to the public's turnaround to embrace in-vitro fertilization. In fact, the public reaction at the time was fascination and approval. A Gallup poll showed that by late 1978 a stunning 93 percent of Americans were aware of the ``test-tube baby,'' while a September Harris poll of American women reported that 85 percent thought infertile couples should have the chance to try in-vitro fertilization.
Oh, really? That's not what I remember of that time period. Just who's rewriting history? I remember it being an enormous controversy. A survey showing 93% of USAns were "aware" of something is not the same thing as them approving of it. Of course they were aware of it. All the talking heads on TV were arguing about it and there were flamewars going on in the letters-to-the-editors columns of the newspapers.
And saying that 85% of USAn women surveyed thought that infertile couples should have a chance to try it begs the question of what the men thought.
To read the article makes it sound like landing on the moon. It wasn't like that at all. The article even quotes Newsweek:
Truly, as Newsweek put it, her first yell was ``a cry heard round the brave new world.''
I got news for Shanks: "brave new world" was not a complementary or approving phrase 25 years ago. It's an allusion -- which was much made in those days, concerning IVF -- to a novel in which all babies are made artificially and reared in artificial wombs, and this intervention of technology into reproduction is used as an opportunity for social control by a Big Brotherish government. It has only been in the last 10 years or so that the public has forgotten that the expression "brave new world" was originally cynical and sarcastic.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but think for a moment about the number of billable hours in a wedding photographer's week. (This is the same as for a wedding musician -- something which I've looked into as a musician.) There aren't a heck of a lot of weddings between 9am and 5pm M-F. Generally, a wedding photographer has to make his entire weekly gross in a weekend. How many weddings per weekend do you think they can do? How often? I don't know how it works for photographers, but for musicians, if you managed to book three a weekend (Sat day, Sat eve and Sun day) steadily you're doing fantastic. Now factor in the fact that if they're doing that as their main job (i.e. no other day job) they're doing sole-proprietor work subject to self-employment tax; they're paying for solo health insurance if any; etc.
Do the math. What a wedding photographer has to charge per wedding just to make a living is staggeringly high. And that's true for every professional who primarily sells services for weddings which requires attending the wedding (e.g. not including florists).
I vote for "munged" , myself.
You have totally missed the point. I can't tell from the traffic on my personal email lists what my subscribers are discussing with their friends on other email list. With blogs I can and so I might very well wind up in a discussion with someone I've never met before who is a friend-of-a-friend.
BTW, I run three list servers and am subscribed to something like 75 lists, ranging from big open discussion lists to little private discussions of a few friends; take it from me, blogs work differently.
Talking to you about blogs reminds me of trying to explain email to my mother in 1989 and the web to her in 1994. It's really quite pointless; you aren't going to get it by making comparisons to media you already know. You're saying things that are the moral equivalent to "why not just use email lists instead of usenet news groups" (to which the answer is that sometimes email list a a perfectly good substitute for usenet -- but it isn't the same thing and if you want usenet for usenet's properties, you need to use usenet. You should check out the new medium for yourself, and then the whole topic will make far more sense.
That's what I thought, until about 2 weeks ago.
My friends managed to get me to finally sign up for a livejournal. I now Get It.
The idea of a blog as existing all alone, broadcasting to the public like a radio tower is, while a perfectly valid one, hardly the one which has people flocking to the "blogosphere". The way these people are using these blogs is far more like a cross between chat (short, chatty msgs) and email (asynchronous), but with aspects which are neither and are interesting in their own right.
It's an asynchronous medium where the topic subjects are the people; as such it's immensely well suited to groups of existing friends keeping in daily touch, while separated by their jobs or great distances.
While the spam problem can be solved by limiting posting to accounts known to you, this could discourage or prevent useful "FOAF" effects. For instance, I wound up today at the LJ of someone I had never met previously, who was asking a question I knew an answer to; she didn't know me from Adam, but I was able to reply to her question in her blog.
How utterly wrong.
One of the primary forces for the founders to get government completely out of the religion racket (and vice versa) was the history in England of the tug of war between the Catholics (papists) and the Protestants. Each time the crown changed heads to someone on the other side, that became the new official religion, and the country was plunged into bloody violence as the losers were oppressed, churches burned, etc. This went on for about a century. By the time the founders of US started trying to build a new country, they were pretty clear that allowing the government to take any stand for any religion at all was the last thing on earth they wanted.
Christians find it convenient to forget that the recent history of the Founders' day was one of Christians slaughtering Christians in sectarian violence. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation were not so long in the past, when Adams and Jefferson took up their pens. They had a very different point of view that you do on the consequences of letting a government in any way endorse a religion.
Oh, and I just discovered this course that I am so interested in? Enrollment is limited to Anthropology Majors and Minors. So even when I was an MIT undergrad, I wouldn't have been able to take this course. Let's hear it for the MIT OCW!
Well, no, but then replacing real, live professors is not the point. I consider it, in part, an FM to R before hastling a person with ignorant questions.
Case in point: I discovered that a topic I'm interested is considered an obscure sub-branch of the field of anthropology. I have friends who are anthropologists, and they're happy to answer my questions until the cows come home (and talk about their research until long after that), but the one question they don't have a handy answer to and never have time to work up is this:
In short, I needed the syllabus and bibliography of a "Anthropology 101" undergrad course, which focused on theory and not practice. Lo! I have all I requested.
Since this is a civil, not a criminal, case, at this stage of the proceedings nobody was anywhere near a courthouse, so I don't think the notion of "burden of proof" quite applies (yet).
Presumably, what just happened is that her lawyer wrote a nice letter to the RIAA which said, in essence, "My client is a Mac user and we would be thoroughly delighted to embarrass the bejesus out of you in both a court of law and the international press. Name a date and courthouse, punk, and bring it on." Then the RIAA decided that maybe the didn't want to find out conclusively one way or the other whether she was a mac user.
That said, (and IANAL) the standard of proof for civil cases is not the familiar "beyond a reasonable doubt" of civil cases, but much lower. That is why the alleged victims of alleged crimes who didn't prevail in criminal cases sometimes attempt to sue, because, the rules being different, it is easier to get a judgment against someone in civil suit. But it works the other way around, too.
I think this means that she would only have to convince a judge it was implausible she could have been using kazaa, not impossible.
I use both. PHP is more powerful, in that you can write more sophisticated code. However, CF is vastly better for prototyping of your typical web app; its abstractions are vastly more appropriate for the sorts of typical db/html tasks than PHP's are.
PHP gets its powerful flexibility by being really general -- it's kind of like simplified perl -- which makes doing typical and common tasks into spaghetti. The classical example is looping over the results of a db query. In PHP you actually have to write out a frigging loop, and assign rows to variables and shit. In-fucking-credible. In the sorts of real systems grownups use to develop web apps -- think Vignette StoryServer's tcl -- the languages have ways to implicitly loop over stuff, because that's so typical to working with db rows. (Gee! Ya think?) And that's how CF works. The result is about 100 times more elegant and readable.
(You can rub Smarty over your PHP, which helps, but you still have to write all sorts of should-be-automatic-stuff out long-hand every freeking time. Smarty improves the situation, but doesn't solve the basic problem.)
Which is not to say I'm unwilling to harsh on CF. My feelings towards it are not, shall we say, unalloyed delight. But PHP and CF each suck in different ways, and really are appropriate to different projects.
In my professional experience, most web projects, bluntly, don't need more power than CF. It takes very little to exceed CF's capacities, but most companys' web sites don't get that far.
It was more than optimism, it was romanticization. It's very hard for us now to romanticize technology because it's so quotidian! Frankly, we live in a SF world.
SF has always been about evoking a sense of wonder. That's one of the oldest saws in the field of SF. But it's damn hard to get all exited about technology when it's such an every-day thing. In the "golden age" of SF, new inventions, new technologies, simple novelty was a big deal. Today it's ho-hum. It's not that the changes are dull, it's that it's an excitement we're accustomed to -- "Dude, look at this new wireless gadget I got!" -- not an excitement which sparks any sort of wonder.
Thank goodness. I'd rather live SF than read SF!
Furthermore, we now all suspect -- from our experiences of going through the information revolution -- that flying to another planet, when it happens, will be as exciting as taking a bus, and that traveling with a cheeky robot will be as romantic as any other irritatingly mis-configured consumer electronics!
We're (to quote Kipling) "Too wonder-stale to wonder."
I don't entirely see that as a bad thing. When I was but an egg, I read SF and covetted living in the worlds there depicted. Now I do.
Yippee!
Ignorant. Too ignorant or oblivious to even notice they are being screwed until it is too late.
The case that Cringley describes, the founder of the Corp got ousted through boardroom manuevering. Do you think he would have seen that coming in a million years? If you incorporated your little company, and owned 80% of the common stock, would you have realized how vulnerable you were to being screwed by the company lawyer? Would you have realized that you could be shut out of the company -- and deprived of all profit -- through a procedural ploy?
And if the founder of the corp didn't figure it out, despite having to deal with these jackals regularly, how would anyone else below him in the organization figure it out? Hell, the person he hired to counsel him on this sort of thing was the person who turned out to be working for the enemy.
The sorts of things Cringley is talking about happen at the top of a company's food chain. There are simply fewer people in that pool, and that means bugs in the policies and procedures are less likely to be noticed. Effectively the company was legally 0nz3rd. The company he described got the corporation-equivalent of rooted, though a vulnerability in the terms of incorporation.
I'm pretty shocked that no one in this entire discussion so far has done what I do. Now, I don't expect normal people to use a system like mine, because it require thinking like a coder. But this is slashdot!
I use the constellation of nmh (which stores every msg as an independent file, and allows nested folders and permits sim-linked folders and messages), procmail (which happily filters directly into nmh-style folders if you want it to), and my own domain name, with catch-all email.
I simply write a procmail rule to snag emails and park them where I want them, on reasonable conceptual bases. This is greatly facilitated by using different email addresses for different purposes. For instance, using the Andrew-style plus convention (MyBusinessUsername+company.com@myDomainname.com) to sort vendors. I sign up for email lists that way, and then use procmail on the "Received" headers instead of the TO headers. Works like a charm.
When I have a particularly active project, I make a higher-level symlink folder for it. So for instance, when I had a folder $myMusicAccout/$bandName/gigs/$gigname/playlist, I would make an alias $gigname at the top level while that gig was being planned, then blow it away after the gig.
Yes. The process of manufacturing silk thread from silkworm cocoons involves boiling the cocoons to get the stickiness off, so that they then can be unwound (yes, *unwound*; silk is not spun from many short fibers like cotton or linen, but from twisting together several extremly long fibers each of which is an unreeled cocoon. That is why silk fabric is so smooth and glossy: almost no little fiber ends sticking out of the thread.)
Completely legitimate for recording. But it begs the question of what's the purpose of this in live performance.
Interestingly, the comes down to yet another tussle in the tug-o-war between composers and performers which really started up in the 15th or early 16th century, and has been roiling ever since.
The people who write music -- the composers, the songwriters, the arrangers -- conceive of music in an abstracted form, and they plan it out. Their artistry is in laying out the blueprints for an idealized performance. The people who execute music -- the singers and instrumentalists, and, today, the sound engineers on live shows -- conceive of music in a specific instance -- this performance, right here, right now -- and their artistry is in spontaneously generating an expressive interpretation of that blueprint.
Since the Renaissance, the people who create the blueprints for music (the composers) and the people who execute the blueprints for music (the performers) have been fighting it out, as to who has control. Composers flamed performers for adding notes, for ornamenting and editing, for not following the plans. Performers... well, performers went on blithely ignoring composers, until composers started demanding control of the hiring of performers for important gigs, and the great age of classical (monomanaiacal, micromanaging) composers was born.
This tool is a tool for the writers of music to control the execution of music. It's a composerly control, not a performerly control. Which is not to say those two roles are always separate people. I'm both, and many other musicians are too. The issue here, is that there's a difference between being a performer -- even in a big electronic performance venue -- and a recording artist. Being a recording artist is very much about "writing" music -- even if it's done in bits, instead of neums or notes! -- it's about making the most perfect possible record of the abstract idea of the music. As such, the autotuner fits right in.
But where does it fit in with performance? It sounds like it doesn't. Yes, the planner of a piece of music, the person recording it can use it to put into a record what is otherwise impossible, but the executer of music cannot use it in realtime to expressively execute music.
Which has an interesting consequence which I've already been observing in amateur venues. Because of the ubiquity of highly professional, highly pitch-accurate music on the radio and other media, the ignorant listening-public of today have a greater expectation/demand for pitch accuracy than perhaps ever before in human history. Quite simply, their ears are accustomed to it, even if they don't consciously know it. Thus people's tolerance for the pitch flaws of live performance is getting lower and lower.
One of two things is going to happen. Because of the arms race for ever more accurate pitch, either rock stars on tour will all start relying on autotuners, to get them consistently to the super-human level of accuracy their public expects, or as a culture we will no longer conflate being a recording artist with being a performer, and there will be a division of labor, and concomitant division of tastes, with some people preferring the fresh, raw sound of live performance, and other preferring the pristine, well-
I'm a singer. You are right about what "perfect pitch" means, but the article suggests one of the purposes of the autotuner is for those nights when a singer physically can't execute the more extreme notes. Being able to execute as passage is more than knowing how it's supposed to sound (which is what perfect pitch gives you); the production of vocal music is very athletic. If you have a head cold or a sore throat messing with your high/low notes, and an arena filled with 50,000 screaming fans who paid upwards of $50/seat, well, yes, I can see where the pressure for an autotuner comes from.
This is still the antichrist, though. Definitionally, it eradicates blue notes, bends, and fun pitch effects -- what does it do to glissandos?
And, frankly, it offends me as a singer. The craft of singing is, like 60%, the mastery of making pitch and rhythm to nigh-superhuman levels of precision. Sure you could make a machine do it, but that's like having a forklift compete in a weightlifting competition. What's the point?
Well, *yes*. Obviously. *Duh*.
Slightly more seriously: Yes, the NE has power outages from time to time, but you seem to either be trolling or not understand the sheer scale of this one. Go find a map and figure out the geographical scale of a power outage which stretches from NYC to Toronto to Ottowa to Detroit.
Um, speed limits are set locally, too. (I presume you know about the speed limit issue.)
I don't know what level of Federal control there is or is not in such mandatory school legislation, but I am quite certain it is possible for it to be a Federal issue (even if it's not based on Federal law), with the level of Federal funding there is for education.
Just felt I should point that out.
On the contrary, the little hoodlums will continue to blithely doing as they have always done to such as you and I. After all, if they assalted us under the watchful eye of the teacher before, why do you think it should be any different with a camera?
No, it will greatly exacerbate precisely the perception you cite: Big Brother is watching you, and doesn't give a rats ass whether you live or die. If you thought your perception of authority figures was bad, wait for the generation that grew up with their abuse recorded for posterity -- and ignored.
Is a camera going to punish someone? No, merely gather information for a punisher to act upon. But that information is already available; the problem is no one wants to act on it.
A camera is a bluff, and every student knows that. If school staff wanted to know what some kids are doing to other kids, that information is already available to them. But they don't want to have to do anything about it. So they issue vague, idle threats, like "The camera will record you doing it" (so what?), to discourage behavior they don't want to have to intervene in. The punishments will still be a slap on the wrist -- and as often administered to both offender and victim, than just the offender -- and the abuse will continue.
Direct supervision and coaching are something very different from surveillance. You may be right, but nobody's suggested using the Biloxi webcams for giving teacher any sort of supervisory feedback -- only security monitoring. Essentially this system is being set up so it is more likely only to be used against teachers -- the tapes will only be reviewed if there is an allegation of a problem -- than for their professional benefit.
I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but I am adamant we be honest about what is going on.
Let me be clear: I'm not weighing in on one side or the other about the webcams. But some of the rationales for them are amazingly specious, and I think honest rational discourse requires me to call them out as such.
Really? Why on earth do you think that? You seem to be presuminng that good teaching is not against the rules. In my limited HS teaching experience (11th & 12th grade English) I regularly had to bend the rules to deliver the education the kids actually needed, instead of what the Powers That Be required. For instance, I had a HS Senior reading at a 4th grade level; I decided to assign her special material much below grade level to try and meet her where she was and get her to advance -- as opposed to pretending there was no problem and passing her just to make myself look good (which is how she made it to 12th grade with a 4th grade reading level, to begin with). I mention that because it was the least egregious case of rule-bending for the sake of education I can remember.
I presume that you think most teachers are slackers who need to be forced to really do their jobs. Actually, I mostly agree with that! But I hardly think surveillance will work; it mostly will cause them to slack off in ways which make them look busy: assigning reams of mindless redundant exercises, responding to questions with punative "assignments" meant to discourge future questions, etc. It's remarkably easy for a teacher to invent ways of appearing "educational" and "hard-working", which are just ways of goofing off.
Someone arguing that "It has nothing to do with brain chemistry", when challenged to back that up writes:
How splendid for you. Meanwhile, Dr. Jerome Kagan at Harvard University is busily doing studies which link brain chemistry to temperament, in particular introversion. In some of the most compelling recent news, infants identified as more socially timid, and then discovered to have brain chemistry and respiratory traits in common, have been followed in a longitudinal study; the subjects are now in their teens, and still temperamentally distinct.
You seem to misunderstand the concept of "temperament". Temperament is an overall predisposition. That predisposition is not an iron law that cannot be broken. It is a tendency.
Saying temperament is in-born, or saying that a temperamental trait such as introversion is in-born, is asserting that a person has a life-long predispostion, not that he will always behave in accordance with that predisposition. Or put another way, it is asserting what a person's behavioral path-of-least-resistance is.
You also seem to misunderstand what is meant by "Introversion":
No, introverts need to learn how to be socially adept, which is quite a different thing from being an extrovert. Indeed, many extroverts need to learn to be socially adept -- just because you really like being around people doesn't mean you're good at socializing!
Saying introverts need to learn a little extroversion to get along in life is like saying that for a man to learn to fly he has to learn to flap his arms like birds flap their wings. While it is possible for a man to learn to fly, it's not by flapping his arms; while it's possible for an introvert to be socially adept, it's not by the same skills as the extrovert.
Try my essay What Changes, What Doesn't Change for a specifically Introvert/Extravert take on the issue.
For the issue of immutablility of traits, more generally, I cannot too highly to you recommend Listening to Prozac. This book has been woefully mischaracterized as a "pro-Prozac" screed, when it is a very thoughtful rumination about the philosophical ramifications of our personalities being materially determined by our brain chemistries. The author goes into considerable detail about research into the connection of brain chemistry and personality traits, also into the history of the politics of that research (which is also fascinating). To summarize, there is considerable evidence that people are born with hardwired predispositions (which is not the same thing as behaviors), the altering of which can only be changed by changing the matter of the brain. It's a fantastically interesting, thoughtful, and well-researched book; I commend it to you.
Duh. Try reading the post again, this time going for reading comprehension.
From the Mercury News article:
Oh, really? That's not what I remember of that time period. Just who's rewriting history? I remember it being an enormous controversy. A survey showing 93% of USAns were "aware" of something is not the same thing as them approving of it. Of course they were aware of it. All the talking heads on TV were arguing about it and there were flamewars going on in the letters-to-the-editors columns of the newspapers.
And saying that 85% of USAn women surveyed thought that infertile couples should have a chance to try it begs the question of what the men thought.
To read the article makes it sound like landing on the moon. It wasn't like that at all. The article even quotes Newsweek:
I got news for Shanks: "brave new world" was not a complementary or approving phrase 25 years ago. It's an allusion -- which was much made in those days, concerning IVF -- to a novel in which all babies are made artificially and reared in artificial wombs, and this intervention of technology into reproduction is used as an opportunity for social control by a Big Brotherish government. It has only been in the last 10 years or so that the public has forgotten that the expression "brave new world" was originally cynical and sarcastic.