Placebo effects work for education just as much as they work for healthcare. By believing that the sugar pills they are being fed are actually potent medicine, patients will themselves to health. Similarly, by believing in their ability to succeed and to handle the material, the kids were able to succeed and handle the material.
The modern North American feel-good approach may be flawed not in its aims but in its methods. If it were making people feel-good about their brilliance rather than their averageness, they would be able to be more brilliant. Everyone wins.
So... would being an FTE with DOS make you a Frickin' Teledildonics Engineer with the Department of Sex? Or a Faster-Than-Everything with Denial-of-Service? I am not really clear on that point.
BTW, using semicolons to terminate lines is perfectly legal in Python. It doesn't care if they are there or not, but using them makes it easier if you are also writing Perl and Java at the same time. In fact, I always semicolon my Python.
Iron Council by China Mieville Secularity: 10 Technophilia: 10 Quality: 8 Xenophilia: 10 Tilt: 7 Average: 9
"I want to die for the engine I love -- one hundred and forty three"
- a folk song
Two decades after the dreamplague of Perdido Street Station, the industrial metropolis of New Crobuzon bubbles with discontent. Guilds strike. Revolutionary cells meet and blabber. Militia patrol in grim uniforms.
The suffrage remains very limited. Power is still in the hands of the Fat Sun Party, with the xenophobic Three Quillers holding the balance of power. New Crobuzon is at war with the city-state of Tesh, and crippled veterans fill the streets.
New Crobuzon's industrialists have launched the construction of a railroad to span the continent. Hills have been levelled, swamps have been filled, mountains have been bored. Thousands of vodyanoi, human, cactus, and Remade workers have died.
In the meantime, an insurrectionary by the name of Cutter has set out on a journey to find a comrade -- or, as Mieville artfuly prefers -- a chaver called Jonah who is in turn looking for the legendary Iron Council.
The first part of the book is bone-fast. The search for Jonah rushes in a manic whirlwind of activity across Bas Lag. Mieville eventually lets up the pace and slows down to a point that lets the majesty of the universe shine through.
The usual playful nomenclature of Mieville is in full force. Exotica suprises and delights. Events echo real world ones without lapsing into allegory.
Terry Pratchett likes to mumble about the narrative imperative, but he doesn't really grasp it. Pratchett's wars end with the sides realizing that they know each other's first names or that they'd much rather play some footie or something trite like that. Everyone's a jolly swell bloke. Uhm, okay. Very gripping. Not.
Mieville, on the other hand, is possessed by the imperative. Iron Council has, in a way, run away from him. At times, the plot stops being a novel and becomes a tall tale or a Biblical myth. Hyperrealism mixes with airbrushed archetypes. China failed to add enough water to the concentrate and the result is a mix of juice and juice powder.
I recommend it, but not as much as I recommed The Scar.
For an alternate opinion, try bookslut.com: "Well, as evinced by his latest novel, Iron Council, my problem is that Miéville is just an abhorrently boring and pretentious novelist... What's frustrating isn't that Miéville is a bad writer. He's not. Throughout Iron Council, there are moments of near-genius, in which he nicely nails tough bits of dialogue or characterization. There is an entire section describing a radical play that reads as well as anything Kim Newman or Ellen Kushner could write. The man can write. He just chooses not to."
This appeared in my journal on August 24th, 2004.:)
Small Screen Rendering is available from the view menu in any recent version of Opera, including Opera 8b3 (Linux). It's surprisingly nifty, though kinda useless on the desktop.
OTOH, the new "Fit to Window Width" feature is super useful whenever there's a horizontal sidebar or if you want to collapse a frameset into a single page.:)
Oh, sweet merciful Azathoth of Infinite Chaos...
on
Juiced
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Look... I like Slashdot. I think dupes have a certain quaint charm. I like the discussion and am not overconcerned about "Slashbots" or "group think". I believe that open source is morally superior to closed. Heck, I have journal here and 2000 posts under my belt. Slashdot's a good place.
... BUT DO NOT EVER POST A STORY ABOUT SPORTS AGAIN, YOU MOTHERFUCKING FUCKERS. I GO TO SLASHDOT TO GET AWAY FROM THIS BULLSHIT. OKAY? READ MY LIPS. NO MORE SPORTS. NO SPORTS. OR SOMEONE DIES.
Last time I checked, Victoria's Secret digitally removed nipples from the photographs. No offense, but there is something disquieting about breasts that really do look like smooth melons.
Opera's chief advantage over IE is the user experience. The interface is fast, the rendering is blazing, and the browser is light. Also, even if IE implements HTML and CSS properly, Opera is still far ahead. The latest Opera 8 beta just added native support for SVG Tiny. The final Opera 8 will again be the Mozilla-spanker Opera 7 was during the Mozilla Suite days.
Hi. I am an actual Opera user on both Windows and Linux.:)
I check up on Firefox regularly, but it's not even trying to compete with Opera. It's very easy to juggle Opera's interface elements around visually, and I don't need to dig through a huge repository of extensions to get 50% of Opera's perks.
While sometimes it may be appropriate to cite an authority to
support a point, often it is not. In particular, an appeal to
authority is inappropriate if:
(i) the person is not qualified to have an expert
opinion on the subject,
(ii) experts in the field disagree on this issue.
(iii) the authority was making a joke, drunk, or
otherwise not being serious
A variation of the fallacious appeal to authority is hearsay. An
argument from hearsay is an argument which depends on
second or third hand sources.
Examples:
(i) Noted psychologist Dr. Frasier Crane recommends that
you buy the EZ-Rest Hot Tub.
(ii) Economist John Kenneth Galbraith argues that a tight
money policy s the best cure for a recession. (Although
Galbraith is an expert, not all economists agree on this
point.)
(iii) We are headed for nuclear war. Last week Ronald
Reagan remarked that we begin bombing Russia in five
minutes. (Of course, he said it as a joke during a
microphone test.)
(iv) My friend heard on the news the other day that Canada
will declare war on Serbia. (This is a case of hearsay; in
fact, the reporter said that Canada would not declare war.)
(v) The Ottawa Citizen reported that sales were up 5.9
percent this year. (This is hearsay; we are not n a position to
check the Citizen's sources.)
Disproof:
Show that either (i) the person cited is not an authority in the
field, or that (ii) there is general disagreement among the
experts in the field on this point.
Given any particular male in IT, and any particular female in IT, the male is much more likely to be proficient in what he is doing.
Actually... NO. Very no.
There are a lot of very, very, very boring males out there in IT. Just as there are plenty of such females. The average competence is the same. However, since there are fewer females bothering, the probability of a genius outlier existing is higher among males.
People don't remember their average coworkers; they remember the great ones, and great ones will inevitably come from the group with the larger representation. Carl Sagan discussed this kind of selective perception in Demon Haunted World. Exceptions are remembered, because average competence is about as memorable as what you had for breakfast two years ago.
More generally, when you double the population, you double the probability of a genius existing by increasing the area between the normal bell curve and the x-axis. And geniuses are the exception that prove the rules of your intuition.
Making judgements about individuals based on the statistical groups they belong to is known as "stereotyping".
Many fat kids may be jolly, many blacks may enjoy the ingestion of watermelons (actual stereotype), many Jews may be in finance, many Canadians may have a good sense of humour, many Frenchlings may be good lovers, many right-wingers may be illiterate oafs, and many women may relish the joys of motherhood, but that doesn't mean you should treat J. Random Groupmember differently. Treat everyone as human beings first, and base your interaction on their behaviour rather than their visual niche.
Slashdot Mirror
Placebo effects work for education just as much as they work for healthcare. By believing that the sugar pills they are being fed are actually potent medicine, patients will themselves to health. Similarly, by believing in their ability to succeed and to handle the material, the kids were able to succeed and handle the material.
The modern North American feel-good approach may be flawed not in its aims but in its methods. If it were making people feel-good about their brilliance rather than their averageness, they would be able to be more brilliant. Everyone wins.
Okay, WTF does an amphibian have lumps that look a lot like mammalian breasts? Someone ought to pound some biology into Lucas' orifices.
Dunno. But your post says a lot about the American Education System ;)
Please pardon my criticism, good sir, but your own post does little to compliment the schools of Australia.
They were British troops recruited in Halifax. That makes them Canadian, because Halifax is part of modern Canada.
It's the same logic that lets Italians claim Julius Caesar, Greeks claim Alexander the Great, and Americans claim the Salem Witch Trials.
So... would being an FTE with DOS make you a Frickin' Teledildonics Engineer with the Department of Sex? Or a Faster-Than-Everything with Denial-of-Service? I am not really clear on that point.
BTW, using semicolons to terminate lines is perfectly legal in Python. It doesn't care if they are there or not, but using them makes it easier if you are also writing Perl and Java at the same time. In fact, I always semicolon my Python.
*evil cackle*
*cough*CP/M*cough*GEM*cough*Apple Macintosh*cough*Desqview*cough*
"Military Intelligence" an "Microsoft Works" are oxymora. "Dead Corpse" and "Obfuscated C Code" are redundancies. Hope that helps. Have a nice day.^-^
Actually, you should submit all unintentionally horrible code to The Daily WTF instead. Great site.:)
Maybe you accidentally selected all of it and hit [Archive]. Have you tried searching for relevant keywords and seeing what turned up?
Weboso (aka Jairo Boudewyn) is the creative force behind those. DeviantArt has a sprawling interface, so here's a direct link to his Gallery.:)
so I can imagine what it would have been like if there were 0! ;)
Am I the only one who read 0! as 1 because of factorial notation?:)
Small Screen Rendering is available from the view menu in any recent version of Opera, including Opera 8b3 (Linux). It's surprisingly nifty, though kinda useless on the desktop.
OTOH, the new "Fit to Window Width" feature is super useful whenever there's a horizontal sidebar or if you want to collapse a frameset into a single page.:)
Look... I like Slashdot. I think dupes have a certain quaint charm. I like the discussion and am not overconcerned about "Slashbots" or "group think". I believe that open source is morally superior to closed. Heck, I have journal here and 2000 posts under my belt. Slashdot's a good place.
... BUT DO NOT EVER POST A STORY ABOUT SPORTS AGAIN, YOU MOTHERFUCKING FUCKERS. I GO TO SLASHDOT TO GET AWAY FROM THIS BULLSHIT. OKAY? READ MY LIPS. NO MORE SPORTS. NO SPORTS. OR SOMEONE DIES.
Gah.
Silly American. William Shatner is the kind of artist that we Canadians export. We keep the really talented folks for ourselves.;)
Worked for her in Catwoman.
No, wait, it didn't.
Never mind.
Why do you have 64 megs of RAM on a 2 GHz machine? Heck, I'd rather use a box with 256 megs of RAM and a 500 MHz processor. It would be faster.:)
Last time I checked, Victoria's Secret digitally removed nipples from the photographs. No offense, but there is something disquieting about breasts that really do look like smooth melons.
Opera's chief advantage over IE is the user experience. The interface is fast, the rendering is blazing, and the browser is light. Also, even if IE implements HTML and CSS properly, Opera is still far ahead. The latest Opera 8 beta just added native support for SVG Tiny. The final Opera 8 will again be the Mozilla-spanker Opera 7 was during the Mozilla Suite days.
Hi. I am an actual Opera user on both Windows and Linux.:)
I check up on Firefox regularly, but it's not even trying to compete with Opera. It's very easy to juggle Opera's interface elements around visually, and I don't need to dig through a huge repository of extensions to get 50% of Opera's perks.
Definition: Examples: Disproof:
Why are you acting so French Canadian, my beautiful homie brother?:)
Given any particular male in IT, and any particular female in IT, the male is much more likely to be proficient in what he is doing.
Actually... NO. Very no.
There are a lot of very, very, very boring males out there in IT. Just as there are plenty of such females. The average competence is the same. However, since there are fewer females bothering, the probability of a genius outlier existing is higher among males.
People don't remember their average coworkers; they remember the great ones, and great ones will inevitably come from the group with the larger representation. Carl Sagan discussed this kind of selective perception in Demon Haunted World. Exceptions are remembered, because average competence is about as memorable as what you had for breakfast two years ago.
More generally, when you double the population, you double the probability of a genius existing by increasing the area between the normal bell curve and the x-axis. And geniuses are the exception that prove the rules of your intuition.
Making judgements about individuals based on the statistical groups they belong to is known as "stereotyping".
Many fat kids may be jolly, many blacks may enjoy the ingestion of watermelons (actual stereotype), many Jews may be in finance, many Canadians may have a good sense of humour, many Frenchlings may be good lovers, many right-wingers may be illiterate oafs, and many women may relish the joys of motherhood, but that doesn't mean you should treat J. Random Groupmember differently. Treat everyone as human beings first, and base your interaction on their behaviour rather than their visual niche.