Doh! I also meant to say that teaching style is *everything* when it comes to boys and girls learning maths. I loved maths at school and took it right up until my final year, but all my teachers were male and I ended up pretty confused... not saying that a female teacher would automatically have improved matters, just that hearing stuff put another way might have succeeded where bashing my head against the same brick wall failed.
As new members of staff in my current job we were encouraged to consider "individual learning styles". I look forward to the day when this sort of consideration is no longer perceived as being optional (too many lousy lectures when I was a student!)
I teach in a psych programme at a university in the UK. It's a modern university, which means we don't get the brightest students [note for non-UK peeps: it's not that our university is bad, but students tend to apply to 'red-brick' (=Ivy League) universities, whose research programmes have a longer history of funding and who can attract bigger names. The fact that our teaching is rated more highly than that of most red-brick universities is apparently not considered an attractive enough prospect for undergraduate students, who won't be touching research with a bargepole in their time here. But I digress...]
Consequently, many of our students are confused by the statistics required of them as part of psych, because they are not mathematical high-achievers (or, often, academic high-achievers in general). More than half of our students are women. Hardly *any* of the male students have ever asked me for help with their statistics, and none have ever openly expressed doubt about their ability to complete the required statistical work.
The women, OTOH, frequently ask for help. I think this is due in roughly equal part to their being less isolationist about this sort of thing and also because it's socially acceptable for them to say "I'm no good at maths" (which I hear pretty frequently in one form or another). I'm trying to overcome this and show them that it's a breeze (if nothing else they should at least be able to click the right buttons in SPSS...:-/ ) but it's a long slow struggle against the widely-held perceptions that (a) it's ok for women not to do well at stats/maths and (b)they are not as naturally able.
The people who will be first against the wall when _my_ revolution comes are the ones who don't encourage their daughters in the same way that they encourage their sons.
Pissed off? Nah.
Trying to drum up a little intra-species discussion, maybe.
Dude, you gotta post with your name, it's no fun if I'm the only one laying my ID on the line.
Yeah, never get into a pissing contest with a woman. It's not pretty (and then she'll have to go home to change her trousers, and that just plain sucks).
Probably neither - my work is quite physiologically-oriented, so I haven't had much exposure to the 'soft end' of psych [it's hard to keep a broad focus...]. In addition, until last year I wasn't "in" a dept, just out on the fringes of two, so I didn't have 'normal' psychologists to interact with and tell me about the fun stuff. I'm trying to make up for that now, though!
Perhaps what this indicates is that we need a user-interface that's more VR-like; I've thought for a while that a desktop simulating total 3-D immersion would be easier to work with (put unimportant stuff "at the back", etc). The sooner your "monitor" is actually a pair of VR glasses you put on, the sooner women may find that we can catch up, on average.
I think that there are *many* outliers providing examples to the contrary. Particularly in/. territory, perhaps, where we're clearly not talking about Joe and Josephine Average.
I should add that I'm no humour slouch either - apologies if I'm coming across like some dry, humourless old stick, but I think that applying such broad brush-strokes to say that men's and women's experiences and understanding of humour is fundamentally different, could be dangerous (I'm not being politically correct here, just aware that my own experiences have been quite, quite different from the trend you suggest).
Go back into psych! This is a terrific area of research:-)
Gosh, I hope the op worked for you (since it's kinda non-trivial):-)
Navigating the computer desktop is a two-dimensional task, which does not require quite the same internalised map of the world as a three-dimensional task like finding your way home from the bus-stop. Experiments with rats and mazes (and rat-sized brain ops) show that the temporal lobe is critical for navigational success. In fact, other areas of your brain are also involved in spatial orientation, but spatially-orienting yourself to use your internalised map of the world cannot really be carried out without the temporal lobe. Saying that, you still have your left temporal lobe, so it is possible that some spatial-orientation functions will still be intact?
Given that men seek out such games more readily than women, though (leaving cultural factors aside, although that's a debate that's been had recently enough), do they perhaps do so because, having more natural aptitude, they find the games more rewarding?
...sexist scientific research to me. The usual men are better than women crap.
I work in this field of psychology and believe it or not, this is one of the few areas of human performance where genuine sex differences are observed - repeatedly and reliably.
You can see this principally in the visuo-spatial section of IQ tests. Some authors (e.g. Kimura) argue that this is because IQ tests tap a particular aspect of visuo-spatial awareness and that men are naturally superior in this regard, but that women excel in other visuo-spatial tests which tap different facets of the skill.
If you go back forty years, IQ tests used to "show" that ethnic minorities were less clever - now it is known that those early tests were highly culturally-specific ("If you give the maid twenty items of clothing to press but she already has another thirty-two from your Ma and Pa, what time can you arrive at your tennis lesson?") - I think in a couple of decades we'll be seeing IQ tests that are a whole lot less gender-biased.
all very well, but don't you think the few women who DO use PCs are in the almost-like-a-man range of spatial abilities?
FWIW, my bf (household alpha geek) can't navigate for s***, whereas I (less geeky, but maybe some modding up on/. will help) have great visuospatial abilities. Yesterday we went to the park to fly our kite and by the time we were leaving, he was completely disoriented... heh.
You might not see it as a problem, because you are a native and (let's assume:-) law-abiding Danish citizen.
In the UK we have a lot of immigrants; currently those who seek asylum here are treated extremely poorly by the system - they are sent to what are effectively detention centres, where they are kept, often in total ignorance of their rights, for weeks/months while their claims are processed/ignored. A recent government report into these processing centres identified several major outstanding issues affecting the welfare of asylum-seekers in these centres.
Those asylum-seekers who are not sent to such centres are placed within the community, where they are often subjected to verbal or physical abuse (and in at least one instance, an attack which led to the asylum-seeker's death). Apparently we are not, as a nation, very tolerant when it comes to other races/cultures, even when they come seeking our help. We do not have a good record in integrating with non-asylum-seeking non-British nationals either.
I have heard that there is not much racial integration in Denmark (this may or may not be true; please feel free to correct me). Either way, are asylum-seekers and other non-nationals likely to be treated much differently than in the UK? I doubt it.
So let me clarify what I think the problems of an ID card system are likely to be:
1. Minority groups, whether they are nationals or not, will be more likely to be asked for their ID (this is just harrassment; the increased likelihood that police will "stop-and-search" non-whites is already documented in the UK.)
2. Asylum seekers and other non-nationals will be disadvantaged and stigmatised when they cannot present their ID (we have seen a reflection of this already in the use of vouchers for asylum-seekers to obtain food and clothing; they were very badly treated in general, but one specific example is them not being given change by shopkeepers when they presented vouchers worth so many pounds.)
3. A thriving black market in stolen IDs, for all new arrivals to the country or people who want to commit crimes not in their own name.
Are you seriously telling me none of this goes on in Denmark?
The Belgian Federal Gov representative (Peter Strickx, ex-Sun, by total coincidence) plainly declared they do not want to have the necessary expertise in-house, but wants to outsource the whole thing (to Sun and ZETES, it now seems)
Lucky Belgians. M$ seem to be hell-bent on bribing their way into the UK Government's infrastructure.
Five years hence, watch me try to use my ID card to see an emergency doctor, only to be told that the system has been hacked through a security hole that M$ couldn't be bothered to patch, and I will need to come back tomorrow.
The point is, it doesn't matter how identity is encoded - the rate-limiting step is the intelligence of the user (that's us). And users will mislay cards, or have them stolen.
I'm not in favour of ID cards in any form, because they can very easily be abused, and also used to deny basic rights to non-holders.
I live in the UK, where the introduction of ID cards is currently under consideration. I wrote to my MP recently about my concerns; he forwarded it to the Home Secretary and eventually I got back a secretary's letter which read along the lines of "Thank you for your views. Now f*** off."
If ID cards were introduced here, I'd want to see some kind of photographic identifier on the card. My debit card was swiped and copied last year and the thieves ran up about £1K ($1.5K) in a day. A simple mandatory photographic ID on cards would stop this kind of fraud, and potentially also halt the abuse of ID cards. But let's hope it never gets that far.
Heh - nice that someone is thinking about coding this:) My programming skills are zip - downside of a psych/biological sciences education. I do teach in a psychology dept but it's very soft-end... I think one member of staff has Matlab on his other (non-IT-sanctioned) hard drive... it's that kind of place:(
I'm afraid I don't really understand the nature of the problem as far as creating the UI is concerned *retreats from./ with tail between legs* but if you fancy having a go at explaining, fire away:)
Otherwise, I can't really offer any help with it except to wish you good luck and assure you that there *would* be interest in such a thing! Building nested hash tables in your spare time... *mutters*;o)
This is exactly the sort of thing I've thought would be useful. Fewer words (no words?) and more inherently human-oriented (mainly visual?) qualities - particularly for those people (not us, surely?;o) we're talking about who might not find it intuitive or natural to be disciplined about updating file meta-data. Someone mentioned the idea of moving stuff around in this kind of UI as activating physical memory (thus making it easier to find things again). As a psychologist, I'd buy that.
A couple of differences in our approaches, perhaps:
1. I'd like to utilise colour, texture, pattern, etc so that one could label certain things (e.g. PDFs of scientific papers from particular academic disciplines) with one colour (e.g. pink) and put papers from a related but distinct discipline in a different colour (e.g. red). Papers which overlapped both disciplines could be striped pink and red. Papers that I only had the abstract for could be fuzzy, whereas full papers might be smooth.
2. My system would be quite fluid - so I might want to tag a few files with big blue spikes, meaning I hadn't yet read them, but when I've read them I'd want the blue spikes to disappear. They would still retain their other charactistics (e.g. pink and fuzzy) but just like spreadsheets and databases it would be possible to sort all items by as many or as few categories as you'd like. When I'd read them, I could drag and drop them to a location in the UI that I would designate as being "papers I've read but not yet filed". It should be possible to select any number of such destinations and add an additional meta-layer (more colour/texture? other?) at any time. Essentially, the UI would deliver a 'naming' prompt each time a new meta-layer was assigned, so that you would only have to specify it once (but you could refer back to a 'key' on a toolbar somewhere, if you forgot what meant what or for users accessing someone else's file system)
Of course, for a really flexible application, one would define one's own keys (so I might like to use colour and texture, but you might prefer shape and pattern... still working on coding smell;o)
Oxygen is transported around in the blood attached to haemoglobin (the stuff with iron in it that makes blood cells appear red). Once oxygen is acquired at the lungs (and diffuses from them into the bloodstream), it diffuses across the blood-vessel walls into the body's tissues. It's pretty much a passive process, but those areas receiving most oxygen are the ones where there is the greatest oxygen 'debt' (i.e. oxygen has previously been 'spent' quicker than it can be replaced).
In other words, the areas of the body (including the brain) that continue to receive the most oxygen when it is in short supply are presumably those which were working hardest a few seconds ago. Quite why this includes memory is hard to say, but what you have to remember about the brain is that all the cells in it are functioning all the time, and blood is always flowing to all parts of it (even if the overall distribution changes depending on which bits are working hardest).
Don't make the mistake of assuming that memory is located in a single area of the brain - in fact, the networks of neurones that lay down and retrieve memory are extremly widely distributed in the brain. There many not be enough oxygen to sustain full body/brain function but while there is any left at all it will presumably be distributed throughout the body and brain (since it cannot help but be absorbed).
Oops, forgot to mention that although the context of language might aid retrieval, studies of multilingual individuals suggest that your vocabulary is stored in a shared lexicon (dictionary) accessible in each language. So I find it unlikely that one forms memories in a specific language, particularly since they are presumably encoded in the same non-language-specific way as words (i.e. as changes in the biochemical structure of neurons and their interconnections). For the record, I don't believe language is required to encode or retrieve memory.
Gosh, I doubt anyone's still reading this...;o)
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Doh! I also meant to say that teaching style is *everything* when it comes to boys and girls learning maths. I loved maths at school and took it right up until my final year, but all my teachers were male and I ended up pretty confused ... not saying that a female teacher would automatically have improved matters, just that hearing stuff put another way might have succeeded where bashing my head against the same brick wall failed.
As new members of staff in my current job we were encouraged to consider "individual learning styles". I look forward to the day when this sort of consideration is no longer perceived as being optional (too many lousy lectures when I was a student!)
I thought this was a terrific post.
:-/ ) but it's a long slow struggle against the widely-held perceptions that (a) it's ok for women not to do well at stats/maths and (b)they are not as naturally able.
I teach in a psych programme at a university in the UK. It's a modern university, which means we don't get the brightest students [note for non-UK peeps: it's not that our university is bad, but students tend to apply to 'red-brick' (=Ivy League) universities, whose research programmes have a longer history of funding and who can attract bigger names. The fact that our teaching is rated more highly than that of most red-brick universities is apparently not considered an attractive enough prospect for undergraduate students, who won't be touching research with a bargepole in their time here. But I digress...]
Consequently, many of our students are confused by the statistics required of them as part of psych, because they are not mathematical high-achievers (or, often, academic high-achievers in general). More than half of our students are women. Hardly *any* of the male students have ever asked me for help with their statistics, and none have ever openly expressed doubt about their ability to complete the required statistical work.
The women, OTOH, frequently ask for help. I think this is due in roughly equal part to their being less isolationist about this sort of thing and also because it's socially acceptable for them to say "I'm no good at maths" (which I hear pretty frequently in one form or another). I'm trying to overcome this and show them that it's a breeze (if nothing else they should at least be able to click the right buttons in SPSS...
The people who will be first against the wall when _my_ revolution comes are the ones who don't encourage their daughters in the same way that they encourage their sons.
Um, actually when my bf lets rip, it's truly hilarious (usually he's kind and goes somewhere else in the house to do it).
To me, farts are funny. I guess I was exposed to too much testosterone in the womb or something.
Pissed off? Nah. Trying to drum up a little intra-species discussion, maybe. Dude, you gotta post with your name, it's no fun if I'm the only one laying my ID on the line.
Yeah, never get into a pissing contest with a woman. It's not pretty (and then she'll have to go home to change her trousers, and that just plain sucks).
insert predictable joke about lies, damned lies, and statistics
Probably neither - my work is quite physiologically-oriented, so I haven't had much exposure to the 'soft end' of psych [it's hard to keep a broad focus...]. In addition, until last year I wasn't "in" a dept, just out on the fringes of two, so I didn't have 'normal' psychologists to interact with and tell me about the fun stuff. I'm trying to make up for that now, though!
A timely reminder :-)
Perhaps what this indicates is that we need a user-interface that's more VR-like; I've thought for a while that a desktop simulating total 3-D immersion would be easier to work with (put unimportant stuff "at the back", etc). The sooner your "monitor" is actually a pair of VR glasses you put on, the sooner women may find that we can catch up, on average.
I *am* a research psychologist. Heh.
/. territory, perhaps, where we're clearly not talking about Joe and Josephine Average.
:-)
I think that there are *many* outliers providing examples to the contrary. Particularly in
I should add that I'm no humour slouch either - apologies if I'm coming across like some dry, humourless old stick, but I think that applying such broad brush-strokes to say that men's and women's experiences and understanding of humour is fundamentally different, could be dangerous (I'm not being politically correct here, just aware that my own experiences have been quite, quite different from the trend you suggest).
Go back into psych! This is a terrific area of research
women do better with a larder worldview...
If women's world-view is restricted to the larder, I could see why we might need widescreen ...
Gosh, I hope the op worked for you (since it's kinda non-trivial) :-)
Navigating the computer desktop is a two-dimensional task, which does not require quite the same internalised map of the world as a three-dimensional task like finding your way home from the bus-stop. Experiments with rats and mazes (and rat-sized brain ops) show that the temporal lobe is critical for navigational success. In fact, other areas of your brain are also involved in spatial orientation, but spatially-orienting yourself to use your internalised map of the world cannot really be carried out without the temporal lobe. Saying that, you still have your left temporal lobe, so it is possible that some spatial-orientation functions will still be intact?
Given that men seek out such games more readily than women, though (leaving cultural factors aside, although that's a debate that's been had recently enough), do they perhaps do so because, having more natural aptitude, they find the games more rewarding?
Seasonal time of year for a chicken/egg debate ;o)
Yeah, all those interpretations occurred to me, but I bit the hook anyway.
Men and women have completely different concepts of humor
Bollocks. Some men find some things funny that some women don't. That's as far as it goes.
Don't come in here with that "we're all created equal" crap - it's people like you who--
Hey, wait a minute ...
Not as sad as people who are too chicken to post under their own names.
Ask my bf whether I'm pretending to be a woman.
You're not single, are you?
I work in this field of psychology and believe it or not, this is one of the few areas of human performance where genuine sex differences are observed - repeatedly and reliably.
You can see this principally in the visuo-spatial section of IQ tests. Some authors (e.g. Kimura) argue that this is because IQ tests tap a particular aspect of visuo-spatial awareness and that men are naturally superior in this regard, but that women excel in other visuo-spatial tests which tap different facets of the skill.
If you go back forty years, IQ tests used to "show" that ethnic minorities were less clever - now it is known that those early tests were highly culturally-specific ("If you give the maid twenty items of clothing to press but she already has another thirty-two from your Ma and Pa, what time can you arrive at your tennis lesson?") - I think in a couple of decades we'll be seeing IQ tests that are a whole lot less gender-biased.
all very well, but don't you think the few women who DO use PCs are in the almost-like-a-man range of spatial abilities?
FWIW, my bf (household alpha geek) can't navigate for s***, whereas I (less geeky, but maybe some modding up on /. will help) have great visuospatial abilities. Yesterday we went to the park to fly our kite and by the time we were leaving, he was completely disoriented ... heh.
But widescreen will make my butt look bigger!!!
*wail*
You might not see it as a problem, because you are a native and (let's assume :-) law-abiding Danish citizen.
In the UK we have a lot of immigrants; currently those who seek asylum here are treated extremely poorly by the system - they are sent to what are effectively detention centres, where they are kept, often in total ignorance of their rights, for weeks/months while their claims are processed/ignored. A recent government report into these processing centres identified several major outstanding issues affecting the welfare of asylum-seekers in these centres.
Those asylum-seekers who are not sent to such centres are placed within the community, where they are often subjected to verbal or physical abuse (and in at least one instance, an attack which led to the asylum-seeker's death). Apparently we are not, as a nation, very tolerant when it comes to other races/cultures, even when they come seeking our help. We do not have a good record in integrating with non-asylum-seeking non-British nationals either.
I have heard that there is not much racial integration in Denmark (this may or may not be true; please feel free to correct me). Either way, are asylum-seekers and other non-nationals likely to be treated much differently than in the UK? I doubt it.
So let me clarify what I think the problems of an ID card system are likely to be:
Are you seriously telling me none of this goes on in Denmark?
The Belgian Federal Gov representative (Peter Strickx, ex-Sun, by total coincidence) plainly declared they do not want to have the necessary expertise in-house, but wants to outsource the whole thing (to Sun and ZETES, it now seems)
Lucky Belgians. M$ seem to be hell-bent on bribing their way into the UK Government's infrastructure.
Five years hence, watch me try to use my ID card to see an emergency doctor, only to be told that the system has been hacked through a security hole that M$ couldn't be bothered to patch, and I will need to come back tomorrow.
The point is, it doesn't matter how identity is encoded - the rate-limiting step is the intelligence of the user (that's us). And users will mislay cards, or have them stolen.
I'm not in favour of ID cards in any form, because they can very easily be abused, and also used to deny basic rights to non-holders.
I live in the UK, where the introduction of ID cards is currently under consideration. I wrote to my MP recently about my concerns; he forwarded it to the Home Secretary and eventually I got back a secretary's letter which read along the lines of "Thank you for your views. Now f*** off."
If ID cards were introduced here, I'd want to see some kind of photographic identifier on the card. My debit card was swiped and copied last year and the thieves ran up about £1K ($1.5K) in a day. A simple mandatory photographic ID on cards would stop this kind of fraud, and potentially also halt the abuse of ID cards. But let's hope it never gets that far.
Heh - nice that someone is thinking about coding this :) My programming skills are zip - downside of a psych/biological sciences education. I do teach in a psychology dept but it's very soft-end ... I think one member of staff has Matlab on his other (non-IT-sanctioned) hard drive ... it's that kind of place :(
I'm afraid I don't really understand the nature of the problem as far as creating the UI is concerned *retreats from ./ with tail between legs* but if you fancy having a go at explaining, fire away :)
Otherwise, I can't really offer any help with it except to wish you good luck and assure you that there *would* be interest in such a thing! Building nested hash tables in your spare time ... *mutters* ;o)
This is exactly the sort of thing I've thought would be useful. Fewer words (no words?) and more inherently human-oriented (mainly visual?) qualities - particularly for those people (not us, surely? ;o) we're talking about who might not find it intuitive or natural to be disciplined about updating file meta-data. Someone mentioned the idea of moving stuff around in this kind of UI as activating physical memory (thus making it easier to find things again). As a psychologist, I'd buy that.
A couple of differences in our approaches, perhaps:
1. I'd like to utilise colour, texture, pattern, etc so that one could label certain things (e.g. PDFs of scientific papers from particular academic disciplines) with one colour (e.g. pink) and put papers from a related but distinct discipline in a different colour (e.g. red). Papers which overlapped both disciplines could be striped pink and red. Papers that I only had the abstract for could be fuzzy, whereas full papers might be smooth.
2. My system would be quite fluid - so I might want to tag a few files with big blue spikes, meaning I hadn't yet read them, but when I've read them I'd want the blue spikes to disappear. They would still retain their other charactistics (e.g. pink and fuzzy) but just like spreadsheets and databases it would be possible to sort all items by as many or as few categories as you'd like. When I'd read them, I could drag and drop them to a location in the UI that I would designate as being "papers I've read but not yet filed". It should be possible to select any number of such destinations and add an additional meta-layer (more colour/texture? other?) at any time. Essentially, the UI would deliver a 'naming' prompt each time a new meta-layer was assigned, so that you would only have to specify it once (but you could refer back to a 'key' on a toolbar somewhere, if you forgot what meant what or for users accessing someone else's file system)
Of course, for a really flexible application, one would define one's own keys (so I might like to use colour and texture, but you might prefer shape and pattern ... still working on coding smell ;o)
Oxygen is transported around in the blood attached to haemoglobin (the stuff with iron in it that makes blood cells appear red). Once oxygen is acquired at the lungs (and diffuses from them into the bloodstream), it diffuses across the blood-vessel walls into the body's tissues. It's pretty much a passive process, but those areas receiving most oxygen are the ones where there is the greatest oxygen 'debt' (i.e. oxygen has previously been 'spent' quicker than it can be replaced).
In other words, the areas of the body (including the brain) that continue to receive the most oxygen when it is in short supply are presumably those which were working hardest a few seconds ago. Quite why this includes memory is hard to say, but what you have to remember about the brain is that all the cells in it are functioning all the time, and blood is always flowing to all parts of it (even if the overall distribution changes depending on which bits are working hardest).
Don't make the mistake of assuming that memory is located in a single area of the brain - in fact, the networks of neurones that lay down and retrieve memory are extremly widely distributed in the brain. There many not be enough oxygen to sustain full body/brain function but while there is any left at all it will presumably be distributed throughout the body and brain (since it cannot help but be absorbed).
Oops, forgot to mention that although the context of language might aid retrieval, studies of multilingual individuals suggest that your vocabulary is stored in a shared lexicon (dictionary) accessible in each language. So I find it unlikely that one forms memories in a specific language, particularly since they are presumably encoded in the same non-language-specific way as words (i.e. as changes in the biochemical structure of neurons and their interconnections). For the record, I don't believe language is required to encode or retrieve memory. Gosh, I doubt anyone's still reading this ... ;o)