Beyond a certain level of employee, those people know they're going to be rich regardless of what happens to the company they run. What are they supposed to be learning? That if they screw up, a lot of people will suffer needlessly? By rights, the loss should scale with responsibility just like compensation. Some of these CEOs and CFOs deserve to be destitute when their companies go under, but really that's not very likely.
By the way, I agree with everything you said I'm just bitter.
I actually made a word problem for my calc kids the other day that was set on the penal colony on Ceti Alpha V. One student got the reference, which warmed my heart.
50% reduction in failures is an indication that more students are able to meet the curve where it is set now. Who in education doesn't want more of their students to learn? Lowering the bar is one way to reduce failures, which many school systems (local, state levels) adopt in response to NCLB. I think we can agree that keeping standards where they are is generally good.
Also I think you're generally right about the world of work, unless you start your own business. Which is also a good thing to encourage. Not satisfied with the work environments that exist? Make a better one.
This won't work if the cop has a partner and a stopwatch. By combining d=rt with the Mean Value Theorem, they can write you a ticket without measuring your speed.
Ooh nice thanks. I'll probably do a little research on this before I say anything to the IT department about it. Also if anyone else is looking, I found this old topic about the very question.
I am also interested in this. My school district has been looking to cut costs by implementing energy conservation. This is laudable for many reasons. Getting off the MS bus is also appealing to me for a number of reasons, but I think the cost cutting would have the most impact if proposed.
In POP you can still just squeak by. The only difference between their system and another game is the time it takes for you to try it again. I guess I should say another game with checkpoints. Compare the thrill of just squeaking by with the annoyance of watching a spinning camera death scene or, worse, a little movie of how your failure has doomed the world. Over and over. That's all they've eliminated in POP.
It seems like the best thing they could do in these circumstances is to make Windows easier to pirate. Didn't Gates himself say something about how Windows has a much wider adoption in areas where it's easier to pirate? I'm sure more than a few people looking at a linux distribution would reconsider if the new windows was "free."
Detroit didn't come up with SUVs to dupe anybody. SUVs were popular because of their versatility, perceived sturdiness and their status.
Of those three items, one could maybe be objectively demonstrated. Perceived sturdiness and status are constructs that the industry worked to promote through advertising and marketing. That's the duping.
I think immersion is the quality of a game that makes you forget you're playing a game. This is implemented in graphics and sound design, sure, but also in the degree to which you are aware of using controls to interact with the game world. Take Tetris, for example. After a short time, you don't really think about the fact that you're pressing keys on a keyboard to move the piece left or right. You want to move the piece left, so you just do it. A poor control scheme that makes you constantly think about what you're doing to control a game can do as much to break immersion as texture tearing or crappy voice acting.
And Tetris by no means represents anything real, is 2D like casual games are, but is very immersive as it can eat up a great chunk of your time before you realize it. When you look at the clock and wonder whether you've actually been sitting at a game for whatever 30 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, that's an immersive game.
To maintain information beyond the lifespan either requires a very comprehensive tradition of memory, or the ability to store information outside one's body. Having that would go a long way for the octopus civilization we're building here on Slashdot.
You can also point him to MathGV. If it isn't designed for teachers, it may as well have been. The author has the following notice on the home page:
I plan to make money from a future version. I'm releasing this version as freeware to build a customer base and to perfect the technologies. I'm currently looking for a good publisher with the marketing resources to make MathGV a commercial success.
So that's one reason for freeware: free advertisement of your skills.
Actually, no. It's much easier to get kids to go along with you when you have something to convey to them. Teaching has as many control freaks as any other profession. There's an old saying that it's easier to control kids than to teach them, but I think the reverse is true. I find that class runs much much more smoothly when kids are learning. Many teachers are stuck in a fallback position where they think that some certain x amount of control must exist before learning can take place. That's an illusion. I don't want to control my kids, I want them to control themselves. Humans are inherently curious, after all.
This mentality really has nothing to do with advanced degrees in education or the fact that these people are teachers. People generally (in my experience) tend to limit themselves to a handful of things, if that. I see it in the students. They say to me "I don't do math, I'm more of an artistic person." As though you have to choose. This attitude is absolutely supported by teachers and the departmentalization of schools, but I see it when I talk to parents as well. They didn't do well in math but they can do blah blah something else. Or else, they tell their kids that the four "main" subjects are the only important ones and therefore it doesn't matter how they perform in their elective courses. I think being well-rounded has fallen by the wayside in American life. Specialization is more important. Kids used to even play a wider variety of sports than they do now (see Warrior Girls by Michael Sokolove) but these days they specialize in a single sport, play it all year, and even go to things like "offensive line camp." I guess that's the route to athletic scholarships.
I've taken my share of "advanced" courses in Education and they're really a joke, as you say. I think, however, that this applies to a number of fields, and the result is that your degree means you jumped through x y z hoops, not that you know anything more than you did when you started the program.
Here's some more ranting: the problem with graduate level education classes is that there's no new learning in them. Teachers of those classes never have to devise new instructional strategies for their students who don't understand things, therefore when they present new instructional strategies it falls flat. And another thing, teachers of these courses tend to focus on "practical things you can use in your classroom the next day." Without the theory behind these things, adoption of new methods will never occur because the necessity has not been demonstrated or understood.
So it sounds like I mostly agree with you about teachers, but I see this phenomenon as a symptom of a larger problem in society.
... and not too recently my mom talked to one of the neighbour kids who was suspended from school for being late for class. It's an authoritarian attitude.
Yes absolutely. There are a few parts to this.
Like it or not, school is at least partly conditioning for the "world of work." Assuming that students are going to go on and be subordinate to someone at a job, conditioning against being late is preparation for that. Certainly there is room to question the assumption that all students will be (or should be) subordinate to someone at their job later in life.
If it's a course that leads to a test or leads to a passing or failing grade, the school needs to have its ducks in a row as regards the student having an opportunity to learn the material. That is, at the end of a school year if a student has failed, and has been chronically tardy, and the school hasn't noticed or done something about this, it could lead to a problem. This is especially true if the student has special needs as that introduces another mountain of paperwork. In Maryland (USA) we have an end of course exam for Algebra I which is a high school graduation requirement. If students are physically not present in the room for a significant amount of time and their score is low, well let's say schools don't want that to be the reason their scores get brought down.
Parents do typically want to know and have a chance to correct things like tardiness or get to the root of them at least before something like a suspension happens. At my school, we have 3 parent contacts per teacher if a student is tardy before they get an "In-School-Suspension." I don't think that being late to class one time caused anyone to be suspended, but I wasn't there so I don't know.
Things need to be bought; if they aren't bought then it's either stolen or its communism or "socialism".
I agree that it's an authoritarian attitude, but I don't follow you on that translating into devaluation of anything free. I use as many free tools as I can with students, because it's much easier to recommend, say, Scribus than InDesign, since Scribus doesn't cost hundreds of dollars. I've been asked a couple of times by the county to teach a class about using software packages, and I'm (on and off) trying to design a short class about the different free software that's ready for inexperienced users, because teachers can recommend these to their kids freely.
A few people have mentioned DRM as shareholder appeasement. It would seem the company would enact more sensible policies if their shareholders were themselves gamers. Either that or people from this group who understand that DRM can always be circumvented.
It would be interesting if a major benefit of holding shares in a company was a discount on the company's products. It's a very old fashioned view of the stock market, but I think you should buy shares because you believe in what a company is doing and want to help them succeed. Of course, their success = your success as far as your ownership goes, so it's not an altruistic act to purchase shares. Currently, many companies are run by people who have no interest in the products being good or even finished are a bad thing as well. Maximizing shareholder value doesn't always give you long term success or a good product - just look at Circuit City. They were held up as an exemplar in Good to Great of increasing shareholder value. Even during that time where they were doing a great job, their customer service (which I guess is one of their main products) was widely panned.
I'm no economist so maybe this idea is hugely naive. I welcome being shown as naive.
On the wikipedia page, you can read that RFL has joined the Open Source Development Labs, which may indicate some kind of cooperation with the rest of the community. I don't know enough about the interrelations between different OSS entities to say. At the RFL web site they don't talk much about the source code.
Rap fans are kind of on the other side of this. The only really good news about Will Smith making movies used to be that it kept him away from a mic. This is no longer the case I don't think.
Most of what I read about Watchmen concerns Snyder perfectly capturing the look of the comic. That's a very superficial understanding of that comic, and it lowers my expectations. Comics aren't movies and visa versa. In one trailer, Rohrschach says "The world will look up and shout 'save us'" whereas the actual line is about whores and politicians. It makes a catchier line, though, so why not eh?
Often in TV shows, we rely on the characters to point out things that we simply can't see because we're not there. On a Law and Order it would be "he was lying." One character says this, then the partner either asks how and it gets explained, or just immediately agrees. Partly that's to show how well trained they are and partly they just have more visual information that we do. Or think about characters looking for something on the ground. It's a lazy way for screenwriters to allow characters to do plot exposition or rehash an emotional point from earlier in the show "so what did you mean when you said ________", and with better resolution, it wouldn't be possible since we could see where the missing earring or contact lens was.
In HD, a better TV show or movie can take advantage of the fact that you're seeing something much closer to what the characters themselves see. It would be counterproductive I guess, since they can't count on everyone having the display technology, and can't count on people noticing the subtleties even if they do have the tech.
Slashdot Mirror
Beyond a certain level of employee, those people know they're going to be rich regardless of what happens to the company they run. What are they supposed to be learning? That if they screw up, a lot of people will suffer needlessly? By rights, the loss should scale with responsibility just like compensation. Some of these CEOs and CFOs deserve to be destitute when their companies go under, but really that's not very likely.
By the way, I agree with everything you said I'm just bitter.
THIS IS CETI ALPHA V!!!
I actually made a word problem for my calc kids the other day that was set on the penal colony on Ceti Alpha V. One student got the reference, which warmed my heart.
50% reduction in failures is an indication that more students are able to meet the curve where it is set now. Who in education doesn't want more of their students to learn? Lowering the bar is one way to reduce failures, which many school systems (local, state levels) adopt in response to NCLB. I think we can agree that keeping standards where they are is generally good.
Also I think you're generally right about the world of work, unless you start your own business. Which is also a good thing to encourage. Not satisfied with the work environments that exist? Make a better one.
This won't work if the cop has a partner and a stopwatch. By combining d=rt with the Mean Value Theorem, they can write you a ticket without measuring your speed.
Here is Cringely talking about Apple's behavior generally in June of last year. It bears on what you're saying; you might find it interesting:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080613_005065.html
Ooh nice thanks. I'll probably do a little research on this before I say anything to the IT department about it. Also if anyone else is looking, I found this old topic about the very question.
I am also interested in this. My school district has been looking to cut costs by implementing energy conservation. This is laudable for many reasons. Getting off the MS bus is also appealing to me for a number of reasons, but I think the cost cutting would have the most impact if proposed.
In POP you can still just squeak by. The only difference between their system and another game is the time it takes for you to try it again. I guess I should say another game with checkpoints. Compare the thrill of just squeaking by with the annoyance of watching a spinning camera death scene or, worse, a little movie of how your failure has doomed the world. Over and over. That's all they've eliminated in POP.
It seems like the best thing they could do in these circumstances is to make Windows easier to pirate. Didn't Gates himself say something about how Windows has a much wider adoption in areas where it's easier to pirate? I'm sure more than a few people looking at a linux distribution would reconsider if the new windows was "free."
Detroit didn't come up with SUVs to dupe anybody. SUVs were popular because of their versatility, perceived sturdiness and their status.
Of those three items, one could maybe be objectively demonstrated. Perceived sturdiness and status are constructs that the industry worked to promote through advertising and marketing. That's the duping.
I think immersion is the quality of a game that makes you forget you're playing a game. This is implemented in graphics and sound design, sure, but also in the degree to which you are aware of using controls to interact with the game world. Take Tetris, for example. After a short time, you don't really think about the fact that you're pressing keys on a keyboard to move the piece left or right. You want to move the piece left, so you just do it. A poor control scheme that makes you constantly think about what you're doing to control a game can do as much to break immersion as texture tearing or crappy voice acting.
And Tetris by no means represents anything real, is 2D like casual games are, but is very immersive as it can eat up a great chunk of your time before you realize it. When you look at the clock and wonder whether you've actually been sitting at a game for whatever 30 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, that's an immersive game.
To maintain information beyond the lifespan either requires a very comprehensive tradition of memory, or the ability to store information outside one's body. Having that would go a long way for the octopus civilization we're building here on Slashdot.
Something I got from watching Bill Nye!
Careful. This road leads to hentai.
Last time I was in an Apple store it was mostly malcontents. They didn't seem hungry though.
:)
It's a good suggestion. I usually use ChaosPro to do this.
You can also point him to MathGV. If it isn't designed for teachers, it may as well have been. The author has the following notice on the home page:
I plan to make money from a future version. I'm releasing this version as freeware to build a customer base and to perfect the technologies. I'm currently looking for a good publisher with the marketing resources to make MathGV a commercial success.
So that's one reason for freeware: free advertisement of your skills.
Actually, no. It's much easier to get kids to go along with you when you have something to convey to them. Teaching has as many control freaks as any other profession. There's an old saying that it's easier to control kids than to teach them, but I think the reverse is true. I find that class runs much much more smoothly when kids are learning. Many teachers are stuck in a fallback position where they think that some certain x amount of control must exist before learning can take place. That's an illusion. I don't want to control my kids, I want them to control themselves. Humans are inherently curious, after all.
This mentality really has nothing to do with advanced degrees in education or the fact that these people are teachers. People generally (in my experience) tend to limit themselves to a handful of things, if that. I see it in the students. They say to me "I don't do math, I'm more of an artistic person." As though you have to choose. This attitude is absolutely supported by teachers and the departmentalization of schools, but I see it when I talk to parents as well. They didn't do well in math but they can do blah blah something else. Or else, they tell their kids that the four "main" subjects are the only important ones and therefore it doesn't matter how they perform in their elective courses. I think being well-rounded has fallen by the wayside in American life. Specialization is more important. Kids used to even play a wider variety of sports than they do now (see Warrior Girls by Michael Sokolove) but these days they specialize in a single sport, play it all year, and even go to things like "offensive line camp." I guess that's the route to athletic scholarships.
I've taken my share of "advanced" courses in Education and they're really a joke, as you say. I think, however, that this applies to a number of fields, and the result is that your degree means you jumped through x y z hoops, not that you know anything more than you did when you started the program.
Here's some more ranting: the problem with graduate level education classes is that there's no new learning in them. Teachers of those classes never have to devise new instructional strategies for their students who don't understand things, therefore when they present new instructional strategies it falls flat. And another thing, teachers of these courses tend to focus on "practical things you can use in your classroom the next day." Without the theory behind these things, adoption of new methods will never occur because the necessity has not been demonstrated or understood.
So it sounds like I mostly agree with you about teachers, but I see this phenomenon as a symptom of a larger problem in society.
... and not too recently my mom talked to one of the neighbour kids who was suspended from school for being late for class. It's an authoritarian attitude.
Yes absolutely. There are a few parts to this.
Things need to be bought; if they aren't bought then it's either stolen or its communism or "socialism".
I agree that it's an authoritarian attitude, but I don't follow you on that translating into devaluation of anything free. I use as many free tools as I can with students, because it's much easier to recommend, say, Scribus than InDesign, since Scribus doesn't cost hundreds of dollars. I've been asked a couple of times by the county to teach a class about using software packages, and I'm (on and off) trying to design a short class about the different free software that's ready for inexperienced users, because teachers can recommend these to their kids freely.
A few people have mentioned DRM as shareholder appeasement. It would seem the company would enact more sensible policies if their shareholders were themselves gamers. Either that or people from this group who understand that DRM can always be circumvented.
It would be interesting if a major benefit of holding shares in a company was a discount on the company's products. It's a very old fashioned view of the stock market, but I think you should buy shares because you believe in what a company is doing and want to help them succeed. Of course, their success = your success as far as your ownership goes, so it's not an altruistic act to purchase shares. Currently, many companies are run by people who have no interest in the products being good or even finished are a bad thing as well. Maximizing shareholder value doesn't always give you long term success or a good product - just look at Circuit City. They were held up as an exemplar in Good to Great of increasing shareholder value. Even during that time where they were doing a great job, their customer service (which I guess is one of their main products) was widely panned.
I'm no economist so maybe this idea is hugely naive. I welcome being shown as naive.
On the wikipedia page, you can read that RFL has joined the Open Source Development Labs, which may indicate some kind of cooperation with the rest of the community. I don't know enough about the interrelations between different OSS entities to say. At the RFL web site they don't talk much about the source code.
Rap fans are kind of on the other side of this. The only really good news about Will Smith making movies used to be that it kept him away from a mic. This is no longer the case I don't think.
Most of what I read about Watchmen concerns Snyder perfectly capturing the look of the comic. That's a very superficial understanding of that comic, and it lowers my expectations. Comics aren't movies and visa versa. In one trailer, Rohrschach says "The world will look up and shout 'save us'" whereas the actual line is about whores and politicians. It makes a catchier line, though, so why not eh?
I saw the "illegal" tag and have been waiting to see a post about why. Does it have something to do with ch. 11 reorganization?
Often in TV shows, we rely on the characters to point out things that we simply can't see because we're not there. On a Law and Order it would be "he was lying." One character says this, then the partner either asks how and it gets explained, or just immediately agrees. Partly that's to show how well trained they are and partly they just have more visual information that we do. Or think about characters looking for something on the ground. It's a lazy way for screenwriters to allow characters to do plot exposition or rehash an emotional point from earlier in the show "so what did you mean when you said ________", and with better resolution, it wouldn't be possible since we could see where the missing earring or contact lens was.
In HD, a better TV show or movie can take advantage of the fact that you're seeing something much closer to what the characters themselves see. It would be counterproductive I guess, since they can't count on everyone having the display technology, and can't count on people noticing the subtleties even if they do have the tech.