It's not possible to answer your question as asked, IMO. There are a few issues.
1. Who are we considering to be "nerds" in this case? All smart people? Only techie smart people? All engineers? Only certain fields of engineering?
2. Even if nerds were defined, I'm curious why you think that. Are you basing it just on the people you know?
An article I read in 2004 or so compared how those who worked primarily with paragraphs versus those who worked primarily with numbers tended to vote (for Kerry versus for Bush). It ended up using librarians to illustrate the paragraphs example. (They were something like 20:1 in favor of Kerry compared to Bush.) Ignoring that the article forced a false binary system, it does seem to suggest that librarians, often viewed as nerdy, might not tend to be libertarian overall. The same article used a different but equally nerdy profession (I can't recall what it was right now) to demonstrate the other side, which was something not-quite-as-absurdly Bush-favoring.* Still, I'd say that there are a lot of types of nerds and pigeonholing them as a big group doesn't work particularly well. (Not even as a smaller group. There are big blocks of very conservative librarians, too. Just look up the debate over the Newbery Award snoozer, er, winner The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Phelan. Some librarians chose not to stock it because it used the word "scrotum" in the beginning of the book. The rest slapped an award on it and handed it to kids.)
*In that study, I always wondered how many people went "Well, I'm VOTING for X because I'm DAMNED if I want Y to win! I'd really rather they both pissed off."
I'm sorry. I find it hard to believe that it costs them over $30 for the two sports channels I would want and that somehow, they're making enough off the hordes of people wanting to watch the hideous programming of G4 to "subsidize" my two channels. Hell, I'm a gamer and I find G4 painful to watch.
And this is exactly what they SHOULDN'T be doing. I would rather just pay the $10 for ESPN and $7 for NFL or whatever they cost and be spared the crap channels and the extra I pay for any other channels I don't want.
It's a luxury utility, and he offered to pay the luxury price to get it and they still wouldn't install it. Considering all the subsidies and tax breaks and non-competition clauses various government entities have given broadband providers, I damn well think that ANY person in the U.S. should be able to receive broadband if they are willing to pay the luxury cost to do so.
Either the information infrastructure is important and we should all have a chance at it (provided we're willing to pay according to our trade offs like distance from offices, etc.) or it's not and we stop financing the bastards.
Well, the NFL Network would just be for the Thursday night games that they won't show anywhere else, and I figure I'll shake down my brother and my ex-husband for part of the cost. I mean, really only one of us would have to get it to see the games, and we tend to watch them together when they're worth watching.
ESPN (and possibly ESPN2) I'd get for the other sports too, but football is the most consuming. Baseball and hockey are also great. I've learned to appreciate tennis, Aussie Rules football, soccer, NASCAR, curling, bull riding, and cricket. Just this year I made it through my first golf (cheering for the course). I find that TiVoing the less exciting sports to fast forward through some of the blathering helps. (This also works with Olympic coverage and all the human interest stories.) All I can say is that watching sports and cross-stitching (or crocheting really badly) is a very nice way to relax unless it's your team playing.
So, um, yeah. I'd prefer a la carte to dump all the crappy music channels and Home and Garden channels and home shopping channels. I just wants my sports, my sci fi, my comedy, and my weather. Okay, nevermind. This post was completely off topic. I couldn't save it.
I don't see why it would have to be all or nothing pay-per-channel or pay-for-3-million-channels. Why not a base rate that everyone pays for their basic cable plus a per channel rate to add any number more channels? Right now I have the option of getting basic cable, which lacks ESPN and the NFL Network (yes, I'm one of those people who requires them, folks), Comedy Central, and the Sci Fi Channel, or paying an arm and a leg for a whole slew of channels I really don't care about.
While I realize that this means there's no chance for start-up channels to get a following, I'm pretty sure they can find a way around it if they try. Free/reduced rates for the first few months or starting out on the Net...
All I can say is I wait longingly for our new Verizon overlords. They can't suck as bad as Comcast and Verizon.
I assume that the second Verizon was supposed to be Qwest.
All I can say is that actually, they can. I gratefully switched to Comcast after having Verizon because Verizon gave me a mostly non-working DSL connection that they kept charging me for and not sending people out to investigate. Now Verizon just tells people that they don't offer DSL in my area code. In fact, I'm not exactly sure what they're offering in my area code, because when I check my phone number on their web site, it says FiOS is not available for me, but I can get High Speed Internet. Exactly what is that, do you think? Super high speed dial up?:P
For the record, I live in an affluent area of a city of 350,000. The population of the whole metropolitan area is 2.5 million. It's not like I live in the middle of nowhere.
I probably wouldn't be so bitter if I didn't know damn well that the state of Pennsylvania paid Verizon an obscene amount of money to provide a fiber-optic network to customers' homes with speeds of 45 mps in both directions and that they were supposed to have rewired 50% of the state in rural, suburban and urban areas with that fiber-optic to the home wire by 2004... but then Verizon admitted that they couldn't do it and the Pennsylvania Utilities Commission just let them off the hook. So really, I paid a bundle for a service that I can't even get.
I may not like that Comcast has a monopoly on the cable service in my area, but at least they do provide a service to me, and if it goes wonky, they do something about it.
And I won't tell you much about the horror stories of our Verizon connection at work. They don't know why, but it just randomly stops working for hours at a time. This is bad for a public library...
New York State used to have what was called tracking, but it wasn't exactly the way you described it. You could take several different levels of a class: remedial, non-Regents, Regents, and Regents Honors. You could take whatever level you needed in whatever class. If you took the right combination, it would give you a Regents Honors diploma. (So, if you made sure you took those classes, you were Regents Honors track.) Meeting slightly lower requirements gave you a Regents diploma, and so on. A few years after I graduated (early 90s), they wiped it away and made everyone get a Regents diploma (where you have to pass the Regents test in certain subjects certain years to graduate), then dumbed down the Regents tests when kids failed them right and left. Yeah, good plan. Don't let people get the diploma level they want, just let them flunk the hell out of school because they suck at Global Studies, even though they kick ass in math and science, then gut the tests so they're meaningless anyways. And of course, all the tracking went away with this too, so the truly gifted kids were bored, bored, bored if they were in small schools that didn't offer AP classes.
I think the legality/illegality of any tracking would depend on how it was implemented. Certainly there's a danger in labeling children. On the other hand, trying to force everyone into the same mold has never worked, either.
You can probably tell from my first paragraph that I don't think the new system is an improvement. Then again, I wasn't one of the hard workers in the lower tracks who was getting screwed by some of my fellow students being, for lack of a better term, complete asshats... But now, every class can be distracted and ruined by them! Share the love!
This seems a bit overhyped to me. Yes, I want the RIAA to go away, I want the RIAA to stop using brutal tactics, however, they do have the legal right to prosecute people illegally distributing their IP.
Prosecute, yes. Persecute, no.
Methinks the RIAA needs a good dictionary, because there are times they've crossed that line.
Not sharing. Copying someone's work and distributing it to hundreds of people in a commercial enterprise rather than going out and buying the copies they should have. Probably repeatedly as their general practice.
It's not like the company sent an email with a link to a publicly accessible news article for their employees to read or passed a newspaper around for them to take a turn reading the article--they physically just copied it and distributed it so each person could read and presumably keep it. That's pretty much the freaking definition of copyright infringement.
These are the people I want them to go after and leave alone Joe Schmoe who makes one photocopy of his grandma's 50th wedding anniversary announcement from the newspaper to send to his sister in Florida.
Apparently women don't want to hear the right words.
That's not women. That's a certain subsection of the population and it comes in both male and female form. I should know. I teach computer skills for a public library. Some people are good with technical terms. Some people--well, for some reason, the correct terms really rattle them, so you need to describe what it is visually and then later start sneaking the words in so they pick them up and start using them without realizing it.
At least with phone call questions of the "Something is screwed up and I can't get it to do what I want" type, the non-jargon folks are sometimes preferable because they can accurately describe what they see on their screen. Being a jargon person doesn't guarantee you're using the correct term. (We have a patron who routinely confuses the terms hard drive and desktop. If you handle two calls from him in a day, your coworkers will buy you a drink.)
i know you are trying to be clever reversing roles but it doesn't work. its like trying to get boys to play with dolls. force quotas do not work, its ffunny how they never try it with subjects dominated by females, like nursing or say dance. to be fair minded thats what they should be doing if they really believed such a thing would work.
I see boys playing with dolls all the time, and I don't think anyone here mentioned quotas. Take a deep breath and try to come at this without a knee jerk reaction. You're badmouthing a book that says positive things about math... why? Because it's aimed at girls? God forbid!
Seriously, there is nothing wrong with telling women from birth that math is cool and they can do it. Just like there's nothing wrong with watching a boy play with a doll and practice care-taking skills. They're both perfectly healthy things for kids to do. Encouraging people in positive behaviors is a good thing.
As to your comments about quotas in subjects dominated by females, I'm currently in one (libraries), and they go out and actively recruit men to be librarians as part of the goal to get greater diversity in the field. So yes, that pretty much happens in all fields dominated by one type.
As to why women aren't interested in math and science, the point of the book is that girls lose interest because they're told math sucks/isn't cool and Winnie's book is one small step in propaganda to counter that. I'd also like to say from my life experiences that there's a subtle discouragement in those fields from birth for most women, and over time, it just adds up and they take a path where they can do well without all the crap. That doesn't mean that can never be changed. It just means that if we, as a society, begin to see more women in those fields and stop spending so much time saying, "Women can't do that" or "don't like that" or "shouldn't do that" to them (or "Men can't/don't/shouldn't" to men--it works both ways), we'll stop indoctrinating our children with that view from birth and they'll actually believe they can and they'll want to and they will.
And frankly, if you look at countries outside the US, you'll see that's true--there are a hell of a lot of women in math and science fields and they're really interested. So either there's something in the American water supply, or we have some cultural hang ups to work on.;)
Nicely worded, although the christian woman thing was a little scarey.
I'm a mathematician (employed), I love to cook (I cook six out of seven nights and breakfasts on Saturday and Sunday mornings for my wife) and am looking forward to being the 'homemaker' when my first born arrives very soon now.
Awesome! That book WAS terrifying. What terrified me most was not that it existed, but that someone out there believed in it enough to raise her children by its tenets and pass it along to people she didn't know.
I'm all for someone being a homemaker. I just object to everyone assuming from birth that a particular woman is going to be. If nothing else, she should have a back up career in case the guy she falls for wants to be the homemaker or she ends up as a single parent or simply single.
It's a funny post, but it also illustrates one of the core problems with recruiting girls into math and engineering: a lot of them aren't interested. My sisters don't care about getting into a really intensive job because they know that they're going to get married and become homemakers. It's not that there's a problem if they do differently, it's that they've chosen that path to happiness. How many girls like my sisters are skewing the results of math/engineering studies?
I just had an urge to rewrite this from the other perspective:
It's a funny post, but it also illustrates one of the core problems with recruiting boys into math and engineering: a lot of them aren't interested. My brothers don't care about getting into a really intensive job because they know they're going to get married and become homemakers. It's not that there's a problem if they do differently, it's just that they've chosen that path to happiness. How many boys like my brothers are skewing the results of math/engineering studies?
(If you're too culturally ingrained to picture a man as a homemaker, you can insert "permanent English grad student" in the above paragraph.)
Maybe your sisters aren't interested because they never thought it was cool to be? See, that's kind of what the book is trying to address. There are a number of people who believe that more women would be interested in math and science if they encountered more books like Danica McKellar's and fewer books like The Rules or some of the schlock I've had sent to me by relatives of friends. (Seriously, it takes a lot of nerve to send your 20-year-old nephew a book to give to his female friends which directs them that the only true Christian woman is the wife who unquestioningly follows her husband's orders and stays at home and realizes that when he isn't speaking to her, it's her fault. That was an eye-opening book for me. I felt for that woman's daughters, who had absolutely no interest in math and science or anthing aside from finding a husband. It might possibly have been related to their upbringing.)
And there are a lot of men who aren't interested in math or science either when you ask it like that, but if it has to do with something they do, it's more interesting.
So what's this "gap" they talk about? Seems to me the guys are falling behind.
Let's see. This was a while ago, but of the top ten in my graduating class, two were male. They both had science and math majors. Of the eight women, only four of us did. Both of the guys have gone on into science and math heavy fields (MD and engineer). Of the women, only two did (veterinarian and dentist). So there is a gap in achievement when you look at that for math and science.
Why do I think that is? Well, I graduated high school with majors in math, science, social studies, and French. In college, I ended up with a history major and minors in anthropology and religious studies, but I took a number of math and science and comp sci courses for fun. I still love math and science. Numbers still are magical to me, and playing around with them to see what they can do can waste hours... But looking back, I realize I ended up focusing on areas where my abilities were treated less like a fluke and more like actual talent. I had higher science and math GPAs and took more science classes than the guys in my high school class (and helped them with studying and homework) and they got the science and math awards. I got the English and Humanities awards. (English? Have you seen my grammar? Seriously, it got lost somewhere around second grade.) The same thing continued in college, with certain professors (not all) handing out puzzles in math classes where I was one of two girls and acting surprised when I worked them out. Like I hadn't aced the last four tests in the class while quietly passing notes to my friends and keeping the freshmen in front of us quiet when they started to get bored and act up.
So women can achieve all they want, but it doesn't necessarily mean they aren't going to face subtle discouragement along the way that eventually does end in a gap. I'm a librarian who works with computers, which I guess is my way of compromising and getting to handle a wide variety of topics while still playing with math and science a bit. I play with my little electrical kits at home and build my own computers and whatnot, and I'm happy with my life, but I also suspect that had I been male, I might have gone for math or science as a career instead of a hobby because I wouldn't have been constantly getting the overlooked treatment.
Or maybe not. Still, it's hard for me to discount 20-some years of subtle discouragement in some areas and encouragement in others as having no impact on my life choices.
In the US, most people who have insurance get it through their place of employment, which means its hard, if not very expensive, for them to change. Now you would think that the companies would try to get the best value possible, but this is rarely the case.
Lots of times, places are limited as to who they can actually get to insure them, too. Since my place of work (a public library) includes a number of older, married women who work part-time, insurance companies don't really want to offer reasonable insurance plans to the library. There are currently two that do. Our business manager is always calling other businesses and libraries to ask who insures them and then calling that insurance company to try and get a quote, but so far, we've still only got the two... and our current one is considering dropping insurance for part-time workers. If that happens, the library will either have to completely switch companies to the only company left (which is not as good coverage-wise), or a large portion of its employees will be left without insurance.
So it's not always a case of getting the best value. Sometimes it's just a case of getting coverage for your workers. I know my health insurance is ridiculously expensive for my age, gender, marital status, etc., but that's because it's driven up by my coworkers. Sometimes I think the library WOULD be better off just saying, "Here's $200 per month. Go find a health plan."
Then of course you add private health insurance on top to bypass the waiting lists.
I'm a little tired of this excuse.
Let's be honest here. If you are well-off enough to have your own health insurance in the US (and your procedure is covered, and they okay whatever procedure you need done, which are not always givens), then you don't generally have the huge waiting lists for elective surgeries like hip replacements because we have an insane number of specialists here. (Things depending on donations... well, good luck.) That's because there's a HUGE disparity in the amount specialists make versus the amount general practitioners make, so something like 70% of our MDs specialize, whereas in other countries the numbers are flipped or much closer to equal.
On the other hand, if you DON'T have your own health insurance, you either get to fight the Medicare red tape (which is new to me, now that my parents have retired, and it is truly impressive) or you don't get it at all.
Add on to that all the uninsured and underinsured people who are raising health care costs for everyone in the United States by being unable to pay for basic preventative check ups or procedures and letting medical situations go until they reach crisis stage, and really? We're not doing ourselves any favors.
I was married to an Australian. My Australian in-laws have both government and private health insurance, and it's not exactly breaking the bank for them. On the other hand, back here in the good ol' US of A, if I'd wanted to add my husband to my health insurance provided by my workplace because it was better than his, it would have cost us $300 per month. We were both in our twenties at the time. I can't even imagine what adding kids to that plan must cost. (Adding me to his plan was cheaper, but his plan was worse.)
I'd also like to comment that I spent several months in Australia about 5 years ago. Inevitably, I picked up a few illnesses while I was there, so I saw a doctor. Not being a citizen, I had no insurance coverage. Cost for an office visit? $20 Australian. At the time, that was like $13 American--which is about what I'd expect to pay as a copay with my private insurance in the US. Right out of college, I was uninsured, and I can tell you that the uninsured office visit price for my local doctors was between $60 and $80 per visit.
So we can keep our system where we're all currently paying out of our noses for a health care system that ranks something like 37th in the world with costs that are spiraling out of control because there are no real limits on what doctors and hospitals and drug companies and insurance companies can charge, or we can institute something that gives every person some basic level of coverage, eliminating some of the really expensive medical procedures that come about from lack of medical care (for example, the amputation of a leg of a diabetic who should have been having regular medical check ups), which MIGHT end up with slightly longer waits for some people to see specialists for elective surgeries.
Of course, since we currently have more specialists than you can shake a stick at, and many of those people who would have to wait are the same people who wouldn't even have a chance in hell at even getting basic health care right now, I'm not really seeing the big downside here.
Hell, the LIBRARIANS skip the instructions on things. (Sure, we're crazy note-takers, but this list was sort of a no duh list. Make the tools intuitive? *gasp* No way!)
As to other suggestions given at the talk, I'm a public librarian, but I still think my comments apply.
Hold LAN parties, after hours, in libraries. (These are parties where many people bring their computers to play computer games, especially those involving teams, together.)
Get my IT department to let me. I've been trying.
Schedule support services on a 24/7/365 basis, not the hours currently in use at many college libraries, which were "set in 1963."
Sure. And the money for this is coming from... where, again? That's more staff hours and a lot more in utility costs to keep the library lighted, heated/cooled, with running water, etc.
Remember that students are much less sensitive about privacy issues than earlier generations were and are much more likely to share passwords or access to databases....which is a contractual issue with database publishers, not something that librarians are hyper about just because we want to be. Hell, we'd offer free access to every database to the world, if you asked us. We're not the ones making the money here. On the other hand, if the usage looks suspicious, the database publishers will either jack the price up or cut us off, claiming we broke the contract. Hence why there are generally some rules about database access.
Look for ways to involve digital natives in designing library services and even providing them. "Expertise is more important than credentials," he said, even credentials such as library science degrees.
I wouldn't say expertise, exactly. Expertise in what? Being a student or library user? I'd say involve the users in making design decisions since they're the ones using the place/services/resources and they often think differently than someone who works there.
(And you may be preaching to the choir. Librarians would like library catalog vendors and library system vendors to actually design systems useable by human beings. Every time I use ours, I'm convinced it was designed by people who hate librarians and library users. No one without actual malice could design anything that bad.)
Play more video games.
I would, but they won't let me do that at work, and I have to leave time for sleeping and eating and showering at home so I don't get labelled as a gaming addict.:P
Avoid implying to students that there is a single, correct way of doing things.
No kidding.
This was a lovely reminder why I don't attend ALA. zzzzzzzzz.
I do think that librarians are a bunch of antiquarians because I can use my colleges online catalog better than they can and they act like computers are something to be learned in a cargo cult fashion.
Thanks for stereotyping us all.
I'm a librarian. I used to code in BASIC on my TI-99 when I was 7 years old. When I leave work, I go home to tinker with my computer and play WoW. I rather resent being called an antiquarian. Granted, I'm the youngest in my department, but most of the other librarians are pretty good with the catalog, at least, if not computers overall.
I'm also fairly certain they can kick your ass on almost any sort of reader's advisory or business statistics question. Does that make you stupid, or just someone who's focused most of your life on other skills? I'm willing to bet the latter.
I'm not sure why people have such a difficult time understanding that computer skills are much like language skills--that when you learn them and how much you use them makes a difference in how fluent you are. If you find your college librarians tend to be 50 and over, then they probably didn't start to learn their computer skills before age 10--the age to which the brain is making crazy amounts of neural pathways and connections and automatic responses. Hence, they're probably having to put actual thought into parts of what they are doing, which means they'll be slower than you at it.
All I can say is appreciate it now, because in a few more years, some snot-nosed twerp will be calling you antiquated for having to think about something that is second nature to him.
If society looks down on education we have one peculiar way of showing it. Nationally more then $530 billion was spent on K-12 public education in 2005. That seems pretty damned respectful to me.
It's a strange relationship we have with education in the US. Most people want their kids to be educated. We're willing to throw money at the problem in the hopes that the next generation will all be able to do basic math. But at the same time, there are a large number of people who look down their noses at anyone who makes education their livelihood or who has an advanced degree.
How does property tax support slant education in favor of the rich? Oh right, more money means more education.
No, but it does tend to mean better facilities, higher teacher salaries, and educational resources that are replaced more quickly (so they are more up-to-date). Environment has a lot to do with a person's ability to learn. If you're in a nice, clean well financed school where things get fixed quickly and you feel vaguely comfortable, you learn better than if you're someplace where you have to dodge the plaster falling from the ceilings and worry about stuff being stolen from your locker which hasn't locked properly since you got it.
Oh, and teachers are over-paid. They have neither the responsibilities or educational requirements of a civil engineer yet their average salaries are equal.
Really? I certainly call being responsible for the daily care and education of thousands of children over a lifetime of teaching to be pretty responsible. Just because making one mathematical mistake won't result in the collapse of a structure and the possible death of hundreds of people does not mean they don't have responsibilities--they're just of a different, more subtle, sort. After all, they can screw up thousands of lives, too, just probably not as dramatically.
As to the educational requirements to be a teacher, it depends on the state. Where I'm from, teachers have to be certified in their area, which requires a bachelor's degree, certain courses in education, two student teaching stints, and passing both a general knowledge teacher's test and one for any area you're going to teach in. That will get you the basics to be hired. After that, you're required to get your Masters within a few years (I can't recall if it's 3 or 5) in order to keep your job. That's to teach in an elementary or secondary high school.
The problem, of course, is finding enough qualified teachers who are willing to teach in jobs in certain schools with less than stellar working conditions. That's where the state starts issuing temporary certifications to people who only meet some of the certifications because no one with the certifications is willing to go in to work part-time for crap pay and benefits and get harassed and threatened on a daily basis in a school that is falling down around them with text books that are ridiculously out of date. Strange, that.
In some cases, I consider teacher pay to be hazardous duty pay. And no, I'm not a teacher. I have some friends who are, though, and seeing the hours they work and the paperwork requirements and the amount of school supplies they finance from their own salaries, I don't think I could ever call them overpaid. And they work in "nice" schools.
That said... I agree with some of your post. Education will only be successful when the students, the parents, and the teachers all consider it a priority and when each takes responsibility for his or her own part in it. Right now, schools and teachers are having to babysit and raise children and teach them basic life skills that should be taught by a parent, and the concept of personal responsibility for one's actions got lost somewhere along the way. I don't want our schools teaching character education. I want that taught at home (silly, idealistic me). I want our schools to be able to focus on the academics.
That depends on how you are defining "lobbying." You're assuming it involves donations because that seems to be what politicians care about anymore. But really, the definition of lobbying is simply an attempt to sway someone to your point of view.
American citizens concerned about a topic can band together and pay someone whose full-time job is to go out there and attempt to sway legislators to the point of view of those citizens. Many groups do this through education and marketing and sheer bloody-minded perseverance. Hell, many professional organizations have lobbyists paid by the dues of their members to work towards legislation that their members feel is important. I'm not talking only corporate groups focused on making money, but also groups that want to see things like more funding for education, or the repeal of certain parts of the PATRIOT act, or better medical coverage for veterans.
I'm not opposed to that. Its a sensible way for people to organize to get their message across. Unfortunately, the system has become unbalanced by lobbies with vast amounts of money behind them that represent corporations or industries rather than individual people. (It's kind of like when corporations somehow gained civil liberties despite not being human beings and all sorts of things suddenly became infringing upon the civil liberties of a company... That still makes no sense to me.) Anyways, we now have the problem of lobbies donating large amounts to legislators and parties and working closely with the companies of said legislators, giving them undue influence.
So lobbying itself is fine. Our current lobbying system? Not so much. Unfortunately, I'm not certain how one would go about fixing it without simply inviting people to game the system in new ways.
I'm a librarian. Having worked at several libraries in different states (and in very different socioeconomic climates), I can address the book donation issue.
Book donations can be both helpful to libraries or a really big drain on time and resources. Occasionally, someone donates a rare book, or a book we find we need or want, or one we've been trying to get. More often, though, by the time people donate copies of a book, the library has purchased, catalogued, and processed (put all the stickers and security items, etc. on the book) copies of that book already. Unless the library's copy is missing or in very poor condition, it doesn't make sense to take the staff time and use the extra processing materials it would take to add an extra copy that probably won't circulate much. (If 50 people are going to check out a certain book, and the library already has a sufficient number of copies to meet that demand, adding another copy isn't doing anything except taking up often precious shelf space. It doesn't mean more people get to take out the book.)
All that, of course, is assuming the book is in mint condition. While you were a good citizen and donated books in good condition, other people try to use libraries as a dumping ground. I've seen books covered in cat urine, mold, food, and some things we couldn't even identify that were given to libraries. My old library had to contract with someone to come and haul away the books that couldn't even be sold at the book sale. Sometimes they had to call and ask for a special pick up, because the items were making us sick. And sometimes, people donated items that no library would add and no one ever wanted to buy, like encyclopedia sets from 1972 or health textbooks from 1980.
Keep in mind that every item donated requires someone to look at it and make a decision. That's taking the time of someone who has to know the library collection and the reading patterns of the patrons pretty well. Many libraries no longer accept donations to put in the collection simply because they were not cost effective--paying a staff member (in large libraries, volunteers often do not know the collection well enough) to sort through the dross was costing more than the library was saving through the addition of the few books it found worth adding. Some accept them only for sale in book sales or book stores because then they only have to weed out the completely unacceptable donations, which requires no knowledge of the library collection, just common sense.
So if a beautiful book you donate to the library ends up in a book sale, please don't be upset. Chances are it finds a good home with someone who enjoys it for years to come, and the library gets money it needs to buy needed materials. It may not be quite the way you envisioned it, but many times, the library is actually getting more value from using your book this way.
Anyways, I hope my explanation helped explain why some libraries might not accept donations (especially in bulk from a store owner), or why donations might end up in a book sale rather than on a library shelf. Please know that we DO appreciate the people who donate their books in good condition to the library, and in a perfect world we'd like to put them all on the shelf, but we lack the time, space, and materials to do so, so instead we do the best we can.
As to the book store owner who tried to donate all his extra stock to libraries and was upset when they wouldn't take them, I'd like to repeat that libraries are not a dumping ground. We don't need 150 copies of The Da Vinci Code any more than you do. We have our copies already, and we're not going to have any more luck selling those copies at book sales than you had. Essentially, he overestimated how many copies he could sell and ended up with stock problems which he is blaming on society, and when he couldn't make nonprofits fix the problem for him, he came up with a way to make it a marketing campaign. I don't really have much sympathy for him.
Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture), finding lost patients (apparently a common problem, especially with mentally unstable patients), Student security, efficient computers/lighting (i.e. computers/lights turn on/off when someone enters/exits room), computer account security and log-on convenience.
Um, I wouldn't trust an RFID system to do half of this stuff. I work with one every day, and I've never seen a system so capable of just not registering data. You'd have to show me that this was the BEST EVAR!!! RFID system before I let it take roll call, much less handle computer account security (ha!) or patient security. If it had anything near the rate of not registering tags or not correctly setting tags that our system has, you'd have conscientious students with Ds for supposedly failing to attend lectures and lights that turned off when you entered the room.
One student carrying too many CDs and the tag can't be read. One student standing in a doorway where there are metal studs in the walls and the tag can't be read. One patient wearing a tinfoil bracelet and they can't be found...
One reason that certain medical tests are not conducted is the number of false positives they can provide. I put RFID systems in the same category right now. I wouldn't tag students for an emergency, because in an emergency, I want to know the data is reliable, not think that everyone is safe only to find out that five kids died in their dorm because their tags didn't register.
Right now, I consider RFID's greatest promise to be its ability to teach kids how many different ways there are to game any system that uses it.
I have no idea who runs this site, but I wanted to see how legit they were. So I sent them a small amount of money through paypal and, lo and behold, 30 minutes later, the gold was in my mailbox. I figure at least they aren't just scamming people completely.
Congratulations. You are now part of the problem.
Where exactly do you think they're getting the gold? Do you think they are legitimately running characters to high levels and then shipping the gold around to characters whose players pay for it? That would take time and effort and would not be an efficient way to make money.
Last I knew, most of the gold came from hacking accounts and stealing it. It's a lot faster to shard and sell off the inventories of multiple characters than it is to go out and earn the money. If it were easy enough to earn the money, people wouldn't be buying it in the first place.
The CGFs people joke about (you know, the ones that run their characters up, speak poor English, and then farm all day long) may make some of that, but not much... Several days to get to the point where you can farm, then maybe three drops an hour for 7-10g each? Pitiful compared to hacking just one account. Probably why I haven't seen them around much--that business model died out.
So next time you think about doing "research" to see if a goldseller is legit, don't bother. They might not have ripped you off, but that's probably because they were too busy screwing over someone else at the time.
So next time someone you know gets their account hacked and all their epics sharded, you can feel really good about yourself. In your own way, you contributed to that just a little bit.
It's much easier to respect a manager who knows her stuff and understands the work well rather than a fresh-out-of-college MBA.
I think you're making the assumption that the women are expecting to immediately be hired as managers. I didn't imagine that was the case. I figured most of them expected to go in and work in various IT positions that could easily lead to a management position in a reasonable amount of time.
As far as I can tell, they interviewed 92 women, took their responses, and shoved them into 3 categories. I wouldn't be surprised if anyone who said, "Eventually, I want to be in management" ended up in the management category, even though they wouldn't fit your image.
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It's not possible to answer your question as asked, IMO. There are a few issues.
1. Who are we considering to be "nerds" in this case? All smart people? Only techie smart people? All engineers? Only certain fields of engineering?
2. Even if nerds were defined, I'm curious why you think that. Are you basing it just on the people you know?
An article I read in 2004 or so compared how those who worked primarily with paragraphs versus those who worked primarily with numbers tended to vote (for Kerry versus for Bush). It ended up using librarians to illustrate the paragraphs example. (They were something like 20:1 in favor of Kerry compared to Bush.) Ignoring that the article forced a false binary system, it does seem to suggest that librarians, often viewed as nerdy, might not tend to be libertarian overall. The same article used a different but equally nerdy profession (I can't recall what it was right now) to demonstrate the other side, which was something not-quite-as-absurdly Bush-favoring.* Still, I'd say that there are a lot of types of nerds and pigeonholing them as a big group doesn't work particularly well. (Not even as a smaller group. There are big blocks of very conservative librarians, too. Just look up the debate over the Newbery Award snoozer, er, winner The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Phelan. Some librarians chose not to stock it because it used the word "scrotum" in the beginning of the book. The rest slapped an award on it and handed it to kids.)
*In that study, I always wondered how many people went "Well, I'm VOTING for X because I'm DAMNED if I want Y to win! I'd really rather they both pissed off."
I'm sorry. I find it hard to believe that it costs them over $30 for the two sports channels I would want and that somehow, they're making enough off the hordes of people wanting to watch the hideous programming of G4 to "subsidize" my two channels. Hell, I'm a gamer and I find G4 painful to watch.
And this is exactly what they SHOULDN'T be doing. I would rather just pay the $10 for ESPN and $7 for NFL or whatever they cost and be spared the crap channels and the extra I pay for any other channels I don't want.
...its a luxury not a basic utility.
It's a luxury utility, and he offered to pay the luxury price to get it and they still wouldn't install it. Considering all the subsidies and tax breaks and non-competition clauses various government entities have given broadband providers, I damn well think that ANY person in the U.S. should be able to receive broadband if they are willing to pay the luxury cost to do so.
Either the information infrastructure is important and we should all have a chance at it (provided we're willing to pay according to our trade offs like distance from offices, etc.) or it's not and we stop financing the bastards.
We would not charge each and every basic sub $2 more per month simply to add what is a niche channel.
Apparently you are not my former cable provider, who used to do things like add the SOAP network so my bill would go up $2.
Well, the NFL Network would just be for the Thursday night games that they won't show anywhere else, and I figure I'll shake down my brother and my ex-husband for part of the cost. I mean, really only one of us would have to get it to see the games, and we tend to watch them together when they're worth watching.
ESPN (and possibly ESPN2) I'd get for the other sports too, but football is the most consuming. Baseball and hockey are also great. I've learned to appreciate tennis, Aussie Rules football, soccer, NASCAR, curling, bull riding, and cricket. Just this year I made it through my first golf (cheering for the course). I find that TiVoing the less exciting sports to fast forward through some of the blathering helps. (This also works with Olympic coverage and all the human interest stories.) All I can say is that watching sports and cross-stitching (or crocheting really badly) is a very nice way to relax unless it's your team playing.
So, um, yeah. I'd prefer a la carte to dump all the crappy music channels and Home and Garden channels and home shopping channels. I just wants my sports, my sci fi, my comedy, and my weather. Okay, nevermind. This post was completely off topic. I couldn't save it.
I don't see why it would have to be all or nothing pay-per-channel or pay-for-3-million-channels. Why not a base rate that everyone pays for their basic cable plus a per channel rate to add any number more channels? Right now I have the option of getting basic cable, which lacks ESPN and the NFL Network (yes, I'm one of those people who requires them, folks), Comedy Central, and the Sci Fi Channel, or paying an arm and a leg for a whole slew of channels I really don't care about.
While I realize that this means there's no chance for start-up channels to get a following, I'm pretty sure they can find a way around it if they try. Free/reduced rates for the first few months or starting out on the Net...
All I can say is I wait longingly for our new Verizon overlords. They can't suck as bad as Comcast and Verizon.
:P
I assume that the second Verizon was supposed to be Qwest.
All I can say is that actually, they can. I gratefully switched to Comcast after having Verizon because Verizon gave me a mostly non-working DSL connection that they kept charging me for and not sending people out to investigate. Now Verizon just tells people that they don't offer DSL in my area code. In fact, I'm not exactly sure what they're offering in my area code, because when I check my phone number on their web site, it says FiOS is not available for me, but I can get High Speed Internet. Exactly what is that, do you think? Super high speed dial up?
For the record, I live in an affluent area of a city of 350,000. The population of the whole metropolitan area is 2.5 million. It's not like I live in the middle of nowhere.
I probably wouldn't be so bitter if I didn't know damn well that the state of Pennsylvania paid Verizon an obscene amount of money to provide a fiber-optic network to customers' homes with speeds of 45 mps in both directions and that they were supposed to have rewired 50% of the state in rural, suburban and urban areas with that fiber-optic to the home wire by 2004... but then Verizon admitted that they couldn't do it and the Pennsylvania Utilities Commission just let them off the hook. So really, I paid a bundle for a service that I can't even get.
I may not like that Comcast has a monopoly on the cable service in my area, but at least they do provide a service to me, and if it goes wonky, they do something about it.
And I won't tell you much about the horror stories of our Verizon connection at work. They don't know why, but it just randomly stops working for hours at a time. This is bad for a public library...
New York State used to have what was called tracking, but it wasn't exactly the way you described it. You could take several different levels of a class: remedial, non-Regents, Regents, and Regents Honors. You could take whatever level you needed in whatever class. If you took the right combination, it would give you a Regents Honors diploma. (So, if you made sure you took those classes, you were Regents Honors track.) Meeting slightly lower requirements gave you a Regents diploma, and so on. A few years after I graduated (early 90s), they wiped it away and made everyone get a Regents diploma (where you have to pass the Regents test in certain subjects certain years to graduate), then dumbed down the Regents tests when kids failed them right and left. Yeah, good plan. Don't let people get the diploma level they want, just let them flunk the hell out of school because they suck at Global Studies, even though they kick ass in math and science, then gut the tests so they're meaningless anyways. And of course, all the tracking went away with this too, so the truly gifted kids were bored, bored, bored if they were in small schools that didn't offer AP classes.
I think the legality/illegality of any tracking would depend on how it was implemented. Certainly there's a danger in labeling children. On the other hand, trying to force everyone into the same mold has never worked, either.
You can probably tell from my first paragraph that I don't think the new system is an improvement. Then again, I wasn't one of the hard workers in the lower tracks who was getting screwed by some of my fellow students being, for lack of a better term, complete asshats... But now, every class can be distracted and ruined by them! Share the love!
This seems a bit overhyped to me. Yes, I want the RIAA to go away, I want the RIAA to stop using brutal tactics, however, they do have the legal right to prosecute people illegally distributing their IP.
Prosecute, yes. Persecute, no.
Methinks the RIAA needs a good dictionary, because there are times they've crossed that line.
Not sharing. Copying someone's work and distributing it to hundreds of people in a commercial enterprise rather than going out and buying the copies they should have. Probably repeatedly as their general practice.
It's not like the company sent an email with a link to a publicly accessible news article for their employees to read or passed a newspaper around for them to take a turn reading the article--they physically just copied it and distributed it so each person could read and presumably keep it. That's pretty much the freaking definition of copyright infringement.
These are the people I want them to go after and leave alone Joe Schmoe who makes one photocopy of his grandma's 50th wedding anniversary announcement from the newspaper to send to his sister in Florida.
Apparently women don't want to hear the right words.
That's not women. That's a certain subsection of the population and it comes in both male and female form. I should know. I teach computer skills for a public library. Some people are good with technical terms. Some people--well, for some reason, the correct terms really rattle them, so you need to describe what it is visually and then later start sneaking the words in so they pick them up and start using them without realizing it.
At least with phone call questions of the "Something is screwed up and I can't get it to do what I want" type, the non-jargon folks are sometimes preferable because they can accurately describe what they see on their screen. Being a jargon person doesn't guarantee you're using the correct term. (We have a patron who routinely confuses the terms hard drive and desktop. If you handle two calls from him in a day, your coworkers will buy you a drink.)
i know you are trying to be clever reversing roles but it doesn't work. its like trying to get boys to play with dolls. force quotas do not work, its ffunny how they never try it with subjects dominated by females, like nursing or say dance. to be fair minded thats what they should be doing if they really believed such a thing would work.
;)
I see boys playing with dolls all the time, and I don't think anyone here mentioned quotas. Take a deep breath and try to come at this without a knee jerk reaction. You're badmouthing a book that says positive things about math... why? Because it's aimed at girls? God forbid!
Seriously, there is nothing wrong with telling women from birth that math is cool and they can do it. Just like there's nothing wrong with watching a boy play with a doll and practice care-taking skills. They're both perfectly healthy things for kids to do. Encouraging people in positive behaviors is a good thing.
As to your comments about quotas in subjects dominated by females, I'm currently in one (libraries), and they go out and actively recruit men to be librarians as part of the goal to get greater diversity in the field. So yes, that pretty much happens in all fields dominated by one type.
As to why women aren't interested in math and science, the point of the book is that girls lose interest because they're told math sucks/isn't cool and Winnie's book is one small step in propaganda to counter that. I'd also like to say from my life experiences that there's a subtle discouragement in those fields from birth for most women, and over time, it just adds up and they take a path where they can do well without all the crap. That doesn't mean that can never be changed. It just means that if we, as a society, begin to see more women in those fields and stop spending so much time saying, "Women can't do that" or "don't like that" or "shouldn't do that" to them (or "Men can't/don't/shouldn't" to men--it works both ways), we'll stop indoctrinating our children with that view from birth and they'll actually believe they can and they'll want to and they will.
And frankly, if you look at countries outside the US, you'll see that's true--there are a hell of a lot of women in math and science fields and they're really interested. So either there's something in the American water supply, or we have some cultural hang ups to work on.
Nicely worded, although the christian woman thing was a little scarey.
I'm a mathematician (employed), I love to cook (I cook six out of seven nights and breakfasts on Saturday and Sunday mornings for my wife) and am looking forward to being the 'homemaker' when my first born arrives very soon now.
Awesome! That book WAS terrifying. What terrified me most was not that it existed, but that someone out there believed in it enough to raise her children by its tenets and pass it along to people she didn't know.
I'm all for someone being a homemaker. I just object to everyone assuming from birth that a particular woman is going to be. If nothing else, she should have a back up career in case the guy she falls for wants to be the homemaker or she ends up as a single parent or simply single.
It's a funny post, but it also illustrates one of the core problems with recruiting girls into math and engineering: a lot of them aren't interested. My sisters don't care about getting into a really intensive job because they know that they're going to get married and become homemakers. It's not that there's a problem if they do differently, it's that they've chosen that path to happiness. How many girls like my sisters are skewing the results of math/engineering studies?
I just had an urge to rewrite this from the other perspective:
It's a funny post, but it also illustrates one of the core problems with recruiting boys into math and engineering: a lot of them aren't interested. My brothers don't care about getting into a really intensive job because they know they're going to get married and become homemakers. It's not that there's a problem if they do differently, it's just that they've chosen that path to happiness. How many boys like my brothers are skewing the results of math/engineering studies?
(If you're too culturally ingrained to picture a man as a homemaker, you can insert "permanent English grad student" in the above paragraph.)
Maybe your sisters aren't interested because they never thought it was cool to be? See, that's kind of what the book is trying to address. There are a number of people who believe that more women would be interested in math and science if they encountered more books like Danica McKellar's and fewer books like The Rules or some of the schlock I've had sent to me by relatives of friends. (Seriously, it takes a lot of nerve to send your 20-year-old nephew a book to give to his female friends which directs them that the only true Christian woman is the wife who unquestioningly follows her husband's orders and stays at home and realizes that when he isn't speaking to her, it's her fault. That was an eye-opening book for me. I felt for that woman's daughters, who had absolutely no interest in math and science or anthing aside from finding a husband. It might possibly have been related to their upbringing.)
And there are a lot of men who aren't interested in math or science either when you ask it like that, but if it has to do with something they do, it's more interesting.
So what's this "gap" they talk about? Seems to me the guys are falling behind.
Let's see. This was a while ago, but of the top ten in my graduating class, two were male. They both had science and math majors. Of the eight women, only four of us did. Both of the guys have gone on into science and math heavy fields (MD and engineer). Of the women, only two did (veterinarian and dentist). So there is a gap in achievement when you look at that for math and science.
Why do I think that is? Well, I graduated high school with majors in math, science, social studies, and French. In college, I ended up with a history major and minors in anthropology and religious studies, but I took a number of math and science and comp sci courses for fun. I still love math and science. Numbers still are magical to me, and playing around with them to see what they can do can waste hours... But looking back, I realize I ended up focusing on areas where my abilities were treated less like a fluke and more like actual talent. I had higher science and math GPAs and took more science classes than the guys in my high school class (and helped them with studying and homework) and they got the science and math awards. I got the English and Humanities awards. (English? Have you seen my grammar? Seriously, it got lost somewhere around second grade.) The same thing continued in college, with certain professors (not all) handing out puzzles in math classes where I was one of two girls and acting surprised when I worked them out. Like I hadn't aced the last four tests in the class while quietly passing notes to my friends and keeping the freshmen in front of us quiet when they started to get bored and act up.
So women can achieve all they want, but it doesn't necessarily mean they aren't going to face subtle discouragement along the way that eventually does end in a gap. I'm a librarian who works with computers, which I guess is my way of compromising and getting to handle a wide variety of topics while still playing with math and science a bit. I play with my little electrical kits at home and build my own computers and whatnot, and I'm happy with my life, but I also suspect that had I been male, I might have gone for math or science as a career instead of a hobby because I wouldn't have been constantly getting the overlooked treatment.
Or maybe not. Still, it's hard for me to discount 20-some years of subtle discouragement in some areas and encouragement in others as having no impact on my life choices.
In the US, most people who have insurance get it through their place of employment, which means its hard, if not very expensive, for them to change. Now you would think that the companies would try to get the best value possible, but this is rarely the case.
Lots of times, places are limited as to who they can actually get to insure them, too. Since my place of work (a public library) includes a number of older, married women who work part-time, insurance companies don't really want to offer reasonable insurance plans to the library. There are currently two that do. Our business manager is always calling other businesses and libraries to ask who insures them and then calling that insurance company to try and get a quote, but so far, we've still only got the two... and our current one is considering dropping insurance for part-time workers. If that happens, the library will either have to completely switch companies to the only company left (which is not as good coverage-wise), or a large portion of its employees will be left without insurance.
So it's not always a case of getting the best value. Sometimes it's just a case of getting coverage for your workers. I know my health insurance is ridiculously expensive for my age, gender, marital status, etc., but that's because it's driven up by my coworkers. Sometimes I think the library WOULD be better off just saying, "Here's $200 per month. Go find a health plan."
Then of course you add private health insurance on top to bypass the waiting lists.
I'm a little tired of this excuse.
Let's be honest here. If you are well-off enough to have your own health insurance in the US (and your procedure is covered, and they okay whatever procedure you need done, which are not always givens), then you don't generally have the huge waiting lists for elective surgeries like hip replacements because we have an insane number of specialists here. (Things depending on donations... well, good luck.) That's because there's a HUGE disparity in the amount specialists make versus the amount general practitioners make, so something like 70% of our MDs specialize, whereas in other countries the numbers are flipped or much closer to equal.
On the other hand, if you DON'T have your own health insurance, you either get to fight the Medicare red tape (which is new to me, now that my parents have retired, and it is truly impressive) or you don't get it at all.
Add on to that all the uninsured and underinsured people who are raising health care costs for everyone in the United States by being unable to pay for basic preventative check ups or procedures and letting medical situations go until they reach crisis stage, and really? We're not doing ourselves any favors.
I was married to an Australian. My Australian in-laws have both government and private health insurance, and it's not exactly breaking the bank for them. On the other hand, back here in the good ol' US of A, if I'd wanted to add my husband to my health insurance provided by my workplace because it was better than his, it would have cost us $300 per month. We were both in our twenties at the time. I can't even imagine what adding kids to that plan must cost. (Adding me to his plan was cheaper, but his plan was worse.)
I'd also like to comment that I spent several months in Australia about 5 years ago. Inevitably, I picked up a few illnesses while I was there, so I saw a doctor. Not being a citizen, I had no insurance coverage. Cost for an office visit? $20 Australian. At the time, that was like $13 American--which is about what I'd expect to pay as a copay with my private insurance in the US. Right out of college, I was uninsured, and I can tell you that the uninsured office visit price for my local doctors was between $60 and $80 per visit.
So we can keep our system where we're all currently paying out of our noses for a health care system that ranks something like 37th in the world with costs that are spiraling out of control because there are no real limits on what doctors and hospitals and drug companies and insurance companies can charge, or we can institute something that gives every person some basic level of coverage, eliminating some of the really expensive medical procedures that come about from lack of medical care (for example, the amputation of a leg of a diabetic who should have been having regular medical check ups), which MIGHT end up with slightly longer waits for some people to see specialists for elective surgeries.
Of course, since we currently have more specialists than you can shake a stick at, and many of those people who would have to wait are the same people who wouldn't even have a chance in hell at even getting basic health care right now, I'm not really seeing the big downside here.
Hell, the LIBRARIANS skip the instructions on things. (Sure, we're crazy note-takers, but this list was sort of a no duh list. Make the tools intuitive? *gasp* No way!)
...which is a contractual issue with database publishers, not something that librarians are hyper about just because we want to be. Hell, we'd offer free access to every database to the world, if you asked us. We're not the ones making the money here. On the other hand, if the usage looks suspicious, the database publishers will either jack the price up or cut us off, claiming we broke the contract. Hence why there are generally some rules about database access.
:P
As to other suggestions given at the talk, I'm a public librarian, but I still think my comments apply.
Hold LAN parties, after hours, in libraries. (These are parties where many people bring their computers to play computer games, especially those involving teams, together.)
Get my IT department to let me. I've been trying.
Schedule support services on a 24/7/365 basis, not the hours currently in use at many college libraries, which were "set in 1963."
Sure. And the money for this is coming from... where, again? That's more staff hours and a lot more in utility costs to keep the library lighted, heated/cooled, with running water, etc.
Remember that students are much less sensitive about privacy issues than earlier generations were and are much more likely to share passwords or access to databases.
Look for ways to involve digital natives in designing library services and even providing them. "Expertise is more important than credentials," he said, even credentials such as library science degrees.
I wouldn't say expertise, exactly. Expertise in what? Being a student or library user? I'd say involve the users in making design decisions since they're the ones using the place/services/resources and they often think differently than someone who works there.
(And you may be preaching to the choir. Librarians would like library catalog vendors and library system vendors to actually design systems useable by human beings. Every time I use ours, I'm convinced it was designed by people who hate librarians and library users. No one without actual malice could design anything that bad.)
Play more video games.
I would, but they won't let me do that at work, and I have to leave time for sleeping and eating and showering at home so I don't get labelled as a gaming addict.
Avoid implying to students that there is a single, correct way of doing things.
No kidding.
This was a lovely reminder why I don't attend ALA. zzzzzzzzz.
I do think that librarians are a bunch of antiquarians because I can use my colleges online catalog better than they can and they act like computers are something to be learned in a cargo cult fashion.
Thanks for stereotyping us all.
I'm a librarian. I used to code in BASIC on my TI-99 when I was 7 years old. When I leave work, I go home to tinker with my computer and play WoW. I rather resent being called an antiquarian. Granted, I'm the youngest in my department, but most of the other librarians are pretty good with the catalog, at least, if not computers overall.
I'm also fairly certain they can kick your ass on almost any sort of reader's advisory or business statistics question. Does that make you stupid, or just someone who's focused most of your life on other skills? I'm willing to bet the latter.
I'm not sure why people have such a difficult time understanding that computer skills are much like language skills--that when you learn them and how much you use them makes a difference in how fluent you are. If you find your college librarians tend to be 50 and over, then they probably didn't start to learn their computer skills before age 10--the age to which the brain is making crazy amounts of neural pathways and connections and automatic responses. Hence, they're probably having to put actual thought into parts of what they are doing, which means they'll be slower than you at it.
All I can say is appreciate it now, because in a few more years, some snot-nosed twerp will be calling you antiquated for having to think about something that is second nature to him.
If society looks down on education we have one peculiar way of showing it. Nationally more then $530 billion was spent on K-12 public education in 2005. That seems pretty damned respectful to me.
It's a strange relationship we have with education in the US. Most people want their kids to be educated. We're willing to throw money at the problem in the hopes that the next generation will all be able to do basic math. But at the same time, there are a large number of people who look down their noses at anyone who makes education their livelihood or who has an advanced degree.
How does property tax support slant education in favor of the rich? Oh right, more money means more education.
No, but it does tend to mean better facilities, higher teacher salaries, and educational resources that are replaced more quickly (so they are more up-to-date). Environment has a lot to do with a person's ability to learn. If you're in a nice, clean well financed school where things get fixed quickly and you feel vaguely comfortable, you learn better than if you're someplace where you have to dodge the plaster falling from the ceilings and worry about stuff being stolen from your locker which hasn't locked properly since you got it.
Oh, and teachers are over-paid. They have neither the responsibilities or educational requirements of a civil engineer yet their average salaries are equal.
Really? I certainly call being responsible for the daily care and education of thousands of children over a lifetime of teaching to be pretty responsible. Just because making one mathematical mistake won't result in the collapse of a structure and the possible death of hundreds of people does not mean they don't have responsibilities--they're just of a different, more subtle, sort. After all, they can screw up thousands of lives, too, just probably not as dramatically.
As to the educational requirements to be a teacher, it depends on the state. Where I'm from, teachers have to be certified in their area, which requires a bachelor's degree, certain courses in education, two student teaching stints, and passing both a general knowledge teacher's test and one for any area you're going to teach in. That will get you the basics to be hired. After that, you're required to get your Masters within a few years (I can't recall if it's 3 or 5) in order to keep your job. That's to teach in an elementary or secondary high school.
The problem, of course, is finding enough qualified teachers who are willing to teach in jobs in certain schools with less than stellar working conditions. That's where the state starts issuing temporary certifications to people who only meet some of the certifications because no one with the certifications is willing to go in to work part-time for crap pay and benefits and get harassed and threatened on a daily basis in a school that is falling down around them with text books that are ridiculously out of date. Strange, that.
In some cases, I consider teacher pay to be hazardous duty pay. And no, I'm not a teacher. I have some friends who are, though, and seeing the hours they work and the paperwork requirements and the amount of school supplies they finance from their own salaries, I don't think I could ever call them overpaid. And they work in "nice" schools.
That said... I agree with some of your post. Education will only be successful when the students, the parents, and the teachers all consider it a priority and when each takes responsibility for his or her own part in it. Right now, schools and teachers are having to babysit and raise children and teach them basic life skills that should be taught by a parent, and the concept of personal responsibility for one's actions got lost somewhere along the way. I don't want our schools teaching character education. I want that taught at home (silly, idealistic me). I want our schools to be able to focus on the academics.
That depends on how you are defining "lobbying." You're assuming it involves donations because that seems to be what politicians care about anymore. But really, the definition of lobbying is simply an attempt to sway someone to your point of view.
American citizens concerned about a topic can band together and pay someone whose full-time job is to go out there and attempt to sway legislators to the point of view of those citizens. Many groups do this through education and marketing and sheer bloody-minded perseverance. Hell, many professional organizations have lobbyists paid by the dues of their members to work towards legislation that their members feel is important. I'm not talking only corporate groups focused on making money, but also groups that want to see things like more funding for education, or the repeal of certain parts of the PATRIOT act, or better medical coverage for veterans.
I'm not opposed to that. Its a sensible way for people to organize to get their message across. Unfortunately, the system has become unbalanced by lobbies with vast amounts of money behind them that represent corporations or industries rather than individual people. (It's kind of like when corporations somehow gained civil liberties despite not being human beings and all sorts of things suddenly became infringing upon the civil liberties of a company... That still makes no sense to me.) Anyways, we now have the problem of lobbies donating large amounts to legislators and parties and working closely with the companies of said legislators, giving them undue influence.
So lobbying itself is fine. Our current lobbying system? Not so much. Unfortunately, I'm not certain how one would go about fixing it without simply inviting people to game the system in new ways.
I'm a librarian. Having worked at several libraries in different states (and in very different socioeconomic climates), I can address the book donation issue.
Book donations can be both helpful to libraries or a really big drain on time and resources. Occasionally, someone donates a rare book, or a book we find we need or want, or one we've been trying to get. More often, though, by the time people donate copies of a book, the library has purchased, catalogued, and processed (put all the stickers and security items, etc. on the book) copies of that book already. Unless the library's copy is missing or in very poor condition, it doesn't make sense to take the staff time and use the extra processing materials it would take to add an extra copy that probably won't circulate much. (If 50 people are going to check out a certain book, and the library already has a sufficient number of copies to meet that demand, adding another copy isn't doing anything except taking up often precious shelf space. It doesn't mean more people get to take out the book.)
All that, of course, is assuming the book is in mint condition. While you were a good citizen and donated books in good condition, other people try to use libraries as a dumping ground. I've seen books covered in cat urine, mold, food, and some things we couldn't even identify that were given to libraries. My old library had to contract with someone to come and haul away the books that couldn't even be sold at the book sale. Sometimes they had to call and ask for a special pick up, because the items were making us sick. And sometimes, people donated items that no library would add and no one ever wanted to buy, like encyclopedia sets from 1972 or health textbooks from 1980.
Keep in mind that every item donated requires someone to look at it and make a decision. That's taking the time of someone who has to know the library collection and the reading patterns of the patrons pretty well. Many libraries no longer accept donations to put in the collection simply because they were not cost effective--paying a staff member (in large libraries, volunteers often do not know the collection well enough) to sort through the dross was costing more than the library was saving through the addition of the few books it found worth adding. Some accept them only for sale in book sales or book stores because then they only have to weed out the completely unacceptable donations, which requires no knowledge of the library collection, just common sense.
So if a beautiful book you donate to the library ends up in a book sale, please don't be upset. Chances are it finds a good home with someone who enjoys it for years to come, and the library gets money it needs to buy needed materials. It may not be quite the way you envisioned it, but many times, the library is actually getting more value from using your book this way.
Anyways, I hope my explanation helped explain why some libraries might not accept donations (especially in bulk from a store owner), or why donations might end up in a book sale rather than on a library shelf. Please know that we DO appreciate the people who donate their books in good condition to the library, and in a perfect world we'd like to put them all on the shelf, but we lack the time, space, and materials to do so, so instead we do the best we can.
As to the book store owner who tried to donate all his extra stock to libraries and was upset when they wouldn't take them, I'd like to repeat that libraries are not a dumping ground. We don't need 150 copies of The Da Vinci Code any more than you do. We have our copies already, and we're not going to have any more luck selling those copies at book sales than you had. Essentially, he overestimated how many copies he could sell and ended up with stock problems which he is blaming on society, and when he couldn't make nonprofits fix the problem for him, he came up with a way to make it a marketing campaign. I don't really have much sympathy for him.
p.s. If you want t
Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture), finding lost patients (apparently a common problem, especially with mentally unstable patients), Student security, efficient computers/lighting (i.e. computers/lights turn on/off when someone enters/exits room), computer account security and log-on convenience.
Um, I wouldn't trust an RFID system to do half of this stuff. I work with one every day, and I've never seen a system so capable of just not registering data. You'd have to show me that this was the BEST EVAR!!! RFID system before I let it take roll call, much less handle computer account security (ha!) or patient security. If it had anything near the rate of not registering tags or not correctly setting tags that our system has, you'd have conscientious students with Ds for supposedly failing to attend lectures and lights that turned off when you entered the room.
One student carrying too many CDs and the tag can't be read. One student standing in a doorway where there are metal studs in the walls and the tag can't be read. One patient wearing a tinfoil bracelet and they can't be found...
One reason that certain medical tests are not conducted is the number of false positives they can provide. I put RFID systems in the same category right now. I wouldn't tag students for an emergency, because in an emergency, I want to know the data is reliable, not think that everyone is safe only to find out that five kids died in their dorm because their tags didn't register.
Right now, I consider RFID's greatest promise to be its ability to teach kids how many different ways there are to game any system that uses it.
I have no idea who runs this site, but I wanted to see how legit they were. So I sent them a small amount of money through paypal and, lo and behold, 30 minutes later, the gold was in my mailbox. I figure at least they aren't just scamming people completely.
Congratulations. You are now part of the problem.
Where exactly do you think they're getting the gold? Do you think they are legitimately running characters to high levels and then shipping the gold around to characters whose players pay for it? That would take time and effort and would not be an efficient way to make money.
Last I knew, most of the gold came from hacking accounts and stealing it. It's a lot faster to shard and sell off the inventories of multiple characters than it is to go out and earn the money. If it were easy enough to earn the money, people wouldn't be buying it in the first place.
The CGFs people joke about (you know, the ones that run their characters up, speak poor English, and then farm all day long) may make some of that, but not much... Several days to get to the point where you can farm, then maybe three drops an hour for 7-10g each? Pitiful compared to hacking just one account. Probably why I haven't seen them around much--that business model died out.
So next time you think about doing "research" to see if a goldseller is legit, don't bother. They might not have ripped you off, but that's probably because they were too busy screwing over someone else at the time.
So next time someone you know gets their account hacked and all their epics sharded, you can feel really good about yourself. In your own way, you contributed to that just a little bit.
It's much easier to respect a manager who knows her stuff and understands the work well rather than a fresh-out-of-college MBA.
I think you're making the assumption that the women are expecting to immediately be hired as managers. I didn't imagine that was the case. I figured most of them expected to go in and work in various IT positions that could easily lead to a management position in a reasonable amount of time.
As far as I can tell, they interviewed 92 women, took their responses, and shoved them into 3 categories. I wouldn't be surprised if anyone who said, "Eventually, I want to be in management" ended up in the management category, even though they wouldn't fit your image.