I agree. I think though there is something of a business case in that, once you've got a good core team (if the team is large enough) there's something to be gained by broadening the experiences of new team members.
But that's not really my point. It's more about 'why is diversity a good thing?' And it's a good thing becuase you don't want to exclude good people for arbitrary reasons.
Now if you start from today, there's only so much you can do, because a great many potentially very good people have already been excluded. They were excluded by parents, teachers, the media and every other influence that helps to convince girls (and perhaps ethnic minorities, I'm not sure) that tech is not for them. I don't think it's done deliberately, it's just where we are.
I think I'm beginning to see that the reason what I wrote was seen as trolling might be because it was assumed I was being politically correct?
In fact it's a business case issue for me. You want the best people for your industry, you want the largest pool of talent from which to recruit. To get the largest pool of talant you want schools pushing those with an aptitude for engineering towards the topics at which they excel (assuming that's what the individual wants).
If you're (inadvertantly) steering a future mathematics prodigy into humanities because 'girls don't do that sort of thing' you're harming everyone.
That's what diversity is about - not excluding people based on race, gender or sex. And that surely is not controversial?
I agree entirely, and if the workforce does not reflect the local demographic, either way, well there's some evidence of discrimination right there (and I am against 'quotas' and 'affermative action' and so on).
But the question was about the 'assumption' that diversity is a good thing. I think it clearly is a good thing because you don't want to exclude part of your demographic through any means, not just through biases in the selection panel of a specific job.
I think it begins early on, when young girls see 'themselves' on TV playing with dolls, and 'their brothers' playing with Lego. It gets confirmed all through their formative years until they make their choices at university. Fewer women taking tech because tech has very few women...
They are 'excluded' by our societies, and I really don't know if it can be solved. One thing that interestes me is that my wife is and engineer and I am a scientist, I am a stay-at-home Dad. Yet my son has been drawn to science growing up and my daughter not. It was an absolute surprise to me, and made me question my own bias that environment was eveything and innate preference irrelevant.
So perhaps where we are is inevitable, and if we start again with 50/50 male/female everywhere, within a hundred years we would have the same gender split in industry that we have right now?
There are so many complex interactions I wonder whether there will ever be a solution. I think it's pretty self-evident that minorities of any type are less likely to join a homogeneous group. In the UK there has been an effort since introducing tuition fees to attract 'poor' applicants to 'rich' universities, and it's largely been a failure.
In the case of ethnic groups there isn't much choice - it's uni or no uni. And that needs to begin at an early age, and poverty must play a large part in how likely it is someone gets a good education, and poverty is more prevelant amongst non-white (or it is in my part of the world).
In the case of attracting female applicants, it's more about attracting them to tech rather than (say) humanities. This also starts at an early age, but I think here the split applies equally to male and female with respect to poverty.
As for us all being 'the same' I don't think there's any doubt that there is variation between sexes. However this variation seems to be less marked than the variation between individuals. I don't know enough to know whether there is variation between 'races', but if there is, I would expect it to be far less marked than between sexes.
I guess the real interesting question is that if you could erase history, and start from 50/50 male/female in every subject area, whether there would be a gradual drift, over generations, to the position we are in now?
If you exclude most women you reduce the population from which you recruit by around 50%.
If you exclude most 'non-whites' you reduce that population still further.
I just don't understand why people here are so hostile to this simple idea?
(Yes, of course there are far fewer women with the training and interest to compete in the tech jobs market, but that's the whole point! Fix that, and the rest follows...)
We 'assume' that innate interpersonal differences within groups, so that the outliers may be predominantly men at one end and women at the other, or 'white' one end and 'black' the other. But the majority of the distribution is not a homogenous group.
We 'assume' that in most parts of 'the West' the population is almost 50/50 male/female.
So first off we can see that excluding females (choice of toys in infancy, inadvertent influences in childhood, unfriendly environment in tech classes at college, lack of role models in industry, sexism on tech forums, harrassment at work, blatant discrimination) will reduce the pool of candidates by about 50%.
Then we 'assume' that there are plenty of areas where the population is around 80/20 white/minority ethnic and exclude those with a minority ethnic background in the same way. So now the pool of candidates is 40%.
Of course you can argue that if all negative bias is removed, women will never like tech so much, or ethnic minorities will never understand maths as well. That's a totally different argument (and one that's increasingly difficult to make, I think, and it was never an easy one to make to begin with).
But that is where my 40% figure was pulled from, out of thin air, and I'm surpised it has turned out to be controversial!
I found it a very interesting and quite moving post.
I'm a white male from a relatively privilaged background, yet I have felt like an outsider many times over the last thirty years of my career. Yet if I choose to I can put on a cheap suit and smile and most people's first impression of me will be 'he's one of us'.
When people start to get to know you they pick up, of course, on the things you do and say that are not quite what they expect, and some will dislike that, and some of those people will turn to harrassment and bullying.
Now, I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to begin at the point where one or two people have taken to bullying, and the rest are reticent about chatting and socialising. It certainly can't be easy (well it could be, I suppose, if you're a sociopath and simply don't care what others think of you).
If you spend long enough somewhere, and you are basically a good person, then of course you will end up with friends who like you for who you are. But getting to that point takes time, causes stress for many, even when you feel welcome and people are supportive. Getting to that point when you already feel you don't belong must take tremendous strenght of character, and I know there's no way I could have gotten through what she has.
Isn't it because without diversity (ie without female and/or ethnic minority) you inevitably recruit from less than 50% (and possibly less than 40%) of the potential pool of talent?
It's rather like asking why it might be bad for innovation if we were only able to offer technology related jobs to those whose surnames begin with the letters A to M...
My wife is an engineer and I trained as a cognitive scientist. When my daughter was born we both fully expected her to have no interest in 'girly' things, especially as the house was already full of interesting 'boy' stuff from her brother. My wife has no make-up, a couple of dresses for formal occasions, no shoes with heels... hopefully you get the picture.
At every step she has chosen the stereotypical girl toys, the colours pink and purple, fairy stuff, pretty dresses and so on. She nagged us for make-up for dressing up, and when we said no she improvised with felt-tip pens. She dresses her dolls and puts them to bed each night, reads to her cuddly toys and hangs up her dancing dresses in order of size, colour or favoritesest.
I'm rather glad it turned out that way because she is popular at school and I know she won't suffer some of the cruelty my wife did as a child growing up slightly different to the other girls in her class.
But nevertheless it continues to amaze me that she fits with her peer group for toys, interests and preferences and it seems to have made no difference whatsoever that she is surrounded by science and 'boy stuff' at home.
And she did not play with lego at all, despite having access to large amounts of duplo, technical lego and a range of figures until I bought her the pink fairy castle set.
It bothers me too about branding things gender specific and all the pink and purple and stars and rainbows. It's a self-serving cycle and I don't see a way out short of legislation. It's harmless enough to begin with, but the danger is that no boy would be seen with a 'girls toy' or 'girls book' and that a lot of girls think 'boys stuff' is boring, or worse convince themselves they don't like it just because they think it's not for them...
Those who are against vaccination believe there is a connection. I think it could be easier to convince them that vaccination is the lesser of two evils than that there is, in fact, no connection.
A slogan that says something along the lines of 'Death from measles or autism, which is best for your child?' might be more successful with these people than 'the evidence does not support a link between vaccination and autism'
That's a good question. In the UK it used to be the case that the main funding councils (known collectively as RCUK) would fund any original research based on its contribution to the field. Under the 'Pathways to Impact' criteria all RCUK and most of the other councils require a submission with all applications stating to whom the research might be useful and how they will benefit. In theory there does not need to be an economic benefit provided there is some societal benefit (for example digitising and annotating an original manuscript for distribution via the web). However with science and engineering, commercialisation seems to rate very highly in deciding who gets funded and who doesn't.
There are a few funding councils not part of RCUK that currently do not seem to require impact plans. One is the British Academy, which will fund researchers at any higher or further education establishment in the UK in the same way that they all used to. The trend though does seem to be away from esoteric research and towards more 'results oriented' projects, with data management plans, project management, risk assessment, stakeholder analysis and so on becoming de rigueur even with charity-funded calls.
I don't know about other countries though, it could be that they are looking at us with bafflement wondering how on earth we think we can predict the unexpected outcomes we want before they've happened...
I don't doubt that those who are granted funding at UK universities, having satisfied the 'impact' criteria, will often invent or discover things equally useful but totally unexpected.
What troubles me is that by making every research project comply with the impact criteria, other avenues of inquiry are cut off. At the moment, a proposal to find out (for the sake of argument - I've no idea if it's a good question) why dandelions are yellow would not get funded, but a proposal to boost the yield of rape seed might.
To me it's along the lines of saying that researchers from certain geographical locations, or birthplaces, or with project names beginning with P, will not get funded. It's an arbitrary and misguided hurdle that threatens to kill projects that might otherwise deliver top quality research. No obvious application at the time funding is granted, but subsequently leading to benefits for many.
I mean, there's already lots and lots of commercially focused research, it's not like we're short of people trying to make money...
The funding councils that back research at UK universities now require an 'impact' plan; evidence that what is being funded will have a 'positive' impact in terms of society and commercial interest. This was brought in by the previous government, and backed by the current one. At the time most researchers were set against it, pointing out that so many of the inventions and discoveries that have been so beneficial to us all came not from a will to research a specific issue, but from something else, and hence little more than an accident.
I thinks it's troubling that the idea of research for its own sake seems to be dying. In effect we're limiting the overall breadth of investigation, and perhaps that will result in fewer 'useful' discoveries after all.
She was generally a pleasant person but distinctly odd. Her father and brother were ASD (her mother told our administrator once when she called about some missing coursework). She was very bright - once spotted an arithmetic error in a 12-page handout within about 10 seconds of getting it, but term marks were always poor, just the bare minimum of effort to get through.
Overall there was nothing very specific that you could call a 'symptom', just inappropriate socially. She would frequently interrupt me in class and wouldn't 'get the message' that the others were irritated. Once another student said 'we hear a lot about you, who are you?' and she replied 'you hear a lot from me, not about me'. Another time she got an Excel handout that began 'double click the icon on the desktop' - she looked, literally, on the desk in front of her, even though we had been using the terminology for weeks in class - it was a different context and the knowledge didn't transfer.
Interestingly I read her 'disabilities review form' and she wrote candidly about what it was like for her. She said that she wished the tutors would 'discipline her for interrupting in class' and that she wished everyone wore name badges. She also said that the reason she chose our university is that we asked the right questions about her condition, and that she turned down places at each institution that referred to wheelchairs (of course most use a single generic form).
So, yes, it was her condition that led to this sort of behavior, but whether it was 'classic' asperger's I couldn't say.
I don't know what this means legally exactly but in UK law there is the defense of 'diminished responsibility'. For example, someone who would normally be convicted of murder may instead be convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility if they were suffering from an abnormality of mind.
However what you seem to be suggesting is that if someone with a previously diagnosed condition would like it to be taken into account, then they shouldn't if sufferers of that condition usually try to get on with their lives? If so I think that's a difficult point to argue. Those with schizophrenia try to live normal lives and take responsibility for their actions but surely no one would claim that a sufferer who commits a crime whilst experiencing delusions was responsible.
It's a matter of degree. I once had someone with asperger's in one of my classes and it was very difficult indeed. She once walked into my colleague's office, ignoring him completely, and began browsing his bookshelf! Now, if she had walked out with one of those books, would she have been responsible for theft? Legally? Of course. Compassionately? I would make allowances based on her condition...
It's a 'voluntary' scheme whereby the biggest six ISPs implement a block list maintained by an organisiation called the 'Internet Watch Foundation'. They claim that only child pornography sites are blocked, but of course there's no way to know what is on the list.
Recently the first efforts to expand block lists to include 'other illegal' content have been made, and to set up a list for copyright-related restricted sites.
It seems governments have realised that legislative oversight is a bit of a nuisance, and it's just easier to coerce and/or bribe big business to get what you want.
Would you consider posting a link to your paper? Or perhaps just the bibliography? It would be nice to see some authoritative sources in support of your view.
Saccadic movements have been understood for a very long time, and it has pretty much always been assumed that part of their 'function' was to prevent the Ganzfeld effect and to facilitate in the construction of a representation in the mind of a wider field of view. It has also been known for a long time that the superior colliculus and brain stem are involved in those movements.
This work has begun to identify highly specialised structures in the superior colliculus that seem to control the saccades, and that *has* furthered our understanding of this aspect of perception.
I'd be surprised if the researchers themselves believe that most people thought saccades were 'mere 'motor noise''. I think when Krauzlis says 'scientists have debated the function, if any, of these fixational eye movements' he's being a good scientist and making a statement that does not have to be qualified to be true.
I think the sooner an 'important' state does this sort of thing the better.
The current situation is a chaotic cat and mouse game that's gradually playing into the hands of the publishing industry.
If a big state blocks and censors parts of the internet, they can probably make it stick. The result might be an incentive for people to start encrypting data by default, and I kind of think that would be a good thing for the whole world.
Here in the UK the government is up to all sorts of tricks - the RIP Act gives them the power to monitor all internet traffic and store it for up to 2 years. Even your local council can request to see which web sites you've been visiting - no need to involve the police or the courts, just a 'senior official'.
I think there's just not been a good enough reason so far to encrypt more than the bear minimum. This sort of thing might shove things in the right direction...
It says "UNLIMITED* internet access with no run-on rates"
Further down there's a link "* Subject to fair use"
Following the link lists 15 different tariffs with their various terms and conditions. It's not immediately obvious which applies to the one you were just looking at.
Which site were you looking at? Was it the UK one?
I can put up with all the 'only £1.99 a day!' and 'from just £49.99' style marketing speak. It's jarring, but at least it's not dishonest.
However I am absolutely sick of hearing 'Unlimited usage! (fair use policy applies equal to 3Gb of data in any 28 day period subject to change)
I'm happy to pay for a 3Gb per month limit. I'd be delighted with an unlimited usage package. But I am fed up with providers advertising 'unlimited', when it is is clearly, unequivocally, NOT unlimited!
Traditionally in the UK the matter has been dealt with by precedent.
It has always been against the law to make copies of copyrighted works. It is illegal to take your vinyl lp and record it to a cassette tape to play in your car.
However, in the UK we have traditionally had protection from the 'fair use defence' This means, simply, that if a copyright owner tried to bring a case for this type of infringement, the court would not hear it; the court would say 'we expect the defence to claim that use of this copyrighted work in this way is fair, and we would agree with them, so there's no point hearing the case'. Consequently copyright owners don't bother unless they are damn sure they can show actual damages.
For the most part this is a Good Thing, because UK courts are usually pretty good at seeing the difference between copies for personal use, and exploiting someone else's hard work for profit and/or causing them damage.
Unfortunately we're heading down the road of prescribing what is and isn't allowed with legislation, which will probably make it more difficult for the courts to make a reasonable judgement.
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I agree. I think though there is something of a business case in that, once you've got a good core team (if the team is large enough) there's something to be gained by broadening the experiences of new team members.
But that's not really my point. It's more about 'why is diversity a good thing?' And it's a good thing becuase you don't want to exclude good people for arbitrary reasons.
Now if you start from today, there's only so much you can do, because a great many potentially very good people have already been excluded. They were excluded by parents, teachers, the media and every other influence that helps to convince girls (and perhaps ethnic minorities, I'm not sure) that tech is not for them. I don't think it's done deliberately, it's just where we are.
I think I'm beginning to see that the reason what I wrote was seen as trolling might be because it was assumed I was being politically correct?
In fact it's a business case issue for me. You want the best people for your industry, you want the largest pool of talent from which to recruit. To get the largest pool of talant you want schools pushing those with an aptitude for engineering towards the topics at which they excel (assuming that's what the individual wants).
If you're (inadvertantly) steering a future mathematics prodigy into humanities because 'girls don't do that sort of thing' you're harming everyone.
That's what diversity is about - not excluding people based on race, gender or sex. And that surely is not controversial?
I agree entirely, and if the workforce does not reflect the local demographic, either way, well there's some evidence of discrimination right there (and I am against 'quotas' and 'affermative action' and so on).
But the question was about the 'assumption' that diversity is a good thing. I think it clearly is a good thing because you don't want to exclude part of your demographic through any means, not just through biases in the selection panel of a specific job.
I think it begins early on, when young girls see 'themselves' on TV playing with dolls, and 'their brothers' playing with Lego. It gets confirmed all through their formative years until they make their choices at university. Fewer women taking tech because tech has very few women...
They are 'excluded' by our societies, and I really don't know if it can be solved. One thing that interestes me is that my wife is and engineer and I am a scientist, I am a stay-at-home Dad. Yet my son has been drawn to science growing up and my daughter not. It was an absolute surprise to me, and made me question my own bias that environment was eveything and innate preference irrelevant.
So perhaps where we are is inevitable, and if we start again with 50/50 male/female everywhere, within a hundred years we would have the same gender split in industry that we have right now?
There are so many complex interactions I wonder whether there will ever be a solution. I think it's pretty self-evident that minorities of any type are less likely to join a homogeneous group. In the UK there has been an effort since introducing tuition fees to attract 'poor' applicants to 'rich' universities, and it's largely been a failure.
In the case of ethnic groups there isn't much choice - it's uni or no uni. And that needs to begin at an early age, and poverty must play a large part in how likely it is someone gets a good education, and poverty is more prevelant amongst non-white (or it is in my part of the world).
In the case of attracting female applicants, it's more about attracting them to tech rather than (say) humanities. This also starts at an early age, but I think here the split applies equally to male and female with respect to poverty.
As for us all being 'the same' I don't think there's any doubt that there is variation between sexes. However this variation seems to be less marked than the variation between individuals. I don't know enough to know whether there is variation between 'races', but if there is, I would expect it to be far less marked than between sexes.
I guess the real interesting question is that if you could erase history, and start from 50/50 male/female in every subject area, whether there would be a gradual drift, over generations, to the position we are in now?
Eh?
If you exclude most women you reduce the population from which you recruit by around 50%.
If you exclude most 'non-whites' you reduce that population still further.
I just don't understand why people here are so hostile to this simple idea?
(Yes, of course there are far fewer women with the training and interest to compete in the tech jobs market, but that's the whole point! Fix that, and the rest follows...)
The argument runs like this:
We 'assume' that innate interpersonal differences within groups, so that the outliers may be predominantly men at one end and women at the other, or 'white' one end and 'black' the other. But the majority of the distribution is not a homogenous group.
We 'assume' that in most parts of 'the West' the population is almost 50/50 male/female.
So first off we can see that excluding females (choice of toys in infancy, inadvertent influences in childhood, unfriendly environment in tech classes at college, lack of role models in industry, sexism on tech forums, harrassment at work, blatant discrimination) will reduce the pool of candidates by about 50%.
Then we 'assume' that there are plenty of areas where the population is around 80/20 white/minority ethnic and exclude those with a minority ethnic background in the same way. So now the pool of candidates is 40%.
Of course you can argue that if all negative bias is removed, women will never like tech so much, or ethnic minorities will never understand maths as well. That's a totally different argument (and one that's increasingly difficult to make, I think, and it was never an easy one to make to begin with).
But that is where my 40% figure was pulled from, out of thin air, and I'm surpised it has turned out to be controversial!
I found it a very interesting and quite moving post.
I'm a white male from a relatively privilaged background, yet I have felt like an outsider many times over the last thirty years of my career. Yet if I choose to I can put on a cheap suit and smile and most people's first impression of me will be 'he's one of us'.
When people start to get to know you they pick up, of course, on the things you do and say that are not quite what they expect, and some will dislike that, and some of those people will turn to harrassment and bullying.
Now, I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to begin at the point where one or two people have taken to bullying, and the rest are reticent about chatting and socialising. It certainly can't be easy (well it could be, I suppose, if you're a sociopath and simply don't care what others think of you).
If you spend long enough somewhere, and you are basically a good person, then of course you will end up with friends who like you for who you are. But getting to that point takes time, causes stress for many, even when you feel welcome and people are supportive. Getting to that point when you already feel you don't belong must take tremendous strenght of character, and I know there's no way I could have gotten through what she has.
Isn't it because without diversity (ie without female and/or ethnic minority) you inevitably recruit from less than 50% (and possibly less than 40%) of the potential pool of talent?
It's rather like asking why it might be bad for innovation if we were only able to offer technology related jobs to those whose surnames begin with the letters A to M...
My wife is an engineer and I trained as a cognitive scientist. When my daughter was born we both fully expected her to have no interest in 'girly' things, especially as the house was already full of interesting 'boy' stuff from her brother. My wife has no make-up, a couple of dresses for formal occasions, no shoes with heels... hopefully you get the picture.
At every step she has chosen the stereotypical girl toys, the colours pink and purple, fairy stuff, pretty dresses and so on. She nagged us for make-up for dressing up, and when we said no she improvised with felt-tip pens. She dresses her dolls and puts them to bed each night, reads to her cuddly toys and hangs up her dancing dresses in order of size, colour or favoritesest.
I'm rather glad it turned out that way because she is popular at school and I know she won't suffer some of the cruelty my wife did as a child growing up slightly different to the other girls in her class.
But nevertheless it continues to amaze me that she fits with her peer group for toys, interests and preferences and it seems to have made no difference whatsoever that she is surrounded by science and 'boy stuff' at home.
And she did not play with lego at all, despite having access to large amounts of duplo, technical lego and a range of figures until I bought her the pink fairy castle set.
It bothers me too about branding things gender specific and all the pink and purple and stars and rainbows. It's a self-serving cycle and I don't see a way out short of legislation. It's harmless enough to begin with, but the danger is that no boy would be seen with a 'girls toy' or 'girls book' and that a lot of girls think 'boys stuff' is boring, or worse convince themselves they don't like it just because they think it's not for them...
Those who are against vaccination believe there is a connection. I think it could be easier to convince them that vaccination is the lesser of two evils than that there is, in fact, no connection.
A slogan that says something along the lines of 'Death from measles or autism, which is best for your child?' might be more successful with these people than 'the evidence does not support a link between vaccination and autism'
Unfortunately we all rely on the effect of herd immunity. A bunch of people going without the vaccine puts everyone else at risk too.
Actually I think you might be onto something;
"Remember people, measles kills, autism doesn't! Get the jab now!"
That's a good question. In the UK it used to be the case that the main funding councils (known collectively as RCUK) would fund any original research based on its contribution to the field. Under the 'Pathways to Impact' criteria all RCUK and most of the other councils require a submission with all applications stating to whom the research might be useful and how they will benefit. In theory there does not need to be an economic benefit provided there is some societal benefit (for example digitising and annotating an original manuscript for distribution via the web). However with science and engineering, commercialisation seems to rate very highly in deciding who gets funded and who doesn't.
There are a few funding councils not part of RCUK that currently do not seem to require impact plans. One is the British Academy, which will fund researchers at any higher or further education establishment in the UK in the same way that they all used to. The trend though does seem to be away from esoteric research and towards more 'results oriented' projects, with data management plans, project management, risk assessment, stakeholder analysis and so on becoming de rigueur even with charity-funded calls.
I don't know about other countries though, it could be that they are looking at us with bafflement wondering how on earth we think we can predict the unexpected outcomes we want before they've happened...
I don't doubt that those who are granted funding at UK universities, having satisfied the 'impact' criteria, will often invent or discover things equally useful but totally unexpected.
What troubles me is that by making every research project comply with the impact criteria, other avenues of inquiry are cut off. At the moment, a proposal to find out (for the sake of argument - I've no idea if it's a good question) why dandelions are yellow would not get funded, but a proposal to boost the yield of rape seed might.
To me it's along the lines of saying that researchers from certain geographical locations, or birthplaces, or with project names beginning with P, will not get funded. It's an arbitrary and misguided hurdle that threatens to kill projects that might otherwise deliver top quality research. No obvious application at the time funding is granted, but subsequently leading to benefits for many.
I mean, there's already lots and lots of commercially focused research, it's not like we're short of people trying to make money...
The funding councils that back research at UK universities now require an 'impact' plan; evidence that what is being funded will have a 'positive' impact in terms of society and commercial interest. This was brought in by the previous government, and backed by the current one. At the time most researchers were set against it, pointing out that so many of the inventions and discoveries that have been so beneficial to us all came not from a will to research a specific issue, but from something else, and hence little more than an accident.
I thinks it's troubling that the idea of research for its own sake seems to be dying. In effect we're limiting the overall breadth of investigation, and perhaps that will result in fewer 'useful' discoveries after all.
She was generally a pleasant person but distinctly odd. Her father and brother were ASD (her mother told our administrator once when she called about some missing coursework). She was very bright - once spotted an arithmetic error in a 12-page handout within about 10 seconds of getting it, but term marks were always poor, just the bare minimum of effort to get through.
Overall there was nothing very specific that you could call a 'symptom', just inappropriate socially. She would frequently interrupt me in class and wouldn't 'get the message' that the others were irritated. Once another student said 'we hear a lot about you, who are you?' and she replied 'you hear a lot from me, not about me'. Another time she got an Excel handout that began 'double click the icon on the desktop' - she looked, literally, on the desk in front of her, even though we had been using the terminology for weeks in class - it was a different context and the knowledge didn't transfer.
Interestingly I read her 'disabilities review form' and she wrote candidly about what it was like for her. She said that she wished the tutors would 'discipline her for interrupting in class' and that she wished everyone wore name badges. She also said that the reason she chose our university is that we asked the right questions about her condition, and that she turned down places at each institution that referred to wheelchairs (of course most use a single generic form).
So, yes, it was her condition that led to this sort of behavior, but whether it was 'classic' asperger's I couldn't say.
I don't know what this means legally exactly but in UK law there is the defense of 'diminished responsibility'. For example, someone who would normally be convicted of murder may instead be convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility if they were suffering from an abnormality of mind.
However what you seem to be suggesting is that if someone with a previously diagnosed condition would like it to be taken into account, then they shouldn't if sufferers of that condition usually try to get on with their lives? If so I think that's a difficult point to argue. Those with schizophrenia try to live normal lives and take responsibility for their actions but surely no one would claim that a sufferer who commits a crime whilst experiencing delusions was responsible.
It's a matter of degree. I once had someone with asperger's in one of my classes and it was very difficult indeed. She once walked into my colleague's office, ignoring him completely, and began browsing his bookshelf! Now, if she had walked out with one of those books, would she have been responsible for theft? Legally? Of course. Compassionately? I would make allowances based on her condition...
It's a 'voluntary' scheme whereby the biggest six ISPs implement a block list maintained by an organisiation called the 'Internet Watch Foundation'. They claim that only child pornography sites are blocked, but of course there's no way to know what is on the list.
Recently the first efforts to expand block lists to include 'other illegal' content have been made, and to set up a list for copyright-related restricted sites.
It seems governments have realised that legislative oversight is a bit of a nuisance, and it's just easier to coerce and/or bribe big business to get what you want.
Would you consider posting a link to your paper? Or perhaps just the bibliography? It would be nice to see some authoritative sources in support of your view.
Saccadic movements have been understood for a very long time, and it has pretty much always been assumed that part of their 'function' was to prevent the Ganzfeld effect and to facilitate in the construction of a representation in the mind of a wider field of view. It has also been known for a long time that the superior colliculus and brain stem are involved in those movements.
This work has begun to identify highly specialised structures in the superior colliculus that seem to control the saccades, and that *has* furthered our understanding of this aspect of perception.
I'd be surprised if the researchers themselves believe that most people thought saccades were 'mere 'motor noise''. I think when Krauzlis says 'scientists have debated the function, if any, of these fixational eye movements' he's being a good scientist and making a statement that does not have to be qualified to be true.
I think the sooner an 'important' state does this sort of thing the better.
The current situation is a chaotic cat and mouse game that's gradually playing into the hands of the publishing industry.
If a big state blocks and censors parts of the internet, they can probably make it stick. The result might be an incentive for people to start encrypting data by default, and I kind of think that would be a good thing for the whole world.
Here in the UK the government is up to all sorts of tricks - the RIP Act gives them the power to monitor all internet traffic and store it for up to 2 years. Even your local council can request to see which web sites you've been visiting - no need to involve the police or the courts, just a 'senior official'.
I think there's just not been a good enough reason so far to encrypt more than the bear minimum. This sort of thing might shove things in the right direction...
Ah I think I see - if you go through the special offers route you seem to see the 'Unlimited' word bandied around
If you go through the various option screens you see 'fair use policy applies'
When you get to the order page itself it says '3Gb fair use amount - "
So I guess T mobile deserve credit for at least making it a lot clearer at the order stage than most.
But I still think 'Unlimited!' needs to be removed from *all* advertising because it's just not true!
Before anyone claims that T mobile say no such thing;
September Offers
It says "UNLIMITED* internet access with no run-on rates"
Further down there's a link "* Subject to fair use"
Following the link lists 15 different tariffs with their various terms and conditions. There's quite a lot of small print there...
I was looking at this one;
September Offers
It says "UNLIMITED* internet access with no run-on rates"
Further down there's a link "* Subject to fair use"
Following the link lists 15 different tariffs with their various terms and conditions. It's not immediately obvious which applies to the one you were just looking at.
Which site were you looking at? Was it the UK one?
I can put up with all the 'only £1.99 a day!' and 'from just £49.99' style marketing speak. It's jarring, but at least it's not dishonest.
However I am absolutely sick of hearing 'Unlimited usage! (fair use policy applies equal to 3Gb of data in any 28 day period subject to change)
I'm happy to pay for a 3Gb per month limit. I'd be delighted with an unlimited usage package. But I am fed up with providers advertising 'unlimited', when it is is clearly, unequivocally, NOT unlimited!
I'd urge any UK readers that agree to generate a gentle trickle of complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency and the Office of Communications.
Traditionally in the UK the matter has been dealt with by precedent.
It has always been against the law to make copies of copyrighted works. It is illegal to take your vinyl lp and record it to a cassette tape to play in your car.
However, in the UK we have traditionally had protection from the 'fair use defence' This means, simply, that if a copyright owner tried to bring a case for this type of infringement, the court would not hear it; the court would say 'we expect the defence to claim that use of this copyrighted work in this way is fair, and we would agree with them, so there's no point hearing the case'. Consequently copyright owners don't bother unless they are damn sure they can show actual damages.
For the most part this is a Good Thing, because UK courts are usually pretty good at seeing the difference between copies for personal use, and exploiting someone else's hard work for profit and/or causing them damage.
Unfortunately we're heading down the road of prescribing what is and isn't allowed with legislation, which will probably make it more difficult for the courts to make a reasonable judgement.