At my boy-toy's 30th high-school reunion, he says that women who would go out of their way - as in detour across the grassy commons to avoid him in high school - were coming up to him and claiming that they remember what a great guy he was in high school.
His theory is that they now have daughters in high school, and wish their daughters were interested in males like him, and not like the ones they themselves had dated.
Those traits would be biologically disadvantageous if too many females had them: the children of an exploiter/exploiter mating would not be as well cared for as the children of an exploiter/non-exploiter mating.
If momma is a self-centered bitch, the children will be neglected.
It's partly hard wired - which means it must have had some sort of survival value for the group.
All clans and tribes need cannon fodder... the young men who will go in after the cave bear, or attack the other tribe. So young women find a settled mature tribesman who will be a good provider, AND cuckolds him with one of the wild boys to produce an offspring or two to refill the cannon fodder supply.
One aspect of the tests might be hiding improvement:
I could pass any reading achievement test with a score in the 99.99th percentile by the time I was in 3rd grade. My scores didn't change from then until I was out of high school because the tests were too simple. My brother's experience wiht math tests was similar. Unless these tests are open-ended, those students who are at the very top have no way to show any improvement because they were already getting all the answers right.
It is hard to test the limits of ability - the only time I have had that sort of a test (in Spanish class), it took several hours and the questions just kept getting harder. Our instructions were to keep answering until we had done a couple of pages where we had no clue what the text meant.
"If people want a crapware free machine, why not buy a Mac?
Its more expensive than the usual PC, but Macs don't need to be formatted and reinstalled every six months like Windows, BSD, or Linux."
WHAT!!!! Please stop spreading this urban legend!
My Ubuntu installation has been running for a year with no reformatting, just the usual upgrades. Before that, my Windows2000 computer had been running a few years with only one reinstall due to PEBKAC.
The roomie's Gentoo was installed about 5 years ago - the box has had new parts, upgrades, and even a new mobo, but no reformatting and reinstalling. The house file server's Gentoo was installed long enough ago that we don't remember. It's had disks fail, but copying the image to a fresh drive is not "reformat and reinstall".
Duties on imports may have something to do with the 20%. Right as Intel started putting manuals online, I was working on that project, and Brazil was high on the list of downloaders. We tracked them to a technical university, did some emailing, and found that the duty on a printed manual nearly tripled the cost of the manual (in USD).
The only person any business will listen to is the executor - in his case, probably a parent. Have the executor make contact and be able to provide proof of death.
The problem will be proving that John Doe is the same as rarbazzle@gmail.com to get the contents.
Being that kaolin clay binds with water and causes clotting, does this mean that this stuff will work on people who have clotting issues, such as those on blood thinning medications or hemophiliacs?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: People with clotting issues are lacking in some of the components tha tmake clots, such as the platelets, or the proteins that turn into the fibrous strands, or the components that control the clotting reaction. All the kaolin does is accelerate normal clotting - there are other small particles that will work, such as the spores from certain mushrooms.
The repairs and reinforcements are what helped the Olympic last as long as she did. There were two sets of repairs ot the Olympic: those done after the collision with the Hawke (which sucked resources from the Titanic) to repair the damage, and those done after the Titanic sank, which included increasing the bulkhead height.
During 1912-13 the Olympic returned to Harland & Wolff for six months safety rebuilding. The double bottom was extended up the sides to the waterline, full height bulkheads were fitted, as were additional lifeboats.
Serial connection to connect the register to your PC or bar code scanner. Software includes a filter that downloads your end of day report totals directly to your QuickBooks Pro or Peachtree accounting programs.
Would you like to risk losing your child to the proven killer: measles? And risk the brain damage that measles encephalitis leaves behind in the survivors? With measles, you can expect about one death per 1000 cases from encephalitis, and a couple of brain-damaged survivors for each 1000 cases. I have medical books from as far back as 1500 through early 1800s and they all say the same thing. Measles is deadly.
WHO says: "The most serious complications include blindness, encephalitis (a dangerous infection of the brain causing inflammation), severe diarrhoea (possibly leading to dehydration), ear infections and severe respiratory infections such as pneumonia, which is the most common cause of death associated with measles. Encephalitis is estimated to occur in one out of 1000 cases, while otitis media (middle ear infection) is reported in 5-15% of cases and pneumonia in 5-10% of cases. The case fatality rate in developing countries is generally in the range of 1 to 5%, but may be as high as 25% in populations with high levels of malnutrition and poor access to health care."
Multiple studies in multiple countries have all shown the same thing: there is no evidence that vaccines (or thimerosol) or whatevr have anything to do with autism.
If it is cheating - why are not the other 146 members of the site also being expelled?
And according to TFA, they were not answer-swapping, they were doing what a meatspace study group has always done... explain bits of the problems that others were having problems with. This was homework to help the students understand the material, NOT A TAKE-HOME EXAM!
One way to handle this is to take it to the extreme:
Students should flood the system with complaints about cheating for EVERY tutorial, meatspace study group, or online post about homework or other academic activity they can find. Get the student body as close to 100% expulsion-qualified as you can get.
When the various departments are spending their time in hearings, all of which will be appealed to the unbiversity senate (more hearings) and recorded in the papers... they will have to recruit a whole new student body. Or back down. If they back down for one, there is the precedent and they are all back in, or the uni gets sued big-time for discrimination.
It's like the "let's all get arrested" civil rights ploy. Jam the process.
Oh yeah! Fight back tooth and nail if anyone wants to combine documenting the current process with modifying the processes. It gets all squishy because no one can remember if they are talking about the "old way", the "proposed new way", or the "approved new way".
I fend them off by saying, "It will be much easier/cheaper/faster to change the processes if we wait until we know what they are."
There is typically a flurry of changes right after the first good process document is released, because those with authority to change things look at it and say, "Why the heck are we doing THAT!" Warn them, and have a good change handling process in place or you end up with the same hanbd annotated confusing mess you just fixed.
As a technical writer, my goal is to first document a normal process in sufficient detail so that anyone (with the appropriate background) can pick up the documents, follow the steps and produce an acceptable product. It doesn't matter what the product is: a legal brief, a cookie, a microprocessor, a correctly checked-in change to code.... the normal process steps should be followable by a new hire.
And everyone should be doing things the same way, so if someone drops dead in the break room or quits in a snit, the replacement doesn't waste a lot of time figuring out what to do.
Where the shamans come in is when the process is no longer routine. Their expertise should be shifted to troubleshooting processes that aren't working, which includes writing the troubleshooting documents so that non-shamans can at least know what to do when things go all pear-shaped. They can also get involved in developing and evaluating new processes and changes to existing processes. You know, the fun stuff!
In fact it is essential that the processes change over time. Putting in place must-be-followed processes is counter-productive if there is not also a process to vary those processes. You must expect that the processes put in place today will be found deficient in a few weeks or months.
Put another way, one of the most important processes is the "process review" process.
He's right! Failing to have an easy way to submit error corrections and updates, and failure to assign a regularly scheduled task to update the documents is the way most organizations get into the mess. When no one knows how to ask for a change, they scribble the changes in the margins. When processes don't get updated as the work flow changes, people develop their own traditions and the manuals gather dust.
Typically, the first few months will have changes coming rapidly as people discover that what they documented was not the best way to do things. Then it settles down into typo-finding and slow modification for a while. Then some policy changes and there will be another flurry of changes ot implement the new policy.
My recommendation is to let typos and non-confusing errors accumulate until there is a regularly scheduled update time OR a major unscheduled change. Then everything gets swept up in the change and you start fresh.
Printed documents should have a "who to contact for error corrections and changes ot the process" page.
Until you know what the real work process is, you can't publish anything meaningful (See my comment on FIRST). Then you can publish them in a useful way.
The critical concept is that the process documents must be easy to refer to while the staff are performing the process, which means available at the point they are needed. There is no sense having the perfect document in a departmental wiki if the persons who need the documents don't have a computer on their desk. There is no sense having a 10-lb binder locked in the manager's office. Pick a color, preferable a gaudy one, and have a designated location for the "purple binder" with instructions for each step of the process.
Somewhere there must be a "master document" where all change requests are tracked and implemented. The easiest way to handle this for printed documents is with a copy of the document, and sticky notes. As requests for minor changes come in, mark up the page and flag it with a sticky note. When the scheduled review/republish time comes around, or when a major unscheduled change lands on your desk, it's easy to go through the flagged pages, making each correction and marking it off. Then you file that copy, and start again with a fresh copy of the updated manual.
For a multi-stage process, at the point of use there must be DATED copies of the relevant sections of the master document. (paper or electronic, I don't care) These should cover what happens to the product (which may be a client, or a manufactured product) from the time it reaches that station until it is handed off to the next station.
Anyone involved in performing the process must know the process for changing the process... how do they report typos, errors in the steps, etc.
There must be a regular update schedule... even if the person who does the updates just looks at the change request queue, finds none, and reports "no changes requested".
If you have paper hard copies in the "purple binder", it's easy to print out the changed docs and insert the new pages.
Did they really need a process to document how to arrange a meeting that had steps like "book a meeting room" and "invite participants to the meeting" plus a diagram showing the meeting with participants as an input.
Yes, they did. How one books a meeting room varies from company to company. If it's written down, you don't waste time trying to find the tribal guru of meeting rooms to strengthen your meeting-fu.
OHHHH!!! ME!!! I KNOW THIS ONE!!!! Been there, done that, have the shurnken heads and tribal tattos to prove it! Also passed ISO9000 on the first try, with only minor criticism of the process docs I wrote.
These things become like folk medicine or a mystery cult, with multiple strands of "tradition" passed from Master to Student, with people adding their own ideas into them. You will need to reconcile the varying practices among the practicioners, which can lead to bruised egos and outright rebellion. After you have the real process identified and accepted, then you can decide how to deal with it.
Hire a temporary Technical Writer who had done this sort of thing before if you can. They can act like the outside anthropologist.
Let everyone know that they are going to clean up the documentation mess so that they can handle new hires, vacation replacements and temps without having to handhold them and spend days getting them up to speed (the real value of well-written process docs is as a training aid).
Department by department, identify the shamans: the person everyone goes to for training and problem solving. You can expect resistance from some shamans: their knowledge may be a source of power and job security to them. One carrot to dangle is the prospect of time freed to do different things instead of being stuck answering questions and training. A stick is the threat of being fired if it is discovered that thye are not handing over all they know - after all, they could be hit by a bus and you would be no worse off than if they are fired and take their tribal knowledge with them.
Have each of the shamans (or the tech writer, or a secretary) write down the process as they understand it - as they are doing whatever that department does, take notes. In a multi-shaman department, you will have several process documents.
If staff are following unofficial crib sheets and hand-written notes to themselves, collect these and make copies of them.
Someone - preferable the technical writer - takes the transcriptions and other documents and reconciles them. Wherever they are in agreement is a non-issue, provided that it works and doesn't violate regulations.
Anywhere two traditions differ must be reconciled. This may mean consulting the operating manual for a piece of equipment (maybe one tradition is using it wrong) and meeting with the shamans to decide which variant makes more sense, is faster, easier or what.
Write the final document and test it. Have someone follow the new process EXACTLY AS WRITTEN and see what happens. The definition of success is that they can follow the document and complete the process with a satisfactory product... a completed form, a properly filed case, etc.
PUBLISH... wherever it makes sense.
TIPS:
Follow the process from incoming "raw materials" through to the exit of "finished product"
While you are cleaning up the process, check the forms and related documents... they might be simplified, or they might be the cause of part of your problems.
The usual heirarchy is: Policies, Processes, Procedures. Write the docs as modules so you can change a procedure (say if you go from paper to computer filing) without rewriting the a 300-page mother-of-all documents. Policies point to processes, processes point to procedures.
Refer to operating instructions, do not incorporate operating instructions (I saw one process where EVERYTHING was in the process instrucitons, including how to change the toner on a cdretain brand of photocopier!)
Slashdot Mirror
Good idea! Let's get 'em while they are fresh!
I would like to make organ donation compulsory for these people. At least they can be of some use after they crash.
His theory is that they now have daughters in high school, and wish their daughters were interested in males like him, and not like the ones they themselves had dated.
If momma is a self-centered bitch, the children will be neglected.
All clans and tribes need cannon fodder ... the young men who will go in after the cave bear, or attack the other tribe. So young women find a settled mature tribesman who will be a good provider, AND cuckolds him with one of the wild boys to produce an offspring or two to refill the cannon fodder supply.
I could pass any reading achievement test with a score in the 99.99th percentile by the time I was in 3rd grade. My scores didn't change from then until I was out of high school because the tests were too simple. My brother's experience wiht math tests was similar. Unless these tests are open-ended, those students who are at the very top have no way to show any improvement because they were already getting all the answers right.
It is hard to test the limits of ability - the only time I have had that sort of a test (in Spanish class), it took several hours and the questions just kept getting harder. Our instructions were to keep answering until we had done a couple of pages where we had no clue what the text meant.
"If people want a crapware free machine, why not buy a Mac?
Its more expensive than the usual PC, but Macs don't need to be formatted and reinstalled every six months like Windows, BSD, or Linux."
WHAT!!!! Please stop spreading this urban legend!
My Ubuntu installation has been running for a year with no reformatting, just the usual upgrades. Before that, my Windows2000 computer had been running a few years with only one reinstall due to PEBKAC.
The roomie's Gentoo was installed about 5 years ago - the box has had new parts, upgrades, and even a new mobo, but no reformatting and reinstalling. The house file server's Gentoo was installed long enough ago that we don't remember. It's had disks fail, but copying the image to a fresh drive is not "reformat and reinstall".
Perhaps it has changed? The project I was talking about was 12-15 years ago.
Duties on imports may have something to do with the 20%. Right as Intel started putting manuals online, I was working on that project, and Brazil was high on the list of downloaders. We tracked them to a technical university, did some emailing, and found that the duty on a printed manual nearly tripled the cost of the manual (in USD).
The problem will be proving that John Doe is the same as rarbazzle@gmail.com to get the contents.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: People with clotting issues are lacking in some of the components tha tmake clots, such as the platelets, or the proteins that turn into the fibrous strands, or the components that control the clotting reaction. All the kaolin does is accelerate normal clotting - there are other small particles that will work, such as the spores from certain mushrooms.
The repairs and reinforcements are what helped the Olympic last as long as she did. There were two sets of repairs ot the Olympic: those done after the collision with the Hawke (which sucked resources from the Titanic) to repair the damage, and those done after the Titanic sank, which included increasing the bulkhead height.
During 1912-13 the Olympic returned to Harland & Wolff for six months safety rebuilding. The double bottom was extended up the sides to the waterline, full height bulkheads were fitted, as were additional lifeboats.
Serial connection to connect the register to your PC or bar code scanner. Software includes a filter that downloads your end of day report totals directly to your QuickBooks Pro or Peachtree accounting programs.
WHO says: "The most serious complications include blindness, encephalitis (a dangerous infection of the brain causing inflammation), severe diarrhoea (possibly leading to dehydration), ear infections and severe respiratory infections such as pneumonia, which is the most common cause of death associated with measles. Encephalitis is estimated to occur in one out of 1000 cases, while otitis media (middle ear infection) is reported in 5-15% of cases and pneumonia in 5-10% of cases. The case fatality rate in developing countries is generally in the range of 1 to 5%, but may be as high as 25% in populations with high levels of malnutrition and poor access to health care."
Multiple studies in multiple countries have all shown the same thing: there is no evidence that vaccines (or thimerosol) or whatevr have anything to do with autism.
And according to TFA, they were not answer-swapping, they were doing what a meatspace study group has always done ... explain bits of the problems that others were having problems with. This was homework to help the students understand the material, NOT A TAKE-HOME EXAM!
Students should flood the system with complaints about cheating for EVERY tutorial, meatspace study group, or online post about homework or other academic activity they can find. Get the student body as close to 100% expulsion-qualified as you can get.
When the various departments are spending their time in hearings, all of which will be appealed to the unbiversity senate (more hearings) and recorded in the papers ... they will have to recruit a whole new student body. Or back down. If they back down for one, there is the precedent and they are all back in, or the uni gets sued big-time for discrimination.
It's like the "let's all get arrested" civil rights ploy. Jam the process.
Imagine sending hundreds of helium-filled balloons, with a payload of memory sticks full of games, pron, and Linux source code!
Firefox, Ubuntu ... no problem opening it and getting mail.
If there were enhancements, I don't care. It's a mail system, not a video game.
Oh yeah! Fight back tooth and nail if anyone wants to combine documenting the current process with modifying the processes. It gets all squishy because no one can remember if they are talking about the "old way", the "proposed new way", or the "approved new way".
I fend them off by saying, "It will be much easier/cheaper/faster to change the processes if we wait until we know what they are."
There is typically a flurry of changes right after the first good process document is released, because those with authority to change things look at it and say, "Why the heck are we doing THAT!" Warn them, and have a good change handling process in place or you end up with the same hanbd annotated confusing mess you just fixed.
We are apparently thinking of different goals.
As a technical writer, my goal is to first document a normal process in sufficient detail so that anyone (with the appropriate background) can pick up the documents, follow the steps and produce an acceptable product. It doesn't matter what the product is: a legal brief, a cookie, a microprocessor, a correctly checked-in change to code .... the normal process steps should be followable by a new hire.
And everyone should be doing things the same way, so if someone drops dead in the break room or quits in a snit, the replacement doesn't waste a lot of time figuring out what to do.
Where the shamans come in is when the process is no longer routine. Their expertise should be shifted to troubleshooting processes that aren't working, which includes writing the troubleshooting documents so that non-shamans can at least know what to do when things go all pear-shaped. They can also get involved in developing and evaluating new processes and changes to existing processes. You know, the fun stuff!
In fact it is essential that the processes change over time. Putting in place must-be-followed processes is counter-productive if there is not also a process to vary those processes. You must expect that the processes put in place today will be found deficient in a few weeks or months.
Put another way, one of the most important processes is the "process review" process.
He's right! Failing to have an easy way to submit error corrections and updates, and failure to assign a regularly scheduled task to update the documents is the way most organizations get into the mess. When no one knows how to ask for a change, they scribble the changes in the margins. When processes don't get updated as the work flow changes, people develop their own traditions and the manuals gather dust.
Typically, the first few months will have changes coming rapidly as people discover that what they documented was not the best way to do things. Then it settles down into typo-finding and slow modification for a while. Then some policy changes and there will be another flurry of changes ot implement the new policy.
My recommendation is to let typos and non-confusing errors accumulate until there is a regularly scheduled update time OR a major unscheduled change. Then everything gets swept up in the change and you start fresh.
Printed documents should have a "who to contact for error corrections and changes ot the process" page.
Until you know what the real work process is, you can't publish anything meaningful (See my comment on FIRST). Then you can publish them in a useful way.
The critical concept is that the process documents must be easy to refer to while the staff are performing the process, which means available at the point they are needed. There is no sense having the perfect document in a departmental wiki if the persons who need the documents don't have a computer on their desk. There is no sense having a 10-lb binder locked in the manager's office. Pick a color, preferable a gaudy one, and have a designated location for the "purple binder" with instructions for each step of the process.
The easiest way to handle this for printed documents is with a copy of the document, and sticky notes. As requests for minor changes come in, mark up the page and flag it with a sticky note. When the scheduled review/republish time comes around, or when a major unscheduled change lands on your desk, it's easy to go through the flagged pages, making each correction and marking it off. Then you file that copy, and start again with a fresh copy of the updated manual.
These should cover what happens to the product (which may be a client, or a manufactured product) from the time it reaches that station until it is handed off to the next station.
Did they really need a process to document how to arrange a meeting that had steps like "book a meeting room" and "invite participants to the meeting" plus a diagram showing the meeting with participants as an input.
Yes, they did. How one books a meeting room varies from company to company. If it's written down, you don't waste time trying to find the tribal guru of meeting rooms to strengthen your meeting-fu.
OHHHH!!! ME!!! I KNOW THIS ONE!!!! Been there, done that, have the shurnken heads and tribal tattos to prove it! Also passed ISO9000 on the first try, with only minor criticism of the process docs I wrote.
These things become like folk medicine or a mystery cult, with multiple strands of "tradition" passed from Master to Student, with people adding their own ideas into them. You will need to reconcile the varying practices among the practicioners, which can lead to bruised egos and outright rebellion. After you have the real process identified and accepted, then you can decide how to deal with it.
You can expect resistance from some shamans: their knowledge may be a source of power and job security to them. One carrot to dangle is the prospect of time freed to do different things instead of being stuck answering questions and training. A stick is the threat of being fired if it is discovered that thye are not handing over all they know - after all, they could be hit by a bus and you would be no worse off than if they are fired and take their tribal knowledge with them.
TIPS:
Refer to operating instructions, do not incorporate operating instructions (I saw one process where EVERYTHING was in the process instrucitons, including how to change the toner on a cdretain brand of photocopier!)