Er... and, of course, when I say "Davos" (the name of a place in Switzerland) all through that last post, I mean to say "Dell" (the name of a CEO). Careless mistake.
The Davos-Putin exchange could be seen as an example of cross-cultural miscommunication. But it could be something more interesting.
Davos' offer of "help"--delivered no doubt with sparkling visions of new markets dancing before his eyes--was surely not intended as a patronizing, unfavorable assessment of Russia's technological prowess. It reads like standard, feelgood, let's-be-friends sales jargon, akin to "Now, what do I have to do to get you into this '92 Toyota Tercel today?"
People in the U.S. are accustomed to tuning out and toning down this kind of sales pitch, but Russia's nascent capitalistic culture seems much more direct, even brutal in certain respects. Putin probably doesn't have much of a frame of reference for all this Dale Carnegie happy crap.
So, while it's plausible that Putin simply took it the wrong way, who knows? He's no idiot--maybe he intentionally misinterpreted Davos as a signal that Russia intends to take advantage of the United States' weakened economic situation as an opportunity to change the rules of the game.
I'd always assumed that auto manufacturers knew this all along, and purposely designed their car models with "facial features" to appeal to different personality types.
Most likely, this study only confirms something that has been suspected for a long time.
Speaking subjectively, I know that the brain can easily find certain patterns in randomly arranged shapes. Look at a tiled floor or chain-link fence; you can pick out all kinds of Tetris patterns when you make up your mind to look for them.
However, the "facial feature" patterns are the ones that seem to have the greatest amount of expressiveness--that is, of all the shapes you can pick out from a random arrangement, it is an arrangement resembling two eyes and a mouth that seems automatically to elicit an emotional response, and minor differences in these arrangements--e.g., whether the "mouth" turns down, whether the "eyes" seem to gaze upward--can produce a wide variety of distinct emotional responses.
Since it's out of print, the most ethical thing is to support your economy by purchasing the used copy from a locally owned, independent bookstore. Only go to Amazon.com or some other national chain as a last resort.
After that, you're justified in downloading the electronic version--although, personally, I find hard copy much easier to read than e-text.
Um, yeah. Aren't these the same people who were trying to develop a chemical weapon that would somehow make enemy soldiers gay?
These military contractors are so imaginative. And really, don't these periodic reports of their whimsical ideas make the billions of dollars we spend worthwhile?
Rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. years ago shifted to contract manufacturers -- companies that provide production services to others -- to build their portable computers.
Translation: Hewlett-Packard laid off thousands of workers and shipped its manufacturing jobs to countries where it's legal to employ blind children for 30 cents an hour.
Contract manufacturers can generally produce computers more cheaply because their entire operations are narrowly focused on finding efficiencies in manufacturing, as opposed to large firms like Dell, which must also balance marketing and other considerations.
Translation: Even though the economy has tanked, there's no need for Dell to cut its CEO's $150 million salary just to keep profits up. Instead, it can keep its stockholders happy simply by firing those employees who worked to build Dell into a successful operation in the first place.
I don't think that Twain's rendering of Jim's dialect, for instance, was meant as a "put down" either. It was part of the character's development.
However, that was Twain. Any writer who, today, transliterated slave dialect as closely and methodically as Twain did would have to justify it very carefully.
It can still be done, of course--it's just that it needs to be applied much more sparingly and with a light touch in order to avoid bogging down the dialog. (Although I love The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at the risk of sounding like a Philistine, I've found that long passages of Jim's dialog make for slow reading and can get kind of tedious; as a kid, I remember puzzling over the meaning of "gwyne" for some time. LOL.)
Also, it should be mentioned that all your examples, although excellent, are fiction. In hard news or straight-up feature writing, dialect would rarely be rendered unless the source's speech characteristics were somehow relevant to the story.
You're right about square brackets, but they can get out of hand pretty quickly.
Your example is perfectly correct. However, since it leaves so little of the source's original quote intact (barely more than half), an editor would probably choose to paraphrase the quote (e.g. "After 7-year-old Kavya posted a question asking how babies were conceived, the Yahoo! Answers forum was inundated with predictably snarky replies.")
I agree, "sic" seems a little ill-mannered--there are probably a few cases where its use might be appropriate, but usually it's a sign that an inexperienced writer is either overeager to prove his/her spelling and grammar cred, or using a heavy hand in an attempt to discredit the source.
Experienced writers--if they really want to--can accomplish both of those things without resorting to "sic."
Quotations transcribed from informal spoken communications (interviews, phone conversations, etc.) are typically cleaned up. Verbal tics, stuttering and "um"s and "er"s are omitted, minor grammatical errors corrected, etc. Great care must be taken not to change the speaker's meaning, however. It is very embarrassing (and professionally damaging) when such mistakes are made.
These are all normal features of informal speech but, by reproducing them verbatim, you run the risk of unfairly discrediting your source. So, unless the speech irregularities are relevant to the story (for instance, if the story is about George W. Bush's pronunciation), you would change "nucular" to "nuclear."
Published material (books, articles, etc.) are normally stetted, with few exceptions.
Blogs and the like fall somewhere between verbal communication and published material. It is something of a gray area.
I would say that, unless the use of nonstandard English in online communications is relevant to the story, the editor should follow the paper's policy regarding verbal communication.
Otherwise, the paper risks being seen as trying intentionally to discredit blog sources. All kinds of paranoid motivations for MSM's perceived desire to discredit bloggers would be attributed.
On the other hand, in editing a blogger, the editor opens himself/herself up to all kinds of accusations as well.
So, as normal, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Just another day in the life of a newspaper editor.
I'll grant that the failure of the Air America experiment may show that "liberal talk radio" doesn't work when it borrows the AM-band yammering-head format.
This is for two reasons:
Corporate advertisers are more likely to fund programming by conservative hotheads, who generally advocate deregulation, than by liberal hotheads, who tend to favor regulatory policies.
Liberals notoriously have a fetish for seeking consensus, and are suspicious of the authoritarian-commentator/subordinate-caller talk-radio format. Yes, even when the authoritarian in question is Al Franken.
Believe it or not, the Fairness Doctrine served broadcast media's viewer- and listenership well--the mid-20th century was something of a Golden Age for U.S. journalism. It's impossible to imagine that Huntley & Brinkley or Walter Cronkite would ever have gibbered about Hanna Montana's photo spread in Vanity Fair for three nights in a row.
Our news only began to go downhill in the 1980s with the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine, and its descent picked up speed with the 1990s Telecommunications Act, which allowed unprecedented concentration of corporate media ownership.
Finally, lest the revival of the Fairness Doctrine be cast as proof that the use of governmental power to restructure the media is another Liberal Plot Against Which Stalwart Conservatives Are Standing Firm, don't forget the neocons' 2005 takeover of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, turning PBS and NPR into "fair and balanced" Fox News clones. Any political party in power tries to play games with the media.
Because of that, given the cyclical nature of political power in the U.S., the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine will serve the interests of liberals, centrists and conservatives alike.
That sounds ominous... does this mean it will self-destruct if the user attempts to play a file without first presenting it with a valid photo ID, passport, security certificate and retinal scan?
I prefer monitors that aren't purposefully crippled and that don't attempt to moonlight as copyright lawyers...
This was the print media, not broadcast news. Also, I haven't heard of any pending copyright-infringement suits.
I'm not versed on the intricacies of British libel laws, but if this case were heard in the U.S., there are a few ways it could go. Most likely, the court would favor the newspapers:
If Amanda is a public figure or a "private individual involved in a matter of public concern," she is required to prove that there was absolutely no teenage drunken revelry at the villa that night, which may be difficult in light of published photos (some of which are still available online at sites such as elmundolibro.com).
On the other hand, the newspaper does not have to demonstrate that every word in the story was true. If it can show that there was "substantial truth" to the report, then Amanda loses.
In some states, if Amanda is an entirely private individual with no public dealings, the court would likely accept her claim at face value that no party took place. Then, Amanda could proceed with her case.
But, even if the court determines that the allegations are false, the newspapers have several strong lines of defense:
If they merely reported the fact that stories about a wild party were published on a social-networking website, and if the stories actually did appear on the site, then the newspapers may claim neutral reportage. This puts Amanda in a pickle.
In this case, she would have to prove that the newspapers published the story with negligence or malice.
"Negligence" means she would have to produce "clear and convincing evidence" that the reporter had definite knowledge--say, from a reliable witness or by photographic evidence--that the debauched hoedown did not actually take place. (Philosophy geeks might reflect that it is notoriously difficult to prove the nonexistence of something.) Without this evidence, Amanda loses.
To prove "malice," Amanda could resort to the mindreading trick and demonstrate that the reporter entertained serious doubts about the truth of the story when it was published. If Amanda can read the reporter's mind, and if the reporter has an incredibly incompetent attorney, Amanda wins! Otherwise, she loses.
If Amanda gets this far, then she must also show that the words used in the story are "capable of defamatory meaning." This standard varies from state to state.
In some states (e.g. Texas), a statement against an individual may be false, abusive and unpleasant without being "defamatory." Some states, like Illinois, consider a statement to be "defamatory" only if the plaintiff were falsely accused of an indictable criminal offense punishable by imprisonment.
England has lately become somewhat draconian in its disregard of individual privacy. I haven't heard, however, about any British attack on press freedom. Indeed, England can lay claim to one of the finest journalistic traditions ever--the BBC may be one of the last remaining bastions of solid investigative journalism in the world.
Given all this, I doubt Amanda has a case. However, her lawsuit--provoking so much anxiety among the Internet community--does make a good story.
I'm as pleased as anybody that the development of large pools of widely accessible data may lead scientists to find and consider correlations which may not otherwise have observed.
However, Wired does tend to breathlessly enthuse when it comes to stories about how the Internet has changed everything, everywhere, forever and ever! (Look back 11 years at "The Long Boom" for an example of this unbridled enthusiasm. Today, to our great sorrow, this seems a bit... overoptimistic.)
In the current political climate, any claim that the Internet has made information universally available is hopelessly naive. And the veracity of the information that is available is, at best, mixed.
This is not to say that scientists would resort to sources such as Wikipedia for their sole source of information. Even so, statistical modeling is not a new science. If the emerging massive data cloud makes this kind of research an increasingly important scientific tool, it is cause for optimism.
However, anybody who claims that his/her hypothesis does not require testing, verification and review--or that scientific hypotheses in general have become obsolete--cannot be taken seriously.
On the contrary, I think the Wiki-fanatics' attitude is the defeatist one. The idea that anything which is so hard that only years of study can reveal its subtleties is not worth knowing strikes at the very basis of civilisation. It's the equivilent of Bart Simpson's "You can't win; don't even bother trying".
Good point. The idea that having a Wiki entry makes you an expert is as infuriating as the idea that having a blog makes you a journalist. In fact, I expect the Wikipedia is as fraught with errors and shallow perspectives as the blogosphere is filled with plagarism and "yellow" journalism.
This is not to say that there aren't any good Wikipedia entries or blogs. It's just that massive collaboration is not necessarily more likely to produce a superior encyclopedia than it's likely to produce superior computer software (as in Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month).
People are as lazy and shallow as ever; the rapidity at which we can now access information doesn't change that.
Of course, it's possible for each of us to rise above shallowness and intellectual laziness -- I was bristling at what I perceived as the idea that it's impossible to achieve greatness except through one's workplace. What we are able to get paid for is not necessarily where our genius lies, and history is filled with men and women who were able to achieve great things in their spare time.
It seems the important thing with products like the IPod is for shuffle playback to produce an ordering of songs which seems random to the listener.
Since (pseudo)RNG algorithms produce orderings that do not appear random to the human mind, a less random but more convincing approach would be better.
What characteristics would a "convincingly random" algorithm need to have?
Writing the article on magnetism that's in my copy of Britannica is not something anyone could do as a hobby.
Maybe most people couldn't, but "anyone"? Why not? Is it so complicated and technical that only its author could possibly understand it, and only then after devoting years of his professional life to it?
People can be brilliant in their spare time. To say otherwise belies a defeatist attitude that sets the creativity bar very low: then the only valid option becomes to give up and just start watching "reality" TV.
Nay, I say! Nay! We must all refuse to give in to the forces of mediocrity!
In 30 years kids will be bored to tears having to memorize the date of the WTC attack, just as we were bored to tears having to memorize the date Pearl Harbor was bombed.
We'll always remember it vividly, but to the next generation it will be ancient history. Thank heavens.
Re:Sounds Fantastic -- Now Why Not Hemp
on
Corn-Based Plastic
·
· Score: 1
However, using hemp rolling papers won't affect the THC content of your smoke, because it's got pretty close to none in it. The paper is made from those stems you didn't need
Perhaps he looks at that picture ever now and then to compare and see if he has any new bald-spots, receding hairline, or whatever. Managers are uncommonly strange about such things.
Oh, sure--it's perfectly normal to have a picture of yourself on your desk. Lots of managers do that, and it doesn't mean a thing. Certainly not that you're one of the most narcissistic men on the West Coast or anything like that. Noooo.
A couple years ago I agreed to do a telephone survey and received a $25 check in the mail two weeks later--it took about 20 minutes. At the end of the survey I asked the woman on whose behalf it was being conducted. She wouldn't tell me, but she said, "I think you can guess."
The questions in Halloween 7 sound familiar, although they also seemed interested in knowing how I felt about the antitrust lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. financial media certainly seems to be reporting this story in a limited way.
Er ... and, of course, when I say "Davos" (the name of a place in Switzerland) all through that last post, I mean to say "Dell" (the name of a CEO). Careless mistake.
Davos' offer of "help"--delivered no doubt with sparkling visions of new markets dancing before his eyes--was surely not intended as a patronizing, unfavorable assessment of Russia's technological prowess. It reads like standard, feelgood, let's-be-friends sales jargon, akin to "Now, what do I have to do to get you into this '92 Toyota Tercel today?"
People in the U.S. are accustomed to tuning out and toning down this kind of sales pitch, but Russia's nascent capitalistic culture seems much more direct, even brutal in certain respects. Putin probably doesn't have much of a frame of reference for all this Dale Carnegie happy crap.
So, while it's plausible that Putin simply took it the wrong way, who knows? He's no idiot--maybe he intentionally misinterpreted Davos as a signal that Russia intends to take advantage of the United States' weakened economic situation as an opportunity to change the rules of the game.
Most likely, this study only confirms something that has been suspected for a long time.
Speaking subjectively, I know that the brain can easily find certain patterns in randomly arranged shapes. Look at a tiled floor or chain-link fence; you can pick out all kinds of Tetris patterns when you make up your mind to look for them.
However, the "facial feature" patterns are the ones that seem to have the greatest amount of expressiveness--that is, of all the shapes you can pick out from a random arrangement, it is an arrangement resembling two eyes and a mouth that seems automatically to elicit an emotional response, and minor differences in these arrangements--e.g., whether the "mouth" turns down, whether the "eyes" seem to gaze upward--can produce a wide variety of distinct emotional responses.
Since it's out of print, the most ethical thing is to support your economy by purchasing the used copy from a locally owned, independent bookstore. Only go to Amazon.com or some other national chain as a last resort.
After that, you're justified in downloading the electronic version--although, personally, I find hard copy much easier to read than e-text.
These military contractors are so imaginative. And really, don't these periodic reports of their whimsical ideas make the billions of dollars we spend worthwhile?
The porn-viewing experience just gets better and better.
Translation: Hewlett-Packard laid off thousands of workers and shipped its manufacturing jobs to countries where it's legal to employ blind children for 30 cents an hour.
Translation: Even though the economy has tanked, there's no need for Dell to cut its CEO's $150 million salary just to keep profits up. Instead, it can keep its stockholders happy simply by firing those employees who worked to build Dell into a successful operation in the first place.
I don't think that Twain's rendering of Jim's dialect, for instance, was meant as a "put down" either. It was part of the character's development.
However, that was Twain. Any writer who, today, transliterated slave dialect as closely and methodically as Twain did would have to justify it very carefully.
It can still be done, of course--it's just that it needs to be applied much more sparingly and with a light touch in order to avoid bogging down the dialog. (Although I love The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at the risk of sounding like a Philistine, I've found that long passages of Jim's dialog make for slow reading and can get kind of tedious; as a kid, I remember puzzling over the meaning of "gwyne" for some time. LOL.)
Also, it should be mentioned that all your examples, although excellent, are fiction. In hard news or straight-up feature writing, dialect would rarely be rendered unless the source's speech characteristics were somehow relevant to the story.
You're right about square brackets, but they can get out of hand pretty quickly.
Your example is perfectly correct. However, since it leaves so little of the source's original quote intact (barely more than half), an editor would probably choose to paraphrase the quote (e.g. "After 7-year-old Kavya posted a question asking how babies were conceived, the Yahoo! Answers forum was inundated with predictably snarky replies.")
I agree, "sic" seems a little ill-mannered--there are probably a few cases where its use might be appropriate, but usually it's a sign that an inexperienced writer is either overeager to prove his/her spelling and grammar cred, or using a heavy hand in an attempt to discredit the source.
Experienced writers--if they really want to--can accomplish both of those things without resorting to "sic."
Quotations transcribed from informal spoken communications (interviews, phone conversations, etc.) are typically cleaned up. Verbal tics, stuttering and "um"s and "er"s are omitted, minor grammatical errors corrected, etc. Great care must be taken not to change the speaker's meaning, however. It is very embarrassing (and professionally damaging) when such mistakes are made.
These are all normal features of informal speech but, by reproducing them verbatim, you run the risk of unfairly discrediting your source. So, unless the speech irregularities are relevant to the story (for instance, if the story is about George W. Bush's pronunciation), you would change "nucular" to "nuclear."
Published material (books, articles, etc.) are normally stetted, with few exceptions.
Blogs and the like fall somewhere between verbal communication and published material. It is something of a gray area.
I would say that, unless the use of nonstandard English in online communications is relevant to the story, the editor should follow the paper's policy regarding verbal communication.
Otherwise, the paper risks being seen as trying intentionally to discredit blog sources. All kinds of paranoid motivations for MSM's perceived desire to discredit bloggers would be attributed.
On the other hand, in editing a blogger, the editor opens himself/herself up to all kinds of accusations as well.
So, as normal, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Just another day in the life of a newspaper editor.
I'll grant that the failure of the Air America experiment may show that "liberal talk radio" doesn't work when it borrows the AM-band yammering-head format.
This is for two reasons:
Believe it or not, the Fairness Doctrine served broadcast media's viewer- and listenership well--the mid-20th century was something of a Golden Age for U.S. journalism. It's impossible to imagine that Huntley & Brinkley or Walter Cronkite would ever have gibbered about Hanna Montana's photo spread in Vanity Fair for three nights in a row.
Our news only began to go downhill in the 1980s with the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine, and its descent picked up speed with the 1990s Telecommunications Act, which allowed unprecedented concentration of corporate media ownership.
Finally, lest the revival of the Fairness Doctrine be cast as proof that the use of governmental power to restructure the media is another Liberal Plot Against Which Stalwart Conservatives Are Standing Firm, don't forget the neocons' 2005 takeover of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, turning PBS and NPR into "fair and balanced" Fox News clones. Any political party in power tries to play games with the media.
Because of that, given the cyclical nature of political power in the U.S., the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine will serve the interests of liberals, centrists and conservatives alike.
That sounds ominous ... does this mean it will self-destruct if the user attempts to play a file without first presenting it with a valid photo ID, passport, security certificate and retinal scan?
I prefer monitors that aren't purposefully crippled and that don't attempt to moonlight as copyright lawyers ...
This was the print media, not broadcast news. Also, I haven't heard of any pending copyright-infringement suits.
I'm not versed on the intricacies of British libel laws, but if this case were heard in the U.S., there are a few ways it could go. Most likely, the court would favor the newspapers:
If Amanda is a public figure or a "private individual involved in a matter of public concern," she is required to prove that there was absolutely no teenage drunken revelry at the villa that night, which may be difficult in light of published photos (some of which are still available online at sites such as elmundolibro.com).
On the other hand, the newspaper does not have to demonstrate that every word in the story was true. If it can show that there was "substantial truth" to the report, then Amanda loses.
In some states, if Amanda is an entirely private individual with no public dealings, the court would likely accept her claim at face value that no party took place. Then, Amanda could proceed with her case.
But, even if the court determines that the allegations are false, the newspapers have several strong lines of defense:
If they merely reported the fact that stories about a wild party were published on a social-networking website, and if the stories actually did appear on the site, then the newspapers may claim neutral reportage. This puts Amanda in a pickle.
In this case, she would have to prove that the newspapers published the story with negligence or malice.
"Negligence" means she would have to produce "clear and convincing evidence" that the reporter had definite knowledge--say, from a reliable witness or by photographic evidence--that the debauched hoedown did not actually take place. (Philosophy geeks might reflect that it is notoriously difficult to prove the nonexistence of something.) Without this evidence, Amanda loses.
To prove "malice," Amanda could resort to the mindreading trick and demonstrate that the reporter entertained serious doubts about the truth of the story when it was published. If Amanda can read the reporter's mind, and if the reporter has an incredibly incompetent attorney, Amanda wins! Otherwise, she loses.
If Amanda gets this far, then she must also show that the words used in the story are "capable of defamatory meaning." This standard varies from state to state.
In some states (e.g. Texas), a statement against an individual may be false, abusive and unpleasant without being "defamatory." Some states, like Illinois, consider a statement to be "defamatory" only if the plaintiff were falsely accused of an indictable criminal offense punishable by imprisonment.
England has lately become somewhat draconian in its disregard of individual privacy. I haven't heard, however, about any British attack on press freedom. Indeed, England can lay claim to one of the finest journalistic traditions ever--the BBC may be one of the last remaining bastions of solid investigative journalism in the world.
Given all this, I doubt Amanda has a case. However, her lawsuit--provoking so much anxiety among the Internet community--does make a good story.
I'm as pleased as anybody that the development of large pools of widely accessible data may lead scientists to find and consider correlations which may not otherwise have observed.
However, Wired does tend to breathlessly enthuse when it comes to stories about how the Internet has changed everything, everywhere, forever and ever! (Look back 11 years at "The Long Boom" for an example of this unbridled enthusiasm. Today, to our great sorrow, this seems a bit ... overoptimistic.)
In the current political climate, any claim that the Internet has made information universally available is hopelessly naive. And the veracity of the information that is available is, at best, mixed.
This is not to say that scientists would resort to sources such as Wikipedia for their sole source of information. Even so, statistical modeling is not a new science. If the emerging massive data cloud makes this kind of research an increasingly important scientific tool, it is cause for optimism.
However, anybody who claims that his/her hypothesis does not require testing, verification and review--or that scientific hypotheses in general have become obsolete--cannot be taken seriously.
That would be a typical Wired overstatement.
Good point. The idea that having a Wiki entry makes you an expert is as infuriating as the idea that having a blog makes you a journalist. In fact, I expect the Wikipedia is as fraught with errors and shallow perspectives as the blogosphere is filled with plagarism and "yellow" journalism.
This is not to say that there aren't any good Wikipedia entries or blogs. It's just that massive collaboration is not necessarily more likely to produce a superior encyclopedia than it's likely to produce superior computer software (as in Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month).
People are as lazy and shallow as ever; the rapidity at which we can now access information doesn't change that.
Of course, it's possible for each of us to rise above shallowness and intellectual laziness -- I was bristling at what I perceived as the idea that it's impossible to achieve greatness except through one's workplace. What we are able to get paid for is not necessarily where our genius lies, and history is filled with men and women who were able to achieve great things in their spare time.
Since (pseudo)RNG algorithms produce orderings that do not appear random to the human mind, a less random but more convincing approach would be better.
What characteristics would a "convincingly random" algorithm need to have?
People can be brilliant in their spare time. To say otherwise belies a defeatist attitude that sets the creativity bar very low: then the only valid option becomes to give up and just start watching "reality" TV.
Nay, I say! Nay! We must all refuse to give in to the forces of mediocrity!
In 30 years kids will be bored to tears having to memorize the date of the WTC attack, just as we were bored to tears having to memorize the date Pearl Harbor was bombed. We'll always remember it vividly, but to the next generation it will be ancient history. Thank heavens.
Won't it give you a headache then?
Oh, yeah, I really needed to see those turkey guts ...
Excuse me while I convert to vegetarianism.
...and Tyler, too?
Oh, sure--it's perfectly normal to have a picture of yourself on your desk. Lots of managers do that, and it doesn't mean a thing. Certainly not that you're one of the most narcissistic men on the West Coast or anything like that. Noooo.
A couple years ago I agreed to do a telephone survey and received a $25 check in the mail two weeks later--it took about 20 minutes. At the end of the survey I asked the woman on whose behalf it was being conducted. She wouldn't tell me, but she said, "I think you can guess."
The questions in Halloween 7 sound familiar, although they also seemed interested in knowing how I felt about the antitrust lawsuit.
Huh.
Urgh! That smirk! And his clean-shaven little face! I just had to thwick him. And now there's a finger mark on my freshly-cleaned monitor.