The real truth of the matter is that the Democrats are in the wrong. Holding the government to ransom in order to push through a social conservative agenda is just a clever way to get things done. You should be proud that the Republican party are so vigilant in sticking up to those power-made Democrat control freaks.
Your "political agenda" is a strawman. There are many different flavors of political interests at work here, and in my experience the US discourse has a solid majority of pro new media scientists.
Sure it is diverse, but there are common themes. The vast majority of social constructionists a radical liberal agenda. They are the moral bastions who will fiddle with our environment to protect us from ourselves. They know this, of course, have had their consciousnesses raised.
Also, your information of a lack of causal relationship is outdated. That's pretty much proven these days, the discourse is 1. about the effect size and 2. about the role of other variables in combination.
This is just not true. The effect size is often quoted as 0.3, based on a review study from the 90s, but that study never published enough information to derive that figure. Freedman calculated the effect size at 0.15, but that is heavily conditional.
The role of other variables is completely unknown, because the effect sizes are so small that the role of alternative explanations such as demand characteristics could easily account for the results. Further-more, over half of media-violence studies (by their own admission) fail to show anything at all, or a negative effect size.
Furthermore, correlation is not causation, and the role of genetics and biology is completely ignored. Aggression has threshold effects -- we are all capable of it, but it must be triggered by certain threshold. This fact is ignored. Instead, absurdities such as children hitting a bozo doll is recorded as an act of aggression. (A bozo doll is a clown-shaped punching back. It's raison-d'etre is to be hit.)
If you are really interested in the issue, then I can only recommend reading my essay on it, and reading the references, esp. Pinker.
Your sentiment is noble, but unfortunately, media violence researchers are not interested in their own numbers -- just a political agenda. Objectively speaking, the burden of proof is on media violence researchers to show any type of causal link at all. They have failed for eighty years. (Going back to the Payne Fund Studies.) See here for more information on what is going on.
This study mixes cause and effect, and pays not even lip service to the fact that there may be a biological interaction at play. This is the story with the vast majority of media research, and research on childhood development. The reason why researchers do this, is because it is considered unconscionable that the environment may not be the ultimate cause, and therefore solution, to all our "problems". This may seem odd, but consider positing a biological basis to patriarchy to an academic feminist. Such a theory would be "morally" wrong. Same goes for media violence. In fact, it is usually the very same ideologues promoting both cases.
It is all very unscientific. I wrote an essay on the politics of media violence research, called The Utopian Pseudo-Science of Media Effects. Freedman (2002), and Trend (2007) (in references) wrote the best scholarly rebuttals of media violence research, but it has fallen on deaf (ideological) ears.
It will take the fall of Margaret Mead-esk feminism before we can put the media violence debate behind us. (I am an old-school feminist -- we want equality, not some naive social re-engineering.) The media violence debate is just one example of how environmental determinism and moral rectitude have produced a kind of race-condition. Don't hold your breath for this heady bubble to burst: social constructionists decry "masculinist" objectivity -- a required point of view if you are going to close your ears to all of the empirical evidence that just says....
There is little to no evidence that media violence is of any cause for concern.
See:
Trend, D. (2007). The myth of media violence: A critical introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing
Freedman, J., L. (2002). Media violence and its effects on aggression: Assessing the scientific evidence. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
The common perception in bizzaro-corporate land is that IP will be the new gold that spurs the continued perpetual economic growth that society is predicated on. It is because of IP that we don't have to be worried about the gutting of the US manufacturing base, and the enormous amount of public and private debt.
False dichotomies aside, he is pointing out that the healthcare insurance companies are/not/ going to do the job ethically or even properly. Follow the money to see how incentives skew activity. In Canada, billing costs less than 10% of that in the USA. Of course, billing costs go straight to the insurance company. You guys are getting ripped off big-time.
The alternative is not communism. That would be the type of black-and-white thinking one could expect from aspergers.
Are we supposed to believe that they bought a $150 piece of gaming hardware and would never have bought any games for it?
Is Nintendo's business model more important than censorship? Surely they can charge the correct amount for the hardware, and provide incentives for buying software, such as group servers.
might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.
If only there were some evidence of this. The copyright cartel worked out how to get the vast majority of authors/musicians to work for free. All that will be reduced is middle-man's balance sheet. Maybe.
Granted, we cannot have $200 million budget films with endorsed copyright infringement. Perhaps these studios should not release to DVD. That's how the business model worked pre-VHS.
From what I've read, the Chinese people generally support their country's censorship, and honestly believe in the importance of the state protecting them from "immoral" things and so on.
True, and they also get really upset when you talk about atrocities of the Chinese government. Like we just don't understand, or a hypocrites or something like that.
Not that Western countries are perfect by any stretch, but never under-estimate the power of denial, esp. when augmented by group identity. It warps our consciousness (Chinese or otherwise), turning black into white and vice-versa. If ever challenged, denial becomes a fearsome destructive force. And this from the country of Taoism.
Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor, friend of Mao, and Communist, asked how a few rich people could convince a million poor people to go kill another million as poor as they. This is how.
Think carefully about what is happening next time Congress beats the drums of war, or engages in clash-of-civilisation rhetoric. The USA has its own techniques for keeping the population "on-message". Not as blatant as China, and probably not as effective, but effective enough.
Sure you can do it in C++, it is just a royal pain in the ass in comparison. Since programming is fundamentally about managing complexity, this is an important factor. Supplying a block of code, and having all of the relevant parameters bound is simpler than constructing a new type, initializing it correctly, and hoping that library X makes use of it.
Spend some time outside of C++, in a functional programming language, and you will find it hard to go back. That is my experience.
It is not merely throwing memory at a problem: closures provide a simple and clean design pattern that can really cut down on cruft. Wish C++ had them, even though the language is already a dangerously complex mess.
A traitor to America, and an Australian to boot. How that works, I do not know. But apparently Australians can betray America, which I find rather disturbing, since I am Australian.
I have some sympathy for what you are saying. Bad managers say "We should implement sharepoint to share documents", not knowing the technical details, but knowing something about sharepoint because they chat to their friends and MS sales drones. Good managers say: "Put together a proposal for a document management system that can do XYZ", and then listen to what their more technically gifted and trustworthy staff put together.
I have seen a lot of the "sharepoint"! mentality, and it is disappointing, but understandable.
Perhaps a hundred other people did too, but 6 months ago I wrote a short spec to Google recommending exactly this feature.
I also went on to describe a trust system whereby searching is fine-tuned by groups of people with similar interests. For example, an academic department could run a server that monitors the blocking of all authorised staff members. Over time, this should whittle out most of the crudy resources and other noise within a particular field, and thereby make research more efficient. This would essentially allow institutions to fine-tune google search results, with the fine-tuning being done by the experts who need to use the system.
They are bailed out and excused because they are too big to fail. I don't think there is any way around that. However, the public should be able to demand scalps from within the company. Incompetence is not an excuse when it costs so many people so much. These people should be very concerned about the public good when they make decisions in a business that is too big to fail. I have no doubt that the real brass will create fall-guys and scape goats to cover for them, which is why we need a strong independent judicial arm that can investigate managerial malfeasance and neglect. Hence rules and regulations. But the regulators seem all bought up at the moment, and work on the side of the regulatee, instead of protecting the public good.
TV is just fine, thank you very much. The less we make the Internet into TV the better.
No way, TV sucks. I only watch stuff via the internet or DVD. That is the future, and the content providers are being dragged to the party by the likes of thepiratebay. Just like TV, content providers have to charge a nominal fee for an internet service, because the first to prefect this will own the future. It is a far superior way to consume media.
If you are referring to Cersie, I thought it was very believable. She became psychotic -- it's a real thing that happens to people, including leaders (think Gaddafi), and Martin wrote the character very well.
Yeah, they want experience with specific technology XYZ -- not knowing enough about IT fundamentals to realize how closely related technologies can be -- and further, that being skilled with programming fundamentals is the most valuable kill of all.
yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,'
I would rate only 8% of managers as having the skill to deduce what they are hiring.
My take is that Anthony Watts wants to present the objective truth
You must mean that Watts wants to present the truth that you want to believe in. Try to pay attention to this alternative view of some of Watt's activities. If you find it difficult to watch and turn it off, then that is a sure sign of denial.
Yes, it's a statistical certainty that Senator James M. Inhofe is corrupt.
He's not corrupt -- just completely crazy. For example, he once bragged that there has never been a divorce or homosexual relationship in his extended family. wtf? The guy's mind must be a wasteland of religious rhetoric and denial.
Have you actually read the series of emails that "hid the decline" comes from? 13 years of stolen emails, and a classic case of cherry picking, and that is the best that denialists can come up with.
You should really watch this (hide the decline starts at 4:10) and this, and try to pay attention.
Denial works by preventing your mind from processing information, and then making you forget about it afterwards. It is always felt as negativity in the body. You have to sit with that feeling if you really want to consider yourself "rational", whatever that means. See Goleman's Vital lies, simple truths for more information on the mechanisms of denial.
Consider this quote from Ronnie Laing's "Knows":
"The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice /that/ we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds."
Slashdot Mirror
The real truth of the matter is, the Democrats...
The real truth of the matter is that the Democrats are in the wrong. Holding the government to ransom in order to push through a social conservative agenda is just a clever way to get things done. You should be proud that the Republican party are so vigilant in sticking up to those power-made Democrat control freaks.
Your "political agenda" is a strawman. There are many different flavors of political interests at work here, and in my experience the US discourse has a solid majority of pro new media scientists.
Sure it is diverse, but there are common themes. The vast majority of social constructionists a radical liberal agenda. They are the moral bastions who will fiddle with our environment to protect us from ourselves. They know this, of course, have had their consciousnesses raised.
Also, your information of a lack of causal relationship is outdated. That's pretty much proven these days, the discourse is 1. about the effect size and 2. about the role of other variables in combination.
This is just not true. The effect size is often quoted as 0.3, based on a review study from the 90s, but that study never published enough information to derive that figure. Freedman calculated the effect size at 0.15, but that is heavily conditional.
The role of other variables is completely unknown, because the effect sizes are so small that the role of alternative explanations such as demand characteristics could easily account for the results. Further-more, over half of media-violence studies (by their own admission) fail to show anything at all, or a negative effect size.
Furthermore, correlation is not causation, and the role of genetics and biology is completely ignored. Aggression has threshold effects -- we are all capable of it, but it must be triggered by certain threshold. This fact is ignored. Instead, absurdities such as children hitting a bozo doll is recorded as an act of aggression. (A bozo doll is a clown-shaped punching back. It's raison-d'etre is to be hit.)
If you are really interested in the issue, then I can only recommend reading my essay on it, and reading the references, esp. Pinker.
Lets actually find out how few in number it is.
Your sentiment is noble, but unfortunately, media violence researchers are not interested in their own numbers -- just a political agenda. Objectively speaking, the burden of proof is on media violence researchers to show any type of causal link at all. They have failed for eighty years. (Going back to the Payne Fund Studies.) See here for more information on what is going on.
This study mixes cause and effect, and pays not even lip service to the fact that there may be a biological interaction at play. This is the story with the vast majority of media research, and research on childhood development. The reason why researchers do this, is because it is considered unconscionable that the environment may not be the ultimate cause, and therefore solution, to all our "problems". This may seem odd, but consider positing a biological basis to patriarchy to an academic feminist. Such a theory would be "morally" wrong. Same goes for media violence. In fact, it is usually the very same ideologues promoting both cases.
It is all very unscientific. I wrote an essay on the politics of media violence research, called The Utopian Pseudo-Science of Media Effects. Freedman (2002), and Trend (2007) (in references) wrote the best scholarly rebuttals of media violence research, but it has fallen on deaf (ideological) ears.
For more information on the ideologies behind the debate, see Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature", and Judith Rich Harris' "The Nurture Assumption". These books expose a lot of "save-the-children" academic research as flap-doodle. I wrote a short essay on the ideologies behind modern academia child research, called Regarding Turkheimer’s Proclamation.
It will take the fall of Margaret Mead-esk feminism before we can put the media violence debate behind us. (I am an old-school feminist -- we want equality, not some naive social re-engineering.) The media violence debate is just one example of how environmental determinism and moral rectitude have produced a kind of race-condition. Don't hold your breath for this heady bubble to burst: social constructionists decry "masculinist" objectivity -- a required point of view if you are going to close your ears to all of the empirical evidence that just says....
There is little to no evidence that media violence is of any cause for concern.
See:
Trend, D. (2007). The myth of media violence: A critical introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing
Freedman, J., L. (2002). Media violence and its effects on aggression: Assessing the scientific evidence. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
The common perception in bizzaro-corporate land is that IP will be the new gold that spurs the continued perpetual economic growth that society is predicated on. It is because of IP that we don't have to be worried about the gutting of the US manufacturing base, and the enormous amount of public and private debt.
Apparently.
You may call me a communist now :-)
False dichotomies aside, he is pointing out that the healthcare insurance companies are /not/ going to do the job ethically or even properly. Follow the money to see how incentives skew activity. In Canada, billing costs less than 10% of that in the USA. Of course, billing costs go straight to the insurance company. You guys are getting ripped off big-time.
The alternative is not communism. That would be the type of black-and-white thinking one could expect from aspergers.
Are we supposed to believe that they bought a $150 piece of gaming hardware and would never have bought any games for it?
Is Nintendo's business model more important than censorship? Surely they can charge the correct amount for the hardware, and provide incentives for buying software, such as group servers.
might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.
If only there were some evidence of this. The copyright cartel worked out how to get the vast majority of authors/musicians to work for free. All that will be reduced is middle-man's balance sheet. Maybe.
Granted, we cannot have $200 million budget films with endorsed copyright infringement. Perhaps these studios should not release to DVD. That's how the business model worked pre-VHS.
From what I've read, the Chinese people generally support their country's censorship, and honestly believe in the importance of the state protecting them from "immoral" things and so on.
True, and they also get really upset when you talk about atrocities of the Chinese government. Like we just don't understand, or a hypocrites or something like that.
Not that Western countries are perfect by any stretch, but never under-estimate the power of denial, esp. when augmented by group identity. It warps our consciousness (Chinese or otherwise), turning black into white and vice-versa. If ever challenged, denial becomes a fearsome destructive force. And this from the country of Taoism.
Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor, friend of Mao, and Communist, asked how a few rich people could convince a million poor people to go kill another million as poor as they. This is how.
Think carefully about what is happening next time Congress beats the drums of war, or engages in clash-of-civilisation rhetoric. The USA has its own techniques for keeping the population "on-message". Not as blatant as China, and probably not as effective, but effective enough.
Sure you can do it in C++, it is just a royal pain in the ass in comparison. Since programming is fundamentally about managing complexity, this is an important factor. Supplying a block of code, and having all of the relevant parameters bound is simpler than constructing a new type, initializing it correctly, and hoping that library X makes use of it.
Spend some time outside of C++, in a functional programming language, and you will find it hard to go back. That is my experience.
It is not merely throwing memory at a problem: closures provide a simple and clean design pattern that can really cut down on cruft. Wish C++ had them, even though the language is already a dangerously complex mess.
A traitor to America, and an Australian to boot. How that works, I do not know. But apparently Australians can betray America, which I find rather disturbing, since I am Australian.
I have some sympathy for what you are saying. Bad managers say "We should implement sharepoint to share documents", not knowing the technical details, but knowing something about sharepoint because they chat to their friends and MS sales drones. Good managers say: "Put together a proposal for a document management system that can do XYZ", and then listen to what their more technically gifted and trustworthy staff put together.
I have seen a lot of the "sharepoint"! mentality, and it is disappointing, but understandable.
Perhaps a hundred other people did too, but 6 months ago I wrote a short spec to Google recommending exactly this feature.
I also went on to describe a trust system whereby searching is fine-tuned by groups of people with similar interests. For example, an academic department could run a server that monitors the blocking of all authorised staff members. Over time, this should whittle out most of the crudy resources and other noise within a particular field, and thereby make research more efficient. This would essentially allow institutions to fine-tune google search results, with the fine-tuning being done by the experts who need to use the system.
They are bailed out and excused because they are too big to fail. I don't think there is any way around that. However, the public should be able to demand scalps from within the company. Incompetence is not an excuse when it costs so many people so much. These people should be very concerned about the public good when they make decisions in a business that is too big to fail. I have no doubt that the real brass will create fall-guys and scape goats to cover for them, which is why we need a strong independent judicial arm that can investigate managerial malfeasance and neglect. Hence rules and regulations. But the regulators seem all bought up at the moment, and work on the side of the regulatee, instead of protecting the public good.
TV is just fine, thank you very much. The less we make the Internet into TV the better.
No way, TV sucks. I only watch stuff via the internet or DVD. That is the future, and the content providers are being dragged to the party by the likes of thepiratebay. Just like TV, content providers have to charge a nominal fee for an internet service, because the first to prefect this will own the future. It is a far superior way to consume media.
If you are referring to Cersie, I thought it was very believable. She became psychotic -- it's a real thing that happens to people, including leaders (think Gaddafi), and Martin wrote the character very well.
yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,'
I would rate only 8% of managers as having the skill to deduce what they are hiring.
I didn't see anything interesting. The promo-video was a waste of time. Someone could have said the same things 10 yrs ago.
any reasonable person
Meaning yourself, right? You're just smarter than the vast majority of climate scientists -- and that's a reasonable position. Good for you.
My take is that Anthony Watts wants to present the objective truth
You must mean that Watts wants to present the truth that you want to believe in. Try to pay attention to this alternative view of some of Watt's activities. If you find it difficult to watch and turn it off, then that is a sure sign of denial.
Yes, it's a statistical certainty that Senator James M. Inhofe is corrupt.
He's not corrupt -- just completely crazy. For example, he once bragged that there has never been a divorce or homosexual relationship in his extended family. wtf? The guy's mind must be a wasteland of religious rhetoric and denial.
Have you actually read the series of emails that "hid the decline" comes from? 13 years of stolen emails, and a classic case of cherry picking, and that is the best that denialists can come up with.
/that/ we fail to notice
You should really watch this (hide the decline starts at 4:10) and this, and try to pay attention.
Denial works by preventing your mind from processing information, and then making you forget about it afterwards. It is always felt as negativity in the body. You have to sit with that feeling if you really want to consider yourself "rational", whatever that means. See Goleman's Vital lies, simple truths for more information on the mechanisms of denial.
Consider this quote from Ronnie Laing's "Knows":
"The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds."
All that greenhouse gas emission means nothing in the midst of an ecology that thrives on it
All the greenhouse gas emissions? rotfl, unless by ecology, you mean planet earth.
Yes, indeed, earth is a very small ecology.
And then finally then the US will be able to shoot the messenger!
1. Then the problem will have ceased to exist
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
If you're with us, then you're a winner.