I've always thought it an interesting coincidence that the Roswell myth dates from about the same time that the Manhattan Project - which was an actual large-scale government cover-up - became public knowledge.
Not only that, but Alamogordo is less than a hundred miles from Roswell.
I've noticed that there's a tendency for programmers who put together a technical test to show off, i.e. they ask questions about arcane trivialities about which they happen to know the answer.
When I was in charge of creating a technical exam, I asked three of our technical experts to each come up with three easy questions. The idea was that an exam where the average score is 20 or 30 percent doesn't do a good job of discriminating between candidates (nor does one with an average score of 90 or 100 percent). Since we were testing three different areas - they were something like C/C++, general Unix, and X-Windows - we would go easy on someone who would draw a blank in one of them; also, we should reward informed guesses (this was a verbal, expository test).
I also contributed a single question (which was: What is the first thing to do when optimizing code for performance (=speed of execution)?) which was, in retrospect, perhaps too vague or difficult as fewer than half the candidates came up with a good answer. However, we left it in as it is a good, general question and can be answered well on the basis of general programming smarts and experience.
It may never be possible to prove that a specific act of violence was the result of a particular experience, but plenty of surveys and studies have linked poor media habits with rising violence, childhood depression, attention deficit disorders and declining educational standards. Yet we also hear entirely the opposite: IQ scores are rising, and have been since at least the 1950s, when television was becoming common in our homes. What's more, regular gamers seem to perform better at tests of visual attention and spatial awareness.
The verdict of the article is mixed: video games may help increase IQ and may increase violent tendencies. However, the bulk of the studies seemed to have focused on the effect of violent movies and TV - the conclusion about video games appear to be more speculative at this point.
The overwhelming majority of studies about modern media and the mind, however, have focused on violence on and off the screen. Although there has been more than 50 years' worth of research, most people seem to have the idea that, while these studies suggest there might be a small link, the jury is still out. Wrong, says John Murray, a developmental psychologist from Kansas State University, one of the editors of the book Children and Television: Fifty years of research and author of US government-sponsored reports in 1972 and 1982. Murray is exasperated by this kind of ambivalence. He says it is impossible to conclude anything other than that violence on TV has raised the level of violence and aggression in our society - and while research on computer games has begun only recently, what there is suggests violent games have an even stronger effect.
"Video games are more worrisome than TV because they are interactive," says Murray. Children learn best by demonstration and then imitation, with rewards for getting things right. "That's exactly what video games do," he says.
So, to be fair, the evidence against video games in particular is less than compelling. However, the evidence of the effect of other violent media seems rather strong but has been clouded:
Not everyone is affected, and we are not all affected in same way, but overall, media violence does affect viewers' attitudes, values and behaviour, Murray says. Hundreds of studies demonstrate this, so why the doubt?
One reason is that media reports tend to give equal prominence to the naysayers. The debate also has its hired guns, with industry organisations such as the Motion Picture Association of America sponsoring prominent books arguing against any links. And whatever their motives, it is easy for critics to highlight the limitations of the science. The ideal experiment would be to divide a large number of children into groups, expose the different groups to different types or varying amounts of TV or computer games for several years while keeping all other experiences identical, and then to follow their progress for life. This will never be possible or ethical. Instead, researchers have to rely on long-term surveys that don't prove causality, and lab experiments that do not demonstrate long-term effects. Nevertheless, the results from all these different types of studies add up to a compelling case.
> Surely this is just some weird Dilbert-type fantasy world we're talking about?
Yes, it's called the real (corporate) world.
My last boss was nasty, egotistical, incompentent and supremely entrenched in the bureaucracy.
She joked about being a "slavedriver" - particularly appropriate as slaves are not very good workers but they're economic because their cost is nearly free.
Her usual "management" technique was shouting in a nasty tone of voice about how
bad your work was. She would typically follow this up by a request for questions.
Wonder why no one ever asked any?
I knew I was doomed when I realized my boss's boss thought she was great.
> I didn't read the article, but from the summary I can conclude that this idiot is trying to say that we need not be constantly looking to improve our security
At the risk of treading too close to Godwin's Law, what we have here is
"The Big Lie" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie): repeat a lie over
and over (can you say "Weapons of Mass Destruction" or "Teach the Controversy"?)
until it becomes familiar enough that the usual suspects accept it without
overly worrying their little heads.
I don't have any inside knowledge on "etc" as I worked with Unix relatively late in the game.
However, looking at the other high-level directories in this list, they all seem to be formed by shortening words: none of them are TLAs.
Therefore, it looks like "etc" is, indeed, from "et cetera" (which may be translated "and other things").
The ideologies of scientists are probably far less uniform than those of conservatives.
Paying money for people to come up with a particular set of results is in
no way scientific: it is sheer advocacy or, at the very least, aggressive
data-mining.
Unless the laws are very different where you are from the laws in most of the United States, it's hard to see how they can require you to give three months notice.
Once you quit, you don't work for them anymore and they cannot require you to do anything.
It's entirely likely that your company tells you this but really has no
recourse to back it up.
These, ahem, "discrepancies" about belief in God may in fact be for the same reasons that more people say they attend church once a month (about 45%, when asked) than actually do (about 30%, based on church attendance).
Though, if you look at the survey by Baylor, the largest Baptist University in the US, this supports
your number: http://washingtontimes.com/national/20060911-10333 8-8995r.htm. Wonder why that
could be? I don't suppose religious people would lie, would they?
As a non-believer, I also take a little comfort in the statistic that, among the US prison population,
un-belief is much lower than in the general population (though I can't find a reference for this one
at the moment.)
Maybe fifteen years or so ago, the "software crisis" was still
a much-talked-about topic. Today, with the situation as bad
or worse, it isn't such a hot topic - we're used to it.
Or, according the Wikipedia, it was at least partially addressed by the implementation of various processes and methodologies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis.
If you've ever had to deal with the magnitude of overhead introduced by many of these
"solutions", you know what bull-hockey that is.
There was a study in Communications of the ACM several years ago (sorry,
can't find the reference) about user interfaces. In the course of the study,
the experimenters had people use interfaces that were deliberately poorly designed.
They didn't get a single comment on how difficult it was to use this software -
people have gotten used to crappy, clumsy software.
You forgot to give away the stupid crucial scene where the
computer learns to understand the futility of war by discovering
that tic-tac-toe is unwinnable given perfect play.
It only takes this super-computer maybe half a minute to play all
possible couple hundred games of tic-tac-toe.
Not to mention that the defense against missiles coming over the pole in
20 minutes apparently requires mounting lots of large tapes - boy, those
are fast.
I continue to be amazed at how many people do command-line work in non-scrollable
windows and don't run the command-line within an editor like emacs.
Using a non-scrollable window is simply idiotic: what are you saving - the few thousand
bytes of (potentially useful) session history?
Using a scrollable window alone is only a little dumb - you've vaulted yourself into the
era of teletype printing terminals: if you need to look at a previous part of the session,
you can scroll backwards and search for it using your eyeballs, just like manually searching through
a long piece of teletype paper. Why run in an editor which has search commands built-in? Think
of the microseconds of computer time you save by wasting seconds and minutes or your own time.
> Without all this accounting bullshit a large chunk of the population could be
> doing something more useful, OTOH, without it
> we wouldn't have built the pyramids in the first place.
Since the pyramids were built by slaves, it's not clear how much accounting bullshit took place.
OTOH, my boss jokes about being a slave-driver which is perhaps more appropriate than
she realizes, considering how inefficient slave labor is, being only economic by virtue of
its low cost. Oh wait, we outsource a lot too.
This is one of the most beloved urban legends of people who need an excuse for their poor luck.
In fact, in the Wall St. Journal's long-running contest, the experts have out-performed the darts
29 to 21 times (ahref=http://www.webtrading.com/issue18.htmrel=ur l2html-21923http://www.webtrading.com/issue18.htm> ). This does not mean the experts are all that great - the score is 26 to 25 againsT the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always thought it an interesting coincidence that the Roswell myth dates from about the same time that the Manhattan Project - which was an actual large-scale government cover-up - became public knowledge.
Not only that, but Alamogordo is less than a hundred miles from Roswell.
Maybe even more topic drift, but...
I've noticed that there's a tendency for programmers who put together a technical test to show off, i.e. they ask questions about arcane trivialities about which they happen to know the answer.
When I was in charge of creating a technical exam, I asked three of our technical experts to each come up with three easy questions. The idea was that an exam where the average score is 20 or 30 percent doesn't do a good job of discriminating between candidates (nor does one with an average score of 90 or 100 percent). Since we were testing three different areas - they were something like C/C++, general Unix, and X-Windows - we would go easy on someone who would draw a blank in one of them; also, we should reward informed guesses (this was a verbal, expository test).
I also contributed a single question (which was: What is the first thing to do when optimizing code for performance (=speed of execution)?) which was, in retrospect, perhaps too vague or difficult as fewer than half the candidates came up with a good answer. However, we left it in as it is a good, general question and can be answered well on the basis of general programming smarts and experience.
Two words: Starship Trooper.
Except this, of course: ahref=http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=d
The verdict of the article is mixed: video games may help increase IQ and may increase violent tendencies. However, the bulk of the studies seemed to have focused on the effect of violent movies and TV - the conclusion about video games appear to be more speculative at this point.
So, to be fair, the evidence against video games in particular is less than compelling. However, the evidence of the effect of other violent media seems rather strong but has been clouded:
A "C" - that's great!
We're all the way up to average!
We (kind of) rock!
> Surely this is just some weird Dilbert-type fantasy world we're talking about?
Yes, it's called the real (corporate) world.
My last boss was nasty, egotistical, incompentent and supremely entrenched in the bureaucracy. She joked about being a "slavedriver" - particularly appropriate as slaves are not very good workers but they're economic because their cost is nearly free.
Her usual "management" technique was shouting in a nasty tone of voice about how bad your work was. She would typically follow this up by a request for questions. Wonder why no one ever asked any?
I knew I was doomed when I realized my boss's boss thought she was great.
> I didn't read the article, but from the summary I can conclude that this idiot is trying to say that we need not be constantly looking to improve our security
Your subject line here refers to yourself?
Can't party - too busy working here...
At the risk of treading too close to Godwin's Law, what we have here is "The Big Lie" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie): repeat a lie over and over (can you say "Weapons of Mass Destruction" or "Teach the Controversy"?) until it becomes familiar enough that the usual suspects accept it without overly worrying their little heads.
I don't have any inside knowledge on "etc" as I worked with Unix relatively late in the game. However, looking at the other high-level directories in this list, they all seem to be formed by shortening words: none of them are TLAs.
Therefore, it looks like "etc" is, indeed, from "et cetera" (which may be translated "and other things").
So, isn't the state of California breaking its own law by interfering with Mr. Henson's exercise of free speech?
"I personally hate Scientology but they are a religion and must be respected as one."
Explain to me why we should respect the promotion of ignorance, superstition and bigotry? This of course, describes most, if not all, religions.
The ideologies of scientists are probably far less uniform than those of conservatives.
Paying money for people to come up with a particular set of results is in no way scientific: it is sheer advocacy or, at the very least, aggressive data-mining.
Unless the laws are very different where you are from the laws in most of the United States, it's hard to see how they can require you to give three months notice.
Once you quit, you don't work for them anymore and they cannot require you to do anything.
It's entirely likely that your company tells you this but really has no recourse to back it up.
That's nothing - here are the real Robots of Mass Destruction: Robot Dance Competition http://web.gc.cuny.edu/sciart/.
"You're fucked if you speak your mind and you know you will..." http://www.amazon.com/gp/music/wma-pop-up/B000J3FB FC001016/ref=mu_sam_wma_001_016/102-2816215-954414 4
They have a knob that goes to 11.
Though I agree with much of what you say, you do propagate the lie that 96% of Americans believe in God. The percentage is lower than this according to exactly how the question is phrased; see http://www.religioustolerance.org/godpoll.htm for a survey of some surveys. Also, a fairly recent Harris survey http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index .asp?PID=408 indicates why people might, in fact, say they believe in God
when they have doubts. A more recent Harris survey supports the encouraging notion that un-belief may be
on the rise: http://www.dentalplans.com/articles/5938/.
3 8-8995r.htm. Wonder why that
could be? I don't suppose religious people would lie, would they?
These, ahem, "discrepancies" about belief in God may in fact be for the same reasons that more people say they attend church once a month (about 45%, when asked) than actually do (about 30%, based on church attendance).
Though, if you look at the survey by Baylor, the largest Baptist University in the US, this supports your number: http://washingtontimes.com/national/20060911-1033
As a non-believer, I also take a little comfort in the statistic that, among the US prison population, un-belief is much lower than in the general population (though I can't find a reference for this one at the moment.)
You insensitive clod!
Haven't you heard of the obesity problem? Maybe he really does need an SUV for his baby.
Maybe fifteen years or so ago, the "software crisis" was still a much-talked-about topic. Today, with the situation as bad or worse, it isn't such a hot topic - we're used to it.
Or, according the Wikipedia, it was at least partially addressed by the implementation of various processes and methodologies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis.
If you've ever had to deal with the magnitude of overhead introduced by many of these "solutions", you know what bull-hockey that is.
There was a study in Communications of the ACM several years ago (sorry, can't find the reference) about user interfaces. In the course of the study, the experimenters had people use interfaces that were deliberately poorly designed. They didn't get a single comment on how difficult it was to use this software - people have gotten used to crappy, clumsy software.
Warning - Spoiler follows...
You forgot to give away the stupid crucial scene where the computer learns to understand the futility of war by discovering that tic-tac-toe is unwinnable given perfect play.
It only takes this super-computer maybe half a minute to play all possible couple hundred games of tic-tac-toe.
Not to mention that the defense against missiles coming over the pole in 20 minutes apparently requires mounting lots of large tapes - boy, those are fast.
I continue to be amazed at how many people do command-line work in non-scrollable windows and don't run the command-line within an editor like emacs.
Using a non-scrollable window is simply idiotic: what are you saving - the few thousand bytes of (potentially useful) session history?
Using a scrollable window alone is only a little dumb - you've vaulted yourself into the era of teletype printing terminals: if you need to look at a previous part of the session, you can scroll backwards and search for it using your eyeballs, just like manually searching through a long piece of teletype paper. Why run in an editor which has search commands built-in? Think of the microseconds of computer time you save by wasting seconds and minutes or your own time.
> Without all this accounting bullshit a large chunk of the population could be
> doing something more useful, OTOH, without it
> we wouldn't have built the pyramids in the first place.
Since the pyramids were built by slaves, it's not clear how much accounting bullshit took place.
OTOH, my boss jokes about being a slave-driver which is perhaps more appropriate than she realizes, considering how inefficient slave labor is, being only economic by virtue of its low cost. Oh wait, we outsource a lot too.
It's all starting to make sense.
This is one of the most beloved urban legends of people who need an excuse for their poor luck.
r l2html-21923http://www.webtrading.com/issue18.htm> ). This does not mean the experts are all that great - the score is 26 to 25 againsT the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
0 7665534-search.html?KEYWORDS=dart+picks&COLLECTION =wsjie/6monthrel=url2html-21923http://online.wsj.c om/article/SB115845214007665534-search.html?KEYWOR DS=dart+picks&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month>).
In fact, in the Wall St. Journal's long-running contest, the experts have out-performed the darts 29 to 21 times (ahref=http://www.webtrading.com/issue18.htmrel=u
However, in the less-long-running contest of Wall St. Journal readers versus darts, the readers are getting trounced 13 to 9 (ahref=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1158452140
What is true, and more damning to investment professionals, is our poor performance versus broad-based indexes, which are inexpensive investments.
Are you saying you'd like to have him over for dinner?