Once youve used chrome in a corporate environment, you never go back.
Your experience, obviously, but not mine.
My company supports only IE for corp. apps/sites/etc. Frankly, it works just fine for the corp stuff and there is no compelling need to go to Chrome. Again, I have compared user experience and although Chrome did not give me any problems, it did not do anything for me either so why bother?
For anything else, I use FF. Not hard to have multiple browsers available.
Chrome is OK; I just find it to be a bit of a PITA with things that I want to configure that I can't.
My browser is one of the first things I start up when I turn on my PC, and generally stays open until my PC has to reboot for some reason (which may be anywhere from a week to a month). This is really only possible now because I use Chrome.
I call shenanigans. "[rebooting monthly] is... only possible now [because of Chrome]" is just not true.
I'm running Win7-64bit on a laptop with 6G ram and I use Firefox. FF is always running and I very very seldom kill the process. Like almost never. I reboot about once a month and usually because of something non-related to Windows or FF crashing/hanging. Usually just a Win security update.
I run some heavy memory usage video editing apps and usually have a LOT of terminal windows open, along with multiple desktops. FF has not been an issue.
eh, your mileage may vary but that is my experience.
Went to Chrome for a while to see what the buzz was about. Supposedly faster, cleaner, etc.
Got po'd when I couldn't configure it to operate the way I wanted it to. Just personal taste and not a criticism; to each their own, as they say. However, I did not see any improvement in responsiveness and, for me there was a genuine loss of functionality. Went back to Firefox and have been very happy. Sure it would be nice to have some process options but Mozilla seems to be doing a bang up job of dealing with the various issues that caused process hangs and memory leaks. I can't remember the last time I had to kill an unresponding FF process. Used to happen weekly, even daily. Kudos to the FF team.
For the most part the Firefox version changes have been transparent to me (well, except for tabs - grrrr - but I have been able to customize them to work the way I want). The update cycle is more or less the same with Chrome and IE. If they changed the numbering scheme so it went from, say, 10.17 to 10.18 instead of 17 to 18, there would be less reaction. Or maybe not. Anyways, it is not a huge issue.
Firefox is easily competitive with any other popular browser and is well supported. Don't think I will bother trying a change again for a while unless something truly game changing comes along.
HR is always a bunch of ass-sucking sycophants. That is true in every industry. Never count on meeting an intelligent person is HR. And NEVER count on them as an ally -- they are there for the company, not you. They ONLY time they might take your side is (if they are capable of understanding you) when you explain to them their managers have fucked up so badly, they will likely lose a lawsuit.
Fuck HR. It is always a pink ghetto.
Too true, but you have to understand that the primary purpose of HR is not to hire the best talent available to fill the positions that make the company go. That is completely off the mark.
HR exists to minimize what is the largest expense for most companies: the employee payroll.
Like most divisions/departments in large companies, HR has other priorities but the number one priority is to reduce payroll expense.
Seriously.
That's why they dick with benefits every year and implement performance review processes that largely obscure the fact that total available budget for pay raises was set in a high level executive meeting prior to anyone's review and no one will get $$ recognition outside of preset boundaries.
They also like to screen out unstable personalities, hence the typical psych profile questions. Again, this is not about hiring good people; it's just that when an employee goes off the rails it tends to increase corporate expense drastically.
Typically, the only interviewer at the table with a vested interest in hiring the best fit for the job is the manager of the area with the open position. Usually this person is outnumbered by HR flaks.
So, you are absolutely correct: HR is not your friend. They are the fat trimmers and EVERYONE looks like greasy bacon to them.
It is not surprising that the person in the article was treated so badly. Just means that the particular HR dept has gone cannibalistic and has reduced itself to the point that they can no longer execute an efficient hiring process. Again though, this is not dysfunctional for HR. Making it hard for people to get hired works to make HR's stats look good.
There have been long standing conflicts between holders of surface rights and of mineral rights, at least in Canada.
One of the touch points has been aquifer damage. Generally speaking, the petroleum industry puts up a wall and admits to no effects of petroleum work on aquifer quality. OTOH, it is easy to find farmers and other rural residents who depend on well water and who have personal evidence (anecdotal, of course) of water quality changing after drilling, well maintenance, and seismic exploration work. Even when the damage is obvious, the oil industry goes into a Pythonesque 'Dead Parrot' routine: it was like that before or it is just pure coincidence etc etc.
Or, you know, require water samples to be taken all around the area of the wells for at least a month before drilling begins, then take more samples periodically and compare.
That's pretty basic science.
What is stunning is the lack of monitoring and ongoing study of our (Canadian) underground water resources.
Ground water threats are everywhere: one foreign producer I worked for was having a terrible time with pipe corrosion in the water flood system used to keep pressure up in one of their richest fields. Since the corrosion was primarily caused by bacteria, someone joked about injecting heavy duty bacteriacide into the supply wells. One should be careful about such jokes as it suddenly became a serious agenda item since it was a very cheap and effective solution. It was dropped when someone else pointed out that the thousands of field workers that the company employed depended on the same aquifer as a drinking water source and that the suggested bacteriacide was very effective at killing people.
It isn't just the Big Bad Oil vs. the Little Guy. The Libyan 'man made river' started under the infamous Col. Khaddafi is/was a project generally for the positive benefit of a dry country but of incredible scope and extent with little or no reliable information of what the long term consequences are. Still listening for news on that front.
Sigh. I love humanity; it's just the things people do that scare me.
Er... I included four years of calculus, linear algebra, and number theory in my undergrad degree and never touched a calculator. There was no need. I did use computation tools in some engineering courses but the emphasis was on numbers more than math theory.
You insensitive clod: some of us have difficulty controlling our anger and turn green easily. Nuclear accidents happen and this is the result.
I have difficulty waiting while a graphing calculator crunches numbers . . . crunch plot, crunch plot, crunch plot ad nauseum. I wouldn't hurl it at the wall because I think they are cute and it isn't their fault they are slow. . .
but puny calculators do make me angry! You won't like my math when I'm angry.
Slide rules are interesting because they give visual and tactile feedback about the numbers being manipulated. They also prevent the presentation of ridiculous precision when no level of accuracy is available. Plus the added benefit of forcing the user to keep track of magnitude.
. . . there are some excellent graphing calculator apps for iOS and I am sure Android has a fair selection as well. They do 2D, 3D and solve algebra.
Also there exist a number of HP emulations but I don't know if there are any for TI.
All of them execute at some Warp factor faster than discrete calculators but there are some issues with using a device different from what the school recommends. My experience with guiding my own spawn around the perils of high school math leads me to believe that HSs (in Canada at least) are more interested in teaching button pushing than math. Many teachers have no interest in math and are perplexed when someone has an issue with something such as a different calculator solution.
Besides that, when using alternatives you may get differing results or even some fantastic errors depending on how well written the code is.
[RANT ON] Sorry, but I gotta say this: CALCULATORS OBSTRUCT THE LEARNING OF MATH
phew, had to get that out
My apologies for the caps but it is a rant after all . . .
There is a place for calculators in engineering courses and in some aspects of learning math but you can get a PhD in Math Science without ever getting near a calculator. I saw my kids get all caught up in the numbers to the detriment of understanding the process and theory. When they started doing courses later on (such as physics, biology, chemistry and sociology-er 'stats'), they had to go back and learn some of the fundamentals that had never been emphasized because of the calculator fixation.
Bottom line: use the TI and don't waste time on alternatives. Use that time to learn the theory.
[RANT OFF]
Well, unless of course you are a real nerd (like the rest of us) and do both: learn the math and are obsessive about calculation tools
Only the name "Asperger's Syndrome" has been dropped. The collective set of symptoms and diagnostic criteria are in the DSM and there is no danger of the diagnosis disappearing. Just don't label it "Asperger's".
Apparently in some parts of the world (eg US) health insurers don't provide support because the word "Autism" is not in the name. If the label doesn't say autism then I guess it ain't autism. Go figure.
IMHO this is a particularly bad summary description.
In general, damages in Canada are limited to real damage. ie: your fender is damaged in a car accident then it is strictly body shop charges (assuming no injury).
A record company would have to show real loss which is typically the actual lost sale and not some imaginary extension to what might have happened. Criminal fines are different though but it is fairly well established that people are fined somewhat proportionate to the crime.
In other words, there is nothing new here with regards to not allowing disproportionate punishment.
A key element of education is teaching people how to think well . . . although apparently critical thinking is not well received in some jurisdictions by some political parties.
There is a body of research that indicates people's ability to reason is enhanced (and actual neural growth occurs) when we are exposed to new and diverse information and methods.
Math may be a useless life skill for some people but the process of learning it is important and leaves the student changed forever. This can be said of all subjects. We don't have to learn everything in depth but it is important to have diversity in education and not narrowly pipeline everyone.
The process of learning a subject that is a stretch for an individual is more important IMHO than the actual subject itself. I dare say that most of the folk I work with do not directly use any of their comp-sci or other university subjects. Most are immersed in things they learned as side effects (Unix admin or such) or things that they had to learn on the job and for which they had no prior training ( business analysis, project management, leadership ).
Somehow, struggling through an AI course in symbolic representation helps a person to become an excellent business analyst.
Go figure.
That said, there have to be alternatives to the educational factories of elementary-highschool and the prescribed jump hoops of higher institutions. There have to be advancement paths which do not arbitrarily cut people off who are otherwise capable.
From direct experience I know there is an advantage to a team when the members have a diversity of education levels and life experiences.
I have trouble with this as well. Seems to me that the process plant I worked at before 1975 had RSX11 multitasking/multiuser/multiterminal systems in the dev lab that used terminal to terminal messaging. One of the programmers wrote a macro11 program that associated terminals with people working there and set up a message by name system that would drop received messages into a directory and notify the terminal user. As soon as we started hooking two computers together with async serial comms and then Decnet, the messaging was hacked to go over the links. I also remember multiple hacks using VT100 cursor commands to create screen editors and message viewers. uh. . . that's what we did for fun in between writing Fortran code to monitor oil pipelines and production facilities.
Not email by todays standards (more like a crudely addressed IM) but...
I am sure that as soon as there was a second terminal on a system, someone figured out a way to use it to communicate by text. I am just as sure that multiple people had the same idea at more or less the same time. Like as soon as they were exposed to hardware/software and had some time to futz with it.
Surely techies in the 60's were doing similar things with their Cobol/Fortran/JCL IBMs and CDCs.
Exactly. The difference between a symptom of something else going on or just a characteristic of neural-typical behaviour is not always clear. In the end, many professionals just look at whether a person's life is being hindered or damaged as versus worrying about whether someone is clinically autistic. At this point in my life, I am not sure what exactly "normal" is.
The diagnosis aspect is so difficult that ADD/ADHD is not to be diagnosed by a single health professional but has to come from an agreement amongst a range of experienced specialists (eg psychiatrist + pediatrician + occupational therapist). Many Aspies (Asperger's Syndrome) do quite well in life and are never formally diagnosed. Watch a sports channel. I'm sure there will be an Aspie on there somewhere.
I really don't care if someone is ignorant enough to read "requires institutionalization" into mild joking about OC characteristics. That's their problem and not mine. I would rather be more open and accepting of differences than to police what I say in case some idiot misinterprets my words.
Many characteristics are common across "normal" and atypical personalities and some of the techniques that work with autism also work quite well with neural-typicals. Focus/obsession pahtayto/pahtahto. Go figure. "Social stories" is a good technique to learn and works well with Ferengi (marketing droids), interfering executives, and difficult techies. eh, I have to be a little more subtle using it than with an autistic person but it still works.
It's a good method that helps to build consensus by aligning the opinions of difficult people to project goals and team decisions. You could look at the following link although it may not be clear how the method is helpful. Basically, it is a way of moving someone forward along a positive path without being threatening.
er... one more thing: People who are classified as OC or who are ADD are not "insane". Good grief.
Also, many of the people I work with actually are somewhat symptomatic of various ASDs (autistic spectrum disorder). It doesn't make them clinically OCD but the characteristics are there and carry both advantages and disadvantages in work and life.
I won't disagree with you about your points re OCD and that people can focus without being debilitated. Sometimes a clinical diagnosis of a disorder will depend on whether the sum of characteristics is debilitating or causes life problems. Me: I see nothing wrong with laughing at myself and fellow types while pointing out that one person's disability is another's advantage.
As far as being "Morlocks", we are all susceptible to caricature and stereotype. Could be worse: we could be "Fubar" oil-field trash headbangers and still be IT nerds. C'est la vie.
Rosemary Greenway has been playing passages of opera and orchestral symphonies on the radio to the animals at her stables for more than 20 years, convinced that it helps soothe them.
While not all of her staff are quite as fond of the output of Classic FM as she is, Mrs Greenway, 62, kept the radio tuned to the station religiously while mucking out because of the apparent benefits.
But she has dropped the practice after being told that she must pay a £99 annual licence fee as it constitutes a "performance".
Because her stables, the Malthouse Equestrian Centre in Bushton, Wilts, employs more than two people it is treated in the same way as shops, bars and cafés which have to apply for a licence to play the radio.
People claim to concentrate better because they like to work with the music on. I am sure they like it but not so sure that headphones improve productivity. However, when I am outside doing carpentry work (building hay sheds and the like), I like a radio or blaster going and I really thing my accuracy/productivity goes up. Headphones would be too much even if they were safe in that situation. With an ambient source of music/sound, I can work and be aware. With headphones, I lose a sense of where I am. Same thing happens to me in the office so I just don't use headphones. OTOH, with low walled cubes and lots of speakerphone meetings going on and other noise, headphones can be a real refuge. Perhaps noise-cancelling ear protectors would be better though.
FWIW: Another common thing I hear from people is that they are good "multi-taskers" and although some people are better than others at juggling tasks, I have yet to meet anyone whose productivity is better when they multitask than when they single-task serially. That is, when they concentrate on one task only and see it through with minimal task switching. Obviously there are realities and not everyone can single task because the jobs are not always set up that way. However, when I do my manager thing and work to remove barriers so the productive people can fly, top of my to-do list is to reduce the complexity and variety of responsibilities covered by a role.
The hard part is initially getting people to focus and not be distracted by other demands. Many IT people (myself included) are OCD / ADHD symptomatic to some extent so there can be difficulty. Incoming phone call redirection and police tape help. After a couple of weeks in the work protection program, most people show real signs of reduced anxiety and have better project task completion. I keep metrics. Single threading works.
Nice thing about OC symptoms is the obsessive part takes over when the distractions are controlled. The compulsive part is productive as well because if the environment is limited (good project management) the project person will be very thorough about covering all aspects that come his or her way.
Funny though, although telephones seem to be productivity damaging, IM is just the opposite. IM seems to hit a sweet spot for communication without being too distracting. Email is better than phones but sometimes people get caught up in message threads. Voice calls are the work of Mordac the Preventer.
IMHObservation anyways.
Feel free to disagree but I get great results. BTW, I never tell people they are bad at multitasking; I always say they are great at it but I would like to get them to focus for a purpose, temporarily.
Also, I often hear that women multitask better than men but that is not my experience. We are all bad at multitasking although in somewhat different ways. I don't publicly say this. The only thing worse would be starting a religious argument.
... one more thing: this speaks to my point that Motorola is good at making great cell phone radio electronics. They have about 50 years experience with communication gear and it shows.
They should be making radios for every phone the way other manufacturers make displays, wifi chipsets, etc. Apple could certainly benefit from Motorola RF guts and every Japanese/Korean phone I have used has terrible RF characteristics. Its like they never expect you to be more than 500 m from a cell site.
My provider has five towers more or less equidistant from me: closest is 15 km, furthest is 21 km. The nearest towers have a HV transmission line in the fresnel zone about 5 km away.
I got good reception on my 3GS if I held it upside down, my 4 was useless and the 4S is just a touch better than useless.
Lumia 800 works if you take the back off but that is kind of inconvenient.
My wife's Moto W385 and my Defy are never worse than 94 db and always connect. Best I get on the 3GS is 96 db but only briefly. Normal for it is about -110 to -116. The 4 and 4S sometimes get a good signal but usually show nothing.
Samsung and LG phones reception is generally non-existant at my location.
Clearly, operation as a PHONE is low on the priority list for most smartphone designs.
Slashdot Mirror
Once youve used chrome in a corporate environment, you never go back.
Your experience, obviously, but not mine.
My company supports only IE for corp. apps/sites/etc. Frankly, it works just fine for the corp stuff and there is no compelling need to go to Chrome. Again, I have compared user experience and although Chrome did not give me any problems, it did not do anything for me either so why bother?
For anything else, I use FF. Not hard to have multiple browsers available.
Chrome is OK; I just find it to be a bit of a PITA with things that I want to configure that I can't.
My browser is one of the first things I start up when I turn on my PC, and generally stays open until my PC has to reboot for some reason (which may be anywhere from a week to a month). This is really only possible now because I use Chrome.
I call shenanigans. "[rebooting monthly] is ... only possible now [because of Chrome]" is just not true.
I'm running Win7-64bit on a laptop with 6G ram and I use Firefox. FF is always running and I very very seldom kill the process. Like almost never. I reboot about once a month and usually because of something non-related to Windows or FF crashing/hanging. Usually just a Win security update.
I run some heavy memory usage video editing apps and usually have a LOT of terminal windows open, along with multiple desktops. FF has not been an issue.
eh, your mileage may vary but that is my experience.
Went to Chrome for a while to see what the buzz was about. Supposedly faster, cleaner, etc.
Got po'd when I couldn't configure it to operate the way I wanted it to. Just personal taste and not a criticism; to each their own, as they say. However, I did not see any improvement in responsiveness and, for me there was a genuine loss of functionality. Went back to Firefox and have been very happy. Sure it would be nice to have some process options but Mozilla seems to be doing a bang up job of dealing with the various issues that caused process hangs and memory leaks. I can't remember the last time I had to kill an unresponding FF process. Used to happen weekly, even daily. Kudos to the FF team.
For the most part the Firefox version changes have been transparent to me (well, except for tabs - grrrr - but I have been able to customize them to work the way I want). The update cycle is more or less the same with Chrome and IE. If they changed the numbering scheme so it went from, say, 10.17 to 10.18 instead of 17 to 18, there would be less reaction. Or maybe not. Anyways, it is not a huge issue.
Firefox is easily competitive with any other popular browser and is well supported. Don't think I will bother trying a change again for a while unless something truly game changing comes along.
HR is always a bunch of ass-sucking sycophants. That is true in every industry. Never count on meeting an intelligent person is HR. And NEVER count on them as an ally -- they are there for the company, not you. They ONLY time they might take your side is (if they are capable of understanding you) when you explain to them their managers have fucked up so badly, they will likely lose a lawsuit.
Fuck HR. It is always a pink ghetto.
Too true, but you have to understand that the primary purpose of HR is not to hire the best talent available to fill the positions that make the company go. That is completely off the mark.
HR exists to minimize what is the largest expense for most companies: the employee payroll.
Like most divisions/departments in large companies, HR has other priorities but the number one priority is to reduce payroll expense.
Seriously.
That's why they dick with benefits every year and implement performance review processes that largely obscure the fact that total available budget for pay raises was set in a high level executive meeting prior to anyone's review and no one will get $$ recognition outside of preset boundaries.
They also like to screen out unstable personalities, hence the typical psych profile questions. Again, this is not about hiring good people; it's just that when an employee goes off the rails it tends to increase corporate expense drastically.
Typically, the only interviewer at the table with a vested interest in hiring the best fit for the job is the manager of the area with the open position. Usually this person is outnumbered by HR flaks.
So, you are absolutely correct: HR is not your friend. They are the fat trimmers and EVERYONE looks like greasy bacon to them.
It is not surprising that the person in the article was treated so badly. Just means that the particular HR dept has gone cannibalistic and has reduced itself to the point that they can no longer execute an efficient hiring process. Again though, this is not dysfunctional for HR. Making it hard for people to get hired works to make HR's stats look good.
Ooooops, there goes my cynicism again. ;->
There have been long standing conflicts between holders of surface rights and of mineral rights, at least in Canada.
One of the touch points has been aquifer damage. Generally speaking, the petroleum industry puts up a wall and admits to no effects of petroleum work on aquifer quality. OTOH, it is easy to find farmers and other rural residents who depend on well water and who have personal evidence (anecdotal, of course) of water quality changing after drilling, well maintenance, and seismic exploration work. Even when the damage is obvious, the oil industry goes into a Pythonesque 'Dead Parrot' routine: it was like that before or it is just pure coincidence etc etc.
Or, you know, require water samples to be taken all around the area of the wells for at least a month before drilling begins, then take more samples periodically and compare.
That's pretty basic science.
What is stunning is the lack of monitoring and ongoing study of our (Canadian) underground water resources.
Ground water threats are everywhere: one foreign producer I worked for was having a terrible time with pipe corrosion in the water flood system used to keep pressure up in one of their richest fields. Since the corrosion was primarily caused by bacteria, someone joked about injecting heavy duty bacteriacide into the supply wells. One should be careful about such jokes as it suddenly became a serious agenda item since it was a very cheap and effective solution. It was dropped when someone else pointed out that the thousands of field workers that the company employed depended on the same aquifer as a drinking water source and that the suggested bacteriacide was very effective at killing people.
It isn't just the Big Bad Oil vs. the Little Guy. The Libyan 'man made river' started under the infamous Col. Khaddafi is/was a project generally for the positive benefit of a dry country but of incredible scope and extent with little or no reliable information of what the long term consequences are. Still listening for news on that front.
Sigh. I love humanity; it's just the things people do that scare me.
Slide rules also have the benefit of working in all weather conditions. .
Hmmmmmmm . . . I have an old K&E bamboo core that needs a little lubrication when the humidity is high but it does still work; it just gets sticky.
The down side is having to fight off the hordes of ladies who find you irresistible for using a slide rule.
. . . ahhhhhh yeah ..... no. Made me smile though! I wonder what is more attractive: linear or circular rules?
Er ... I included four years of calculus, linear algebra, and number theory in my undergrad degree and never touched a calculator. There was no need. I did use computation tools in some engineering courses but the emphasis was on numbers more than math theory.
And you are welcome. ;-)
Cheers
I respectfully disagree. There is no place for a calculator in High School math. It adds nothing to the experience.
The story is different if you aren't teaching math as a subject but are using math for another purpose and need the numbers.
But everybody is entitled to an opinion . . . no matter how wrong
Cheers
PDP 8I with the flashy light panel!
Fat finger programming the front panel to load it the bootstrap.
Sigh ....
It used to take hours to do something really useful with a computer ; now it takes hours but we have lots and lots of pixels.
Thanks! Been a long time but APL was neat! Now if I could only find a FOCAL interpreter to run my old DEC games.
You insensitive clod: some of us have difficulty controlling our anger and turn green easily. Nuclear accidents happen and this is the result.
I have difficulty waiting while a graphing calculator crunches numbers . . . crunch plot, crunch plot, crunch plot ad nauseum. I wouldn't hurl it at the wall because I think they are cute and it isn't their fault they are slow. . .
but puny calculators do make me angry! You won't like my math when I'm angry.
Slide rules are interesting because they give visual and tactile feedback about the numbers being manipulated. They also prevent the presentation of ridiculous precision when no level of accuracy is available. Plus the added benefit of forcing the user to keep track of magnitude.
[salivating noisily] slide roools! mmmmm...........
. . . there are some excellent graphing calculator apps for iOS and I am sure Android has a fair selection as well. They do 2D, 3D and solve algebra.
Also there exist a number of HP emulations but I don't know if there are any for TI.
All of them execute at some Warp factor faster than discrete calculators but there are some issues with using a device different from what the school recommends. My experience with guiding my own spawn around the perils of high school math leads me to believe that HSs (in Canada at least) are more interested in teaching button pushing than math. Many teachers have no interest in math and are perplexed when someone has an issue with something such as a different calculator solution.
Besides that, when using alternatives you may get differing results or even some fantastic errors depending on how well written the code is.
[RANT ON]
Sorry, but I gotta say this: CALCULATORS OBSTRUCT THE LEARNING OF MATH
phew, had to get that out
My apologies for the caps but it is a rant after all . . .
There is a place for calculators in engineering courses and in some aspects of learning math but you can get a PhD in Math Science without ever getting near a calculator. I saw my kids get all caught up in the numbers to the detriment of understanding the process and theory. When they started doing courses later on (such as physics, biology, chemistry and sociology-er 'stats'), they had to go back and learn some of the fundamentals that had never been emphasized because of the calculator fixation.
Bottom line: use the TI and don't waste time on alternatives. Use that time to learn the theory.
[RANT OFF]
Well, unless of course you are a real nerd (like the rest of us) and do both: learn the math and are obsessive about calculation tools
Cheers
FWIW:
Only the name "Asperger's Syndrome" has been dropped. The collective set of symptoms and diagnostic criteria are in the DSM and there is no danger of the diagnosis disappearing. Just don't label it "Asperger's".
Apparently in some parts of the world (eg US) health insurers don't provide support because the word "Autism" is not in the name. If the label doesn't say autism then I guess it ain't autism. Go figure.
IMHO this is a particularly bad summary description.
In general, damages in Canada are limited to real damage. ie: your fender is damaged in a car accident then it is strictly body shop charges (assuming no injury).
A record company would have to show real loss which is typically the actual lost sale and not some imaginary extension to what might have happened. Criminal fines are different though but it is fairly well established that people are fined somewhat proportionate to the crime.
In other words, there is nothing new here with regards to not allowing disproportionate punishment.
A key element of education is teaching people how to think well . . . although apparently critical thinking is not well received in some jurisdictions by some political parties.
There is a body of research that indicates people's ability to reason is enhanced (and actual neural growth occurs) when we are exposed to new and diverse information and methods.
Math may be a useless life skill for some people but the process of learning it is important and leaves the student changed forever. This can be said of all subjects. We don't have to learn everything in depth but it is important to have diversity in education and not narrowly pipeline everyone.
The process of learning a subject that is a stretch for an individual is more important IMHO than the actual subject itself. I dare say that most of the folk I work with do not directly use any of their comp-sci or other university subjects. Most are immersed in things they learned as side effects (Unix admin or such) or things that they had to learn on the job and for which they had no prior training ( business analysis, project management, leadership ).
Somehow, struggling through an AI course in symbolic representation helps a person to become an excellent business analyst.
Go figure.
That said, there have to be alternatives to the educational factories of elementary-highschool and the prescribed jump hoops of higher institutions. There have to be advancement paths which do not arbitrarily cut people off who are otherwise capable.
From direct experience I know there is an advantage to a team when the members have a diversity of education levels and life experiences.
For_any subject where subject isanelementof all_subjects_under_the_sun
there_exists a_person where a_person isanelementof humanity
such_that
subject is_useless_to a_person
and
a_person in_some_way_trashes subject
and
a_person claims world_will_be_better_off
Consider as well that the fella is a poli-sci. ;->
a camera that truly matches the detail zooming capability of webcams on NCIS, CSI whatever and so on.
I have trouble with this as well. Seems to me that the process plant I worked at before 1975 had RSX11 multitasking/multiuser/multiterminal systems in the dev lab that used terminal to terminal messaging. One of the programmers wrote a macro11 program that associated terminals with people working there and set up a message by name system that would drop received messages into a directory and notify the terminal user. As soon as we started hooking two computers together with async serial comms and then Decnet, the messaging was hacked to go over the links. I also remember multiple hacks using VT100 cursor commands to create screen editors and message viewers. uh. . . that's what we did for fun in between writing Fortran code to monitor oil pipelines and production facilities.
Not email by todays standards (more like a crudely addressed IM) but...
I am sure that as soon as there was a second terminal on a system, someone figured out a way to use it to communicate by text. I am just as sure that multiple people had the same idea at more or less the same time. Like as soon as they were exposed to hardware/software and had some time to futz with it.
Surely techies in the 60's were doing similar things with their Cobol/Fortran/JCL IBMs and CDCs.
Exactly. The difference between a symptom of something else going on or just a characteristic of neural-typical behaviour is not always clear. In the end, many professionals just look at whether a person's life is being hindered or damaged as versus worrying about whether someone is clinically autistic. At this point in my life, I am not sure what exactly "normal" is.
The diagnosis aspect is so difficult that ADD/ADHD is not to be diagnosed by a single health professional but has to come from an agreement amongst a range of experienced specialists (eg psychiatrist + pediatrician + occupational therapist). Many Aspies (Asperger's Syndrome) do quite well in life and are never formally diagnosed. Watch a sports channel. I'm sure there will be an Aspie on there somewhere.
I really don't care if someone is ignorant enough to read "requires institutionalization" into mild joking about OC characteristics. That's their problem and not mine. I would rather be more open and accepting of differences than to police what I say in case some idiot misinterprets my words.
Many characteristics are common across "normal" and atypical personalities and some of the techniques that work with autism also work quite well with neural-typicals. Focus/obsession pahtayto/pahtahto. Go figure. "Social stories" is a good technique to learn and works well with Ferengi (marketing droids), interfering executives, and difficult techies. eh, I have to be a little more subtle using it than with an autistic person but it still works.
It's a good method that helps to build consensus by aligning the opinions of difficult people to project goals and team decisions. You could look at the following link although it may not be clear how the method is helpful. Basically, it is a way of moving someone forward along a positive path without being threatening.
http://www.thegraycenter.org/social-stories
Point is that in many cases we are all the same, just to different degrees.
er ... one more thing: People who are classified as OC or who are ADD are not "insane". Good grief.
Also, many of the people I work with actually are somewhat symptomatic of various ASDs (autistic spectrum disorder). It doesn't make them clinically OCD but the characteristics are there and carry both advantages and disadvantages in work and life.
I won't disagree with you about your points re OCD and that people can focus without being debilitated. Sometimes a clinical diagnosis of a disorder will depend on whether the sum of characteristics is debilitating or causes life problems. Me: I see nothing wrong with laughing at myself and fellow types while pointing out that one person's disability is another's advantage.
As far as being "Morlocks", we are all susceptible to caricature and stereotype. Could be worse: we could be "Fubar" oil-field trash headbangers and still be IT nerds. C'est la vie.
Cheers
At least in the UK
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5061004/Woman-who-plays-classical-music-to-soothe-horses-told-to-get-licence.html
Rosemary Greenway has been playing passages of opera and orchestral symphonies on the radio to the animals at her stables for more than 20 years, convinced that it helps soothe them.
While not all of her staff are quite as fond of the output of Classic FM as she is, Mrs Greenway, 62, kept the radio tuned to the station religiously while mucking out because of the apparent benefits.
But she has dropped the practice after being told that she must pay a £99 annual licence fee as it constitutes a "performance".
Because her stables, the Malthouse Equestrian Centre in Bushton, Wilts, employs more than two people it is treated in the same way as shops, bars and cafés which have to apply for a licence to play the radio.
People claim to concentrate better because they like to work with the music on. I am sure they like it but not so sure that headphones improve productivity. However, when I am outside doing carpentry work (building hay sheds and the like), I like a radio or blaster going and I really thing my accuracy/productivity goes up. Headphones would be too much even if they were safe in that situation. With an ambient source of music/sound, I can work and be aware. With headphones, I lose a sense of where I am. Same thing happens to me in the office so I just don't use headphones. OTOH, with low walled cubes and lots of speakerphone meetings going on and other noise, headphones can be a real refuge. Perhaps noise-cancelling ear protectors would be better though.
FWIW: Another common thing I hear from people is that they are good "multi-taskers" and although some people are better than others at juggling tasks, I have yet to meet anyone whose productivity is better when they multitask than when they single-task serially. That is, when they concentrate on one task only and see it through with minimal task switching. Obviously there are realities and not everyone can single task because the jobs are not always set up that way. However, when I do my manager thing and work to remove barriers so the productive people can fly, top of my to-do list is to reduce the complexity and variety of responsibilities covered by a role.
The hard part is initially getting people to focus and not be distracted by other demands. Many IT people (myself included) are OCD / ADHD symptomatic to some extent so there can be difficulty. Incoming phone call redirection and police tape help. After a couple of weeks in the work protection program, most people show real signs of reduced anxiety and have better project task completion. I keep metrics. Single threading works.
Nice thing about OC symptoms is the obsessive part takes over when the distractions are controlled. The compulsive part is productive as well because if the environment is limited (good project management) the project person will be very thorough about covering all aspects that come his or her way.
Funny though, although telephones seem to be productivity damaging, IM is just the opposite. IM seems to hit a sweet spot for communication without being too distracting. Email is better than phones but sometimes people get caught up in message threads. Voice calls are the work of Mordac the Preventer.
IMHObservation anyways.
Feel free to disagree but I get great results. BTW, I never tell people they are bad at multitasking; I always say they are great at it but I would like to get them to focus for a purpose, temporarily.
Also, I often hear that women multitask better than men but that is not my experience. We are all bad at multitasking although in somewhat different ways. I don't publicly say this. The only thing worse would be starting a religious argument.
... one more thing: this speaks to my point that Motorola is good at making great cell phone radio electronics. They have about 50 years experience with communication gear and it shows.
They should be making radios for every phone the way other manufacturers make displays, wifi chipsets, etc. Apple could certainly benefit from Motorola RF guts and every Japanese/Korean phone I have used has terrible RF characteristics. Its like they never expect you to be more than 500 m from a cell site.
My provider has five towers more or less equidistant from me: closest is 15 km, furthest is 21 km. The nearest towers have a HV transmission line in the fresnel zone about 5 km away.
I got good reception on my 3GS if I held it upside down, my 4 was useless and the 4S is just a touch better than useless.
Lumia 800 works if you take the back off but that is kind of inconvenient.
My wife's Moto W385 and my Defy are never worse than 94 db and always connect. Best I get on the 3GS is 96 db but only briefly. Normal for it is about -110 to -116. The 4 and 4S sometimes get a good signal but usually show nothing.
Samsung and LG phones reception is generally non-existant at my location.
Clearly, operation as a PHONE is low on the priority list for most smartphone designs.