For work-related things, of course people aren't likely to rely on a social network site. But that doesn't mean that when they get home, that won't still be their main source to keep in touch with their friends. Sure, you want some things to last, but would you really want an archive of every time you said to a friend "Hey, wanna get pizza tomorrow?" or "Check out this funny clip on YouTube?" Those emails get deleted anyhow (at least, I delete them).
But I am not going to write a note to a family member about a significant issue using AIM
Funny, I've had some fairly serious conversations with my family over IM. Just a couple days ago, my mom and sister and I had a three-way chat about caring for my grandma who just broke her hip. It worked better than emails back and forth, and we had a record of it, unlike a phone call. Also, more work-related, I work on a grant with about 5-6 different institutions. Yes, a lot of the work gets done over email and a collaboration website. We also have weekly video conference meetings, during which most of the professors are also talking to each other on IM about side questions, technical glitches, etc. All of those technologies aid in the collaboration in one way or another.
Of course email has advantages for some uses. But social networking sites have the advantage for some other uses, IM for some others, texting for others, voice phone calls for others, and some to-be-invented technology will be just perfect for still other uses in a few years.
I certainly do use email, but the only people from college I'm in regular touch with are those who are on livejournal or facebook - even though that doesn't include some of the people I was closest to in college. Why? Because it takes so much less effort. I get a page (friends page on LJ, home page on FB) with a list of everything anyone I know has done/said/posted today. I read about what everyone is up to at once and reply where I feel like it. My other friends, I have to email them and hope for a reply to find out what they're up to, and to send them updates I have to email them all individually.
Posting to LJ or FB is like sending out a mass email, without the apology for sending out an impersonal mass email. And since everyone can see it, multiple people can get in on one conversation. Or you can send various forms of private or semi-private messages within either website. I definitely don't think it's MORE limited than email at all. Sure, it's less personal, but it's more personal than the personal email that I never remember to get around to sending, which is just about all of them.
I had the same thought... As though all boys would be interested in it, but only nerdy girls would. I think the same proportion of boys and girls would enjoy it - and that's nowhere near 100% for either gender.
Yeah, but unfortunately I'm sure there's a decent chunk of used machines out there that fit into that category, and will not go easily on freecycle or craigslist. I'm not sure what you do with them if you can't find a recycling program.
A couple years ago I tried to get rid of a 166mhz Dell running Redhat 6.5 (it couldn't take anything newer than that) on Freecycle. Couldn't give the thing away, and this was in a college town. The local thrift stores wouldn't take anything more than 5 years old, either. Luckily, my school started a computer recycling program so I was finally able to give it them.
The fact is, tuition generally pays for only a small percentage of a school's operating costs. The rest comes from research grants, alumni donations, and interest on their endowment (and possibly taxes for a public school). Even a small, bachelor's-only college has a ton of support staff, buildings, equipment, etc to pay for. But remember that unless you go to one of those, research is as much a part of your school's mission as teaching is. In fact, your professors are mainly there to do research. Most of them, even the ones who do enjoy teaching, only teach because that's what the school makes them do so they can do their research the rest of the time. All that research means WAY more staff, equipment, and buildings are needed - not to mention paying graduate students and postdocs, which are both for all intents and purposes entry-level professors that small colleges don't hire.
But before you bemoan paying for all that when all you want is an education, remember what I just said about your professors. If your school didn't spend money to attract the best faculty it can - which means giving them the space and resources to do their research - they wouldn't be able to give you the quality of education you went there to get.
Why did you go to your large state school instead of a smaller branch campus? Probably because you know the main campus is better than the branches. And that's because they have top faculty who are doing top research, which costs a lot of money.
So if you like one song, discovering that you don't like the artist's other songs will make you not like that song anymore?
Besides, a decade ago, you pretty much had to take the plunge on the album before you found out whether you liked it or not (unless you happened to have a friends who owned it to borrow from). There are reviews, sure, but who's to say you have the same taste as the reviewer? At least now you can listen to clips first, and often entire streaming songs.
A conservative wants you to give your money to the government so the governmnet can give it to him. He says he's against taxes, but he's only against himself paying taxes. If you don't pay yours he's up in arms.
I think you're confusing "conservative" with "Republican" here. I know, it's an easy mistake to make these days.
I believe this is a situation where "RTFA" is an appropriate response. You had no idea that this was about a book rather than a website, and you had no idea that she has been long planning to write a similar book whose sales might suffer due to this other book. You just keep digging yourself a deeper hole with every reply.
(For the record, I DON'T think sales of her encyclopedia would suffer - aside from the fact that millions of people will snatch up anything with her name on it, it's well-known that she has tons of notes for character backgrounds and side plots that never made it into the books, which people are dying to read about in her encyclopedia and the Lexicon won't have.)
Well of course rumble strips, as normally used, are there for a safety reason. I never said they weren't. But this "talking road" thing definitely does not serve a useful purpose, just adds annoyance. In the case I was talking about, the lanes were shifted so that the shoulder became the right lane, so everyone has to drive over the rumble strip to change lanes. They are not serving their usual purpose.
Unless you've got a sleeping child (or dog, in my case) in the backseat. That's the biggest annoyance for this kind of thing, after tire and road wear - sometimes you just don't WANT sudden loud noises when you're driving (actually, you probably never do, just b/c startling a driver isn't good either). A path I drive often has had a stretch recently where the lane is shifted and you have to go over the rumble strips to drive on the shoulder. The rumble strips always wake up my whiny dog and I have to listen to him until he gets back to sleep.
The username "Lena" is kind of a tipoff, y'know. This is why I have my gender in my signature - but then you get people who don't read signatures, and when I post something particularly girly assume I'm a very effeminate man or something. It does get grating.
You may not see this reply, since you're posting AC, but I'll try anyway...
How did you get involved this way? Is there a particular philanthropic/volunteering group you started out with, and then took on this village on your own? Or did you somehow get in contact with them yourself?
Considering I've been hearing about the OLPC constantly for years so it's permanently etched in my brain, and this post is the first I've heard of the Asus one, I don't think the upstaging has gone very well.
I'm not american, and I'd never heard of it. But when I clicked on the article, the article had a link to google's page about it, which explains it all.
Now, textbook companies, that's who they REALLY need to go after. The price gouging, the constant "new editions" that are just rearranged so you can't buy used, it's insane. And it's not like most textbook authors exactly get rich with them. I've often wondered why more prominent researchers don't write intro textbooks and self-publish or go with a smaller publishing house; they could get a bigger chunk of the profits while charging students less. But then, a lot of people who are prominent enough to get a self-published textbook used in schools probably don't even realize that's an option (older scientists aren't necessarily any more up on technology outside of their field than any other average schmoe).
Researchers, amazingly, aren't the only people who might be able to make use of research. For example, I once posted the text from an article from the New England Journal of Medicine to a cancer mailing list I'm on because it contained important information that could help people make treatment decisions, but only those of us with access to the journal would be able to see it. Another possibility: I do educational research. Gee, it sure would be great if teachers could actually read it and use it improve their practice, since that's why we're doing it in the first place. But most public schools do not subscribe to academic journals.
Now, I definitely wonder how this will all shake out financially. But saying that there's no access problem just b/c the researchers themselves can get the journals doesn't make sense.
Nearly all the bathrooms in MIT used to be men's rooms, then they converted half to women's rooms at some point. Which is why you don't find pairs of M/W bathrooms like in most buildings - instead, when you find a men's room, you go up or down a flight of stairs and you'll find a women's room directly above or below it (at least, in the older infinite corridor section of campus). I'm guessing bldg 20 would have had its bathrooms similarly converted, so that it was about half and half.
Also, I've always heard that a large part of the collaborativeness found in 20 was because several disparate departments were kind of shoved in there helter-skelter - so there were linguists down the hall from music professors around the corner from the Tech Model Railroad Club. I'm not sure how much the physical layout had to do with it - I didn't go in there much (it was torn down my sophomore year), but I remember most of the layout being pretty standard hallways.
Yeah, but that's on a much more abstract level. With kids, it's on the most literal level possible. At least when you cover an adult's eyes, they still realize that just because they can't see you doesn't mean you can't see them. And if you bring two adults into a room, hide an object, remove Adult A, and move the object to a new location, then ask Adult B where Adult A will look for the object, Adult B will realize that Adult A didn't see the object get moved and reply that A will look in the original location. Little kids very literally don't realize that other people can possess different knowledge than they do.
Oh yeah, sure, the grammar nazis aren't trolls, but the people who oppose them totally are. It's okay, moderators. I'm sure your efforts will go a long way toward ensuring that our language remains pristine.
As a not-yet-phd'ed proto-psychologist, here's how I'd put it: Kids this age are unclear on what has agency and what doesn't. They are also unclear on the division between themselves and other people - they think that everyone can see what they see, for instance, and knows what they are thinking or feeling to a certain extent and thinks/feels the same way. Add these two together, and they attribute agency to something that *acts* like other things with agency, plus assume that because it has agency, it thinks/feels/has the same needs as they do.
I have to take this opportunity to advertise for a former employer of mine, Borders Books. The main reason I loved working for them was a complete lack of this kind of policy. I never felt like I was pushing anything on any customer. Yes, we were supposed to make suggestions - but they were just that, a suggestion for another author or series or section of the store/genre that we honestly thought the customer would find interesting - OR mentioning a current sale or coupon. I always felt like I was actually providing useful information, rather than pushing for a sale, and it was quite common for people to thank you for it.
I moved somewhere without Borders, and got a job at Books-A-Million. The first day of training was all about selling the discount cards, and how every customer who walks through the door must be offered one, and they track how many you sell per month, etc etc. I don't know what the second day of training covered, b/c I didn't go back. I could never work in that kind of environment.
So Borders is at the top of my bookstore chain list for life, b/c of that and other very customer-friendly policies that made me happy to work there.
Slashdot Mirror
But I am not going to write a note to a family member about a significant issue using AIM
Funny, I've had some fairly serious conversations with my family over IM. Just a couple days ago, my mom and sister and I had a three-way chat about caring for my grandma who just broke her hip. It worked better than emails back and forth, and we had a record of it, unlike a phone call. Also, more work-related, I work on a grant with about 5-6 different institutions. Yes, a lot of the work gets done over email and a collaboration website. We also have weekly video conference meetings, during which most of the professors are also talking to each other on IM about side questions, technical glitches, etc. All of those technologies aid in the collaboration in one way or another.
Of course email has advantages for some uses. But social networking sites have the advantage for some other uses, IM for some others, texting for others, voice phone calls for others, and some to-be-invented technology will be just perfect for still other uses in a few years.
Posting to LJ or FB is like sending out a mass email, without the apology for sending out an impersonal mass email. And since everyone can see it, multiple people can get in on one conversation. Or you can send various forms of private or semi-private messages within either website. I definitely don't think it's MORE limited than email at all. Sure, it's less personal, but it's more personal than the personal email that I never remember to get around to sending, which is just about all of them.
I had the same thought... As though all boys would be interested in it, but only nerdy girls would. I think the same proportion of boys and girls would enjoy it - and that's nowhere near 100% for either gender.
Yeah, but unfortunately I'm sure there's a decent chunk of used machines out there that fit into that category, and will not go easily on freecycle or craigslist. I'm not sure what you do with them if you can't find a recycling program.
A couple years ago I tried to get rid of a 166mhz Dell running Redhat 6.5 (it couldn't take anything newer than that) on Freecycle. Couldn't give the thing away, and this was in a college town. The local thrift stores wouldn't take anything more than 5 years old, either. Luckily, my school started a computer recycling program so I was finally able to give it them.
But before you bemoan paying for all that when all you want is an education, remember what I just said about your professors. If your school didn't spend money to attract the best faculty it can - which means giving them the space and resources to do their research - they wouldn't be able to give you the quality of education you went there to get.
Why did you go to your large state school instead of a smaller branch campus? Probably because you know the main campus is better than the branches. And that's because they have top faculty who are doing top research, which costs a lot of money.
Besides, a decade ago, you pretty much had to take the plunge on the album before you found out whether you liked it or not (unless you happened to have a friends who owned it to borrow from). There are reviews, sure, but who's to say you have the same taste as the reviewer? At least now you can listen to clips first, and often entire streaming songs.
I think you're confusing "conservative" with "Republican" here. I know, it's an easy mistake to make these days.
(For the record, I DON'T think sales of her encyclopedia would suffer - aside from the fact that millions of people will snatch up anything with her name on it, it's well-known that she has tons of notes for character backgrounds and side plots that never made it into the books, which people are dying to read about in her encyclopedia and the Lexicon won't have.)
Well of course rumble strips, as normally used, are there for a safety reason. I never said they weren't. But this "talking road" thing definitely does not serve a useful purpose, just adds annoyance. In the case I was talking about, the lanes were shifted so that the shoulder became the right lane, so everyone has to drive over the rumble strip to change lanes. They are not serving their usual purpose.
Unless you've got a sleeping child (or dog, in my case) in the backseat. That's the biggest annoyance for this kind of thing, after tire and road wear - sometimes you just don't WANT sudden loud noises when you're driving (actually, you probably never do, just b/c startling a driver isn't good either). A path I drive often has had a stretch recently where the lane is shifted and you have to go over the rumble strips to drive on the shoulder. The rumble strips always wake up my whiny dog and I have to listen to him until he gets back to sleep.
I'm sure the RIAA cares about little technicalities like "jurisdiction."
The username "Lena" is kind of a tipoff, y'know. This is why I have my gender in my signature - but then you get people who don't read signatures, and when I post something particularly girly assume I'm a very effeminate man or something. It does get grating.
I just looked at your website, and I just wanted to say, you rock.
How did you get involved this way? Is there a particular philanthropic/volunteering group you started out with, and then took on this village on your own? Or did you somehow get in contact with them yourself?
Considering I've been hearing about the OLPC constantly for years so it's permanently etched in my brain, and this post is the first I've heard of the Asus one, I don't think the upstaging has gone very well.
I'm not american, and I'd never heard of it. But when I clicked on the article, the article had a link to google's page about it, which explains it all.
Now, textbook companies, that's who they REALLY need to go after. The price gouging, the constant "new editions" that are just rearranged so you can't buy used, it's insane. And it's not like most textbook authors exactly get rich with them. I've often wondered why more prominent researchers don't write intro textbooks and self-publish or go with a smaller publishing house; they could get a bigger chunk of the profits while charging students less. But then, a lot of people who are prominent enough to get a self-published textbook used in schools probably don't even realize that's an option (older scientists aren't necessarily any more up on technology outside of their field than any other average schmoe).
Now, I definitely wonder how this will all shake out financially. But saying that there's no access problem just b/c the researchers themselves can get the journals doesn't make sense.
Nearly all the bathrooms in MIT used to be men's rooms, then they converted half to women's rooms at some point. Which is why you don't find pairs of M/W bathrooms like in most buildings - instead, when you find a men's room, you go up or down a flight of stairs and you'll find a women's room directly above or below it (at least, in the older infinite corridor section of campus). I'm guessing bldg 20 would have had its bathrooms similarly converted, so that it was about half and half.
Also, I've always heard that a large part of the collaborativeness found in 20 was because several disparate departments were kind of shoved in there helter-skelter - so there were linguists down the hall from music professors around the corner from the Tech Model Railroad Club. I'm not sure how much the physical layout had to do with it - I didn't go in there much (it was torn down my sophomore year), but I remember most of the layout being pretty standard hallways.
Yeah, but that's on a much more abstract level. With kids, it's on the most literal level possible. At least when you cover an adult's eyes, they still realize that just because they can't see you doesn't mean you can't see them. And if you bring two adults into a room, hide an object, remove Adult A, and move the object to a new location, then ask Adult B where Adult A will look for the object, Adult B will realize that Adult A didn't see the object get moved and reply that A will look in the original location. Little kids very literally don't realize that other people can possess different knowledge than they do.
Oh yeah, sure, the grammar nazis aren't trolls, but the people who oppose them totally are. It's okay, moderators. I'm sure your efforts will go a long way toward ensuring that our language remains pristine.
As a not-yet-phd'ed proto-psychologist, here's how I'd put it: Kids this age are unclear on what has agency and what doesn't. They are also unclear on the division between themselves and other people - they think that everyone can see what they see, for instance, and knows what they are thinking or feeling to a certain extent and thinks/feels the same way. Add these two together, and they attribute agency to something that *acts* like other things with agency, plus assume that because it has agency, it thinks/feels/has the same needs as they do.
That was my first thought. What do you want to bet it's a disgruntled ex-employee trying to sabotage the deal by leaking it?
I moved somewhere without Borders, and got a job at Books-A-Million. The first day of training was all about selling the discount cards, and how every customer who walks through the door must be offered one, and they track how many you sell per month, etc etc. I don't know what the second day of training covered, b/c I didn't go back. I could never work in that kind of environment.
So Borders is at the top of my bookstore chain list for life, b/c of that and other very customer-friendly policies that made me happy to work there.