Transferring knowledge acquired in one context to another is a pretty hard problem. "Problem solving," "reasoning," and "critical thinking" skills seem to be one of the hardest things to transfer. Just because you're really, really good at logic problems doesn't mean you'll approach other things in life with the same logic all the time. I have to wonder how much these game-learned skills will really transfer to the business world; it would probably depend on there being enough surface similarities between a game situation and a business situation to act as a trigger.
Another point not mentioned in the article is that, yes, these people are more used to working in groups thanks to MMOGs and such. But group work is also far, far more prevalent in schools (from kindergarten straight through college math classes) than it was 20, even 10 years ago. More and more, students come out of school being thoroughly used to working in groups, delegating tasks, collaborating on the final product, etc. Some of this has been due to bottom-up pressure from educational researchers saying this works well, some of it has been top-down pressure from employers saying that this is a skill they want in their workforce. Either way, I'm not sure you can give video games all of the credit.
It's not just Radiohead. Sure, these artists have a following that was bought and paid for by the RIAA, but they are also the ones that bring in the most dependable money for the RIAA companies. Labels lose too many of the mega-names like Madonna and The Eagles, and they're going to have to start scrambling to do something differently. Meanwhile, the wave of big stars dropping labels will result in a few well-established alternate routes, which those lower down the ladder can start turning to more readily.
No, it's not a tidal wave yet. But the water is drawing back from the shore, and the labels had better recognize that and head for higher ground before wave does hit.
I collect Barbie dolls. It is a common scam (well, it was common back in the late 90s when Barbie doll collecting was particularly trendy) for people to swap a cheaper doll into a more expensive doll's box, and either return it - or do the swap right in the store and buy the expensive doll in the cheap box.
There was one particular Toys R Us where this happened all the time (Alewife in Boston, if anyone's curious). I actually repeatedly took obviously-swapped dolls up to Customer Service to tell them this was happening - sometimes a stack of four or five of them. And the managers say "there's nothing we can do about it." I asked if they were actually going to sell these dolls to customers, and they just repeated that there was nothing they could do about it. I pointed out that knowingly doing so might not be exactly legal, and again, nothing they could do about it. It's no wonder it always happened at that store - I wouldn't be too shocked if it was actually one of the employees I was talking to doing it.
Either your first sentence is wrong or your third sentence is wrong. Because everything I can find says that the first computer to reach a teraflop wasn't until 1996. So there were no supercomputers until 1996?
Also, the Wikipedia article makes no mention of an official government definition at all, and states that the term was first used by a newspaper in 1929.
Usually, but not always. I met a guy a year or two ago who had never been out of Morocco in his life, yet spoke flawless English with an American accent, surprisingly enough. (And for those who don't know, English is not a common language in Morocco, it's mostly Arabic and French.) He sounded like he was from New Jersey, in fact. The only thing that gave him away was the fact that he pronounced the second B in bombers (we discussed the Casablanca bombings). You can bet we complimented him on his English - though it was more like "Wow, where on earth did you learn that?" than a polite "Your English is quite good." I don't think I've ever heard a non-native speaker with so little accent.
So you're saying that calling a court that is run by a theocracy based on religion X an "X court" is a blanket label? In what way? The OP only called one court Muslim, and it was one that IS Muslim. He linked to a court decision that was entirely based on Islamic law. The term "blanket label" is only applicable (at least in a pejorative sense) if the label is being misapplied to something it doesn't apply to. If you say that all dogs are mutts, that's a blanket label and untrue. If you point to a single labradoodle and call it a mutt, that's a statement of fact. Furthermore, if you say that ALL labradoodles are mutts, it is still a statement of fact, because they all, by definition, fit the definition of mutt.
Gee, a court that's a part of the theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nope, not Muslim at all. Islam has NOTHING to do with that court decision.
No, there's not a court called "The Muslim Court." But you're seriously saying that only a Fox-News-watching Bush-loving right-winger would consider a court in Iran to be Muslim? Here, larn yerself sum edumacations.
My husband and I were given a couple of MasterCard debit cards for Christmas last year. We had a HELL of a time spending them. They wouldn't work at Ikea, Target, or a nice restaurant we went to. They did work at K-Mart and Borders Books. No rhyme or reason, tried running them through every which way and backwards, with various amounts often far below the amount left on the card. So we bought more stuff at K-Mart than we normally do this year, and I won't be using those again. Oh, and you can only check your balance via phone twice without getting charged for it - but the website to check balances doesn't work on anything but IE on Windows. And that same website is necessary for activating it if you want to make online purchases. All in all, I don't know if it was just this particular type of card or what, but I was thoroughly unimpressed.
I don't think that's true anymore. Many people choose to live within their means these days when Credit Card Companies screw everyone but the very wealthy with astronomical percentage rates and draconian fee structures.
LOL. Yes, and they also don't take out zero-down mortgages, make car-buying decisions based on the monthly payment rather than the total cost, or rent extra-fancy furniture/tvs/etc when they could buy cheaper versions.
a) haven't been able to find another community of intellectual peers, which means they probably have unfulfilling and not intellectually challenging careers and hobbies (I remember wanting to join mensa when I was 14 because I had no idea how to find people on my level to hang out with - then I joined science club and did summer programs and that desire flew out the window.)
or b) are ridiculously full of themselves and overly proud of their intelligence, and have probably kept themselves as a big fish in a little pond in many ways. Which also leads to the unfulfilling/not challenging work. Either way, often not the happiest or most self-actualized people ever.
Probably because she was an undergrad at the time. She probably ran the subjects for the lab and maybe did a little data analysis. The HS one, she's first author, though.
After discovering that she published her papers under her birth name of Hershlag (urg, no wonder she took a stage name), I found one of them on Google Scholar:
Mensa is not an organization for smart people. It's an organization for people who feel the need to prove how smart they are. The vast majority of people who qualify for mensa are not members.
Although some of the points weren't entirely off the mark (20th century schooling IS based on a factory model, and didn't I already argue somewhere in this thread that the drill-and-kill method it entails does NOT make effective education?), I lost interest in the part about SAT scores. First, he shows the low SAT scores of two politicians as "proof" that the SAT is meaningless. Then he goes on to present information about two scientists to back up the point... information that does not include their SAT scores. Aside from anecdotes not being data, you should really at least include the information you're arguing about in the anecdote if you expect anyone to care!
Well, overall, people tend to be optimistic in their assessments of their own abilities and their own odds for various future events. You know, the whole "90% of people think they're above average" thing, which holds true for a lot of different traits. And people think it's less likely than average that bad things will happen to them, and more likely than average that good things will happen. There are a ton of factors that have been investigated as playing into these - from cognitive errors that cause people to forget relevant bits of info (like that most people in the world are also fairly good at X) to a deep-seated need to increase one's self esteem. But whatever the underlying causes, it's a widespread and consistent enough phenomenon that you have to assume it must be an overall good thing, evolutionarily, or else we'd be in trouble. Although there are probably benefits to pessimism as well, we've made it this far as a massively optimistic species, so we must be doing something right.
To add a little bit to the previous comments, it was originally for college students, specifically at a handful of top universities. You had to have an email addy from one of them to join. Then they expanded it to all colleges. Now anyone can join, although your "networks" are often still based on colleges or high schools, though there are now city and workplace networks as well. It's got a much cleaner interface than myspace - you can do any of the crazy animated-background-plus-lime-green-text shit to your profile, it's always white background with black and blue text. People are also writing all sorts of applications that you add into your profile, for instance a map to show what countries you've visited or a Scrabble game you can play with others on the site.
Apparently a lot of HS and college students use it now to form homework/study groups, things like that. And, of course, less wholesome things. One interesting side effect of its history is that (from what I've seen) most people are registered under their real names there (and if you want to join a college's network, you still have to use an email address or alum email from the school). So it can be much easier to find people than on other sites where people use aliases, which has various implications.
Until after WW2, hardly anyone graduated from high school. I wouldn't say that reading, writing, and doing math on a sixth grade level takes a lot of logic or "critical thinking skills," which is what this thread is about. It does prepare you for an agricultural or manufacturing job, though, which is what most people had. Also, most of those people didn't fail, they just stopped at some point because HS graduation wasn't expected of them.
I would bet that the vast majority of today's high school graduates, even those who, admittedly, should not be getting a HS diploma have about the same level of reading, writing, and math skills as the average adult 100 years ago. No, it's not on a 12th-grade level, but neither were most people's back then. Yes, it's a problem that people are getting a diploma when they're barely where a middle-schooler should be (this is why it's hard for me to be against HS graduation tests *in theory*, although they are poorly-implemented in practice), but that doesn't mean that they're not doing it as well as the average person their age in the past.
While I agree that the one-room schoolhouse approach has some definite advantages over our current system, you also have to remember that back when that was common the vast majority of the population did not finish high school. In fact, it wasn't until after WW2 that high school graduation became a common rite of passage. In 1870, only 2% of the population made it that far. When the most the students need to learn is reading, writing, and 'rithmatic, plus maybe a little history and bible study, and you've got turnover in 6 years instead of 12, that model is a lot easier to implement. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find a teacher who can teach several different high-school-level subjects competently enough that the students could then teach other students about them.
Now, I do think that this model would work well for some elementary schools, and should be experimented with more than it is. I think that our current system of regimented divisions according to chronological age is a major problem. Also, I don't think the one-room-schoolhouse approach *automatically* leads to things like critical thinking - do you really think that the rural population of the late 1800s were better at logic than we are today?
Thank you, you said everything I was going to say. People tend to view education with very strong rose-colored glasses. The truth is, drill-and-kill has been the most prominent pedagogy used in the 20th century, and one that is NOT known to lead to long-term retention, critical thinking and reasoning skills, or the ability to transfer understanding and knowledge to new contexts.
What really drives me crazy are the blank checks Discover keeps sending me. All the necessary info, right there, in a form that they can actually fill out and mail to someone as payment. The thief could be completely internet-illiterate and still max out my card for me, plus rack up the extra cash advance fees that come with using those checks.
I do get 5Mbps for $30/month - but then, I live in one of the few places (it's not even the whole city, just a few neighborhoods) where we actually have *gasp* TWO cable companies COMPETING! And so, surprisingly enough, the one that's competing against Comcast is pretty cheap. Even if you don't want this particular service, hopefully if Verizon expands it it'll drive other prices down. Every new choice for consumers shakes up all the other choices a little.
Slashdot Mirror
Another point not mentioned in the article is that, yes, these people are more used to working in groups thanks to MMOGs and such. But group work is also far, far more prevalent in schools (from kindergarten straight through college math classes) than it was 20, even 10 years ago. More and more, students come out of school being thoroughly used to working in groups, delegating tasks, collaborating on the final product, etc. Some of this has been due to bottom-up pressure from educational researchers saying this works well, some of it has been top-down pressure from employers saying that this is a skill they want in their workforce. Either way, I'm not sure you can give video games all of the credit.
No, it's not a tidal wave yet. But the water is drawing back from the shore, and the labels had better recognize that and head for higher ground before wave does hit.
Sigs: Don't turn them off, they're useful sometimes.
There was one particular Toys R Us where this happened all the time (Alewife in Boston, if anyone's curious). I actually repeatedly took obviously-swapped dolls up to Customer Service to tell them this was happening - sometimes a stack of four or five of them. And the managers say "there's nothing we can do about it." I asked if they were actually going to sell these dolls to customers, and they just repeated that there was nothing they could do about it. I pointed out that knowingly doing so might not be exactly legal, and again, nothing they could do about it. It's no wonder it always happened at that store - I wouldn't be too shocked if it was actually one of the employees I was talking to doing it.
I *think* they're supposed to be more secure. Like, if you have the card # written down somewhere, and the card is stolen, you can get it replaced.
Either your first sentence is wrong or your third sentence is wrong. Because everything I can find says that the first computer to reach a teraflop wasn't until 1996. So there were no supercomputers until 1996?
Also, the Wikipedia article makes no mention of an official government definition at all, and states that the term was first used by a newspaper in 1929.
Isn't "supercomputer" a bit of a relative term? Don't we have supercomputing handhelds today, if you look at the original supercomputers?
Usually, but not always. I met a guy a year or two ago who had never been out of Morocco in his life, yet spoke flawless English with an American accent, surprisingly enough. (And for those who don't know, English is not a common language in Morocco, it's mostly Arabic and French.) He sounded like he was from New Jersey, in fact. The only thing that gave him away was the fact that he pronounced the second B in bombers (we discussed the Casablanca bombings). You can bet we complimented him on his English - though it was more like "Wow, where on earth did you learn that?" than a polite "Your English is quite good." I don't think I've ever heard a non-native speaker with so little accent.
So you're saying that calling a court that is run by a theocracy based on religion X an "X court" is a blanket label? In what way? The OP only called one court Muslim, and it was one that IS Muslim. He linked to a court decision that was entirely based on Islamic law. The term "blanket label" is only applicable (at least in a pejorative sense) if the label is being misapplied to something it doesn't apply to. If you say that all dogs are mutts, that's a blanket label and untrue. If you point to a single labradoodle and call it a mutt, that's a statement of fact. Furthermore, if you say that ALL labradoodles are mutts, it is still a statement of fact, because they all, by definition, fit the definition of mutt.
No, there's not a court called "The Muslim Court." But you're seriously saying that only a Fox-News-watching Bush-loving right-winger would consider a court in Iran to be Muslim? Here, larn yerself sum edumacations.
My husband and I were given a couple of MasterCard debit cards for Christmas last year. We had a HELL of a time spending them. They wouldn't work at Ikea, Target, or a nice restaurant we went to. They did work at K-Mart and Borders Books. No rhyme or reason, tried running them through every which way and backwards, with various amounts often far below the amount left on the card. So we bought more stuff at K-Mart than we normally do this year, and I won't be using those again. Oh, and you can only check your balance via phone twice without getting charged for it - but the website to check balances doesn't work on anything but IE on Windows. And that same website is necessary for activating it if you want to make online purchases. All in all, I don't know if it was just this particular type of card or what, but I was thoroughly unimpressed.
LOL. Yes, and they also don't take out zero-down mortgages, make car-buying decisions based on the monthly payment rather than the total cost, or rent extra-fancy furniture/tvs/etc when they could buy cheaper versions.
Average number of credit cards per U.S. household: 12.7
Just because you and your few closest buddies have some clue about financial planning, doesn't mean 99.9% of people do.
a) haven't been able to find another community of intellectual peers, which means they probably have unfulfilling and not intellectually challenging careers and hobbies (I remember wanting to join mensa when I was 14 because I had no idea how to find people on my level to hang out with - then I joined science club and did summer programs and that desire flew out the window.)
or b) are ridiculously full of themselves and overly proud of their intelligence, and have probably kept themselves as a big fish in a little pond in many ways. Which also leads to the unfulfilling/not challenging work. Either way, often not the happiest or most self-actualized people ever.
Probably because she was an undergrad at the time. She probably ran the subjects for the lab and maybe did a little data analysis. The HS one, she's first author, though.
Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy
Definitely geekier than your average psych paper.
And it appears that her other paper, on which she was first author while in high school, was actually in chemistry:
A Simple Method To Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar
Though it's actually in a chemistry education journal, and appears to maybe have something to do with doing demonstrations in chemistry classrooms.
Mensa is not an organization for smart people. It's an organization for people who feel the need to prove how smart they are. The vast majority of people who qualify for mensa are not members.
Although some of the points weren't entirely off the mark (20th century schooling IS based on a factory model, and didn't I already argue somewhere in this thread that the drill-and-kill method it entails does NOT make effective education?), I lost interest in the part about SAT scores. First, he shows the low SAT scores of two politicians as "proof" that the SAT is meaningless. Then he goes on to present information about two scientists to back up the point... information that does not include their SAT scores. Aside from anecdotes not being data, you should really at least include the information you're arguing about in the anecdote if you expect anyone to care!
Well, overall, people tend to be optimistic in their assessments of their own abilities and their own odds for various future events. You know, the whole "90% of people think they're above average" thing, which holds true for a lot of different traits. And people think it's less likely than average that bad things will happen to them, and more likely than average that good things will happen. There are a ton of factors that have been investigated as playing into these - from cognitive errors that cause people to forget relevant bits of info (like that most people in the world are also fairly good at X) to a deep-seated need to increase one's self esteem. But whatever the underlying causes, it's a widespread and consistent enough phenomenon that you have to assume it must be an overall good thing, evolutionarily, or else we'd be in trouble. Although there are probably benefits to pessimism as well, we've made it this far as a massively optimistic species, so we must be doing something right.
Apparently a lot of HS and college students use it now to form homework/study groups, things like that. And, of course, less wholesome things. One interesting side effect of its history is that (from what I've seen) most people are registered under their real names there (and if you want to join a college's network, you still have to use an email address or alum email from the school). So it can be much easier to find people than on other sites where people use aliases, which has various implications.
How does it act as a disincentive when they can pass the cost directly to the consumer with no worry of losing business??
I would bet that the vast majority of today's high school graduates, even those who, admittedly, should not be getting a HS diploma have about the same level of reading, writing, and math skills as the average adult 100 years ago. No, it's not on a 12th-grade level, but neither were most people's back then. Yes, it's a problem that people are getting a diploma when they're barely where a middle-schooler should be (this is why it's hard for me to be against HS graduation tests *in theory*, although they are poorly-implemented in practice), but that doesn't mean that they're not doing it as well as the average person their age in the past.
Now, I do think that this model would work well for some elementary schools, and should be experimented with more than it is. I think that our current system of regimented divisions according to chronological age is a major problem. Also, I don't think the one-room-schoolhouse approach *automatically* leads to things like critical thinking - do you really think that the rural population of the late 1800s were better at logic than we are today?
Thank you, you said everything I was going to say. People tend to view education with very strong rose-colored glasses. The truth is, drill-and-kill has been the most prominent pedagogy used in the 20th century, and one that is NOT known to lead to long-term retention, critical thinking and reasoning skills, or the ability to transfer understanding and knowledge to new contexts.
What really drives me crazy are the blank checks Discover keeps sending me. All the necessary info, right there, in a form that they can actually fill out and mail to someone as payment. The thief could be completely internet-illiterate and still max out my card for me, plus rack up the extra cash advance fees that come with using those checks.
I do get 5Mbps for $30/month - but then, I live in one of the few places (it's not even the whole city, just a few neighborhoods) where we actually have *gasp* TWO cable companies COMPETING! And so, surprisingly enough, the one that's competing against Comcast is pretty cheap. Even if you don't want this particular service, hopefully if Verizon expands it it'll drive other prices down. Every new choice for consumers shakes up all the other choices a little.