When my husband and I got married, I insisted we have one joint checking account plus a separate account each. Two years later, my separate account is closed b/c we never used it and his is just a "house account" for the money we plan to spend on home upgrades & repairs. All our savings accounts at this point, I think, are now joint. We do still each have one credit card that the other's name isn't on, but that was mostly b/c we were trying not to mess with our credit ratings too much before getting a mortgage.
We just didn't use the separate accounts, at all. He is much more frugal than I am, and also much better with money in general, so I generally follow his lead when it comes to money anyhow. If I really want some small thing, and we have the money this month, I'll buy it (sometimes checking with him first) and it's not a big deal. Bigger things we have separate accounts for, that we put a certain amount of money in each month, and I can spend within those accounts pretty freely. For instance, I know how much is in our Dogs account so I don't feel bad buying treats or whatever. And today I'll probably go our and buy curtains for the kitchen out of the house account, because I know that's one of the things that account is meant for. He doesn't particularly *want* to be involved in those decisions, beyond how much is in each account, and I don't have to double-check with him on every single item I buy.
Separate accounts for separate purposes has worked out WAY better than separate accounts for separate people. Sure, it took some negotiation at first - he wanted to put more in the Travel fund each month, but I pointed out that I wanted to save up for getting dogs so some of it wound up in Dogs. But I think in the end negotiating where the money goes is much healthier than just not knowing.
I use Livejournal, and it is annoying that my best friend uses some other blogging format and so can't read my friendslocked entries. But I'll sacrifice her being 100% up-to-date (I'll tell her anything important on phone or IM anyhow) to keep the general public out of some things.
Livejournal does supports OpenID, which is basically what the site in this article is trying to do. Basically, with OpenID, if you're a member of any site that uses OpenID then you can use that login on any other site that uses it, and thus have access to information on all the participating sites. Livejournal, Wordpress, and AOL.com are a few of the sites that use it. I don't know how much use it gets; I don't think I've seen anyone post on Livejournal that doesn't actually have a LJ account, but then I don't check everyone's username. All those I've clicked on led to real LJs, though.
Going to a multi-age, go at your own pace, parent participation school room helps
Oh dear god, do you have any idea how lucky you and your daughter are? My master's is in gifted ed, I can tell you that this type of classroom is incredibly rare and has a lot of political resistance holding it back from ever becoming more popular. I'm assuming she goes to a Montessori school, because finding it outside of those is even more rare. Either way, yes, it probably does help a lot.
But for the millions of kids who will never be in such a classroom, there are always girlified math books to try and fill in some of the gaps. It just bugs me that so many people on here seem to look down on the girliness; saying "femininity bad, masculinity good" is no better than "woman bad, man good."
Thank you. When this article first went up, all I saw were comments about how making it girly is "dumbing it down." I'm so glad now there are more comments like this.
I am about the girliest girl possible. I like flowing skirts and long pretty hair and freckles on my cheeks and wearing mascara and pretty colors and celebrity gossip rags and Barbie dolls and cartoony video games etc etc etc.
I'm also an MIT graduate, currently getting a PhD, and am married to a mathematician who's teaching me linear algebra this summer because I never had time to take it as an undergrad and I think it would be fun and useful to know. It's about time girls realized you can have it both ways.
Actually, the quote is "Math class is tough," and only 1.5% of all Teen Talk Barbies said that phrase. If you find one now, it's worth quite a bit of money. (And I'll bet more than 1.5% of the population actually thinks that math class is tough.)
a large segment of the educational research community who has picked up on the ways in which males are falling behind females in various areas and that this has become one of the new trendy research areas.
You said:
if anything in general boys are behind girls and need more attention
I'm not disagreeing with the premise that the gender gap has been diminished or erased in many areas - I'm saying that many academics already agree with you and there's no BIG BAD CONSPIRACY out to get you, so calm down.
I read teen fluff magazines in junior high, and celebrity gossip is still a guilty pleasure of mine. But somehow I managed to go to MIT and now have a master's and am working on PhD. Oh! And not only did I play with Barbies, I switched from playing to collecting when I was about 12 and currently own about a hundred of them.
Shielding your kids from "girliness" doesn't do them any favors. Teach them that they can be girly AND smart, that they don't have to choose between them, and you'll never run the risk that in a moment of weakness they'll choose girly over smart.
If you were anything more than a fringe lunatic out to get one particular group, you'd realize that there actually is quite a large segment of the educational research community who has picked up on the ways in which males are falling behind females in various areas and that this has become one of the new trendy research areas. But have fun with your conspiracy theory, there, bucko. I'm sure it'll get you laid.
Why do you assume that it's dumbed-down just because it includes some "fun" material? Have you actually read the book? Or are you just assuming that one can't write a math book that's fun to read without dumbing it down - or perhaps that one can't write a math book that would catch a preteen girl's attention without dumbing it down?
Yeeees, because the average 13-year-old uses the word "reciprocate" regularly in their daily vocabulary.
For pete's sake, people, since when have mnemonics become the work of the dumbing-down devil? No, you can't learn all of math that way, but when it comes to remember the definition of one term it's fine. I still use SOHCAHTOA, I must be an idiot.
While it is true that the gender gap has closed in many areas, this is a recent development (last decade) and is only true up to the bachelor's level, and only up to high school in math and science. Female enrollment in graduate programs, and female representation in academia and other high-level professions are still trailing.
Which does not meant that African-American males are not in trouble as well. Strangely enough, more than one group can be trailing other groups at any given time.
Actually, historically you're wrong. I don't know about today, but for a very long time that's exactly what highly intelligent women mostly did - they married intelligent, ambitious men and were the driving force behind their success. In the book Smart Girls, Gifted Women, the author revisits the women she went to a school for gifted children in the 50s/60s with, and found that many were now (in the 80s) in this position.
Of course, now that so many women are getting powerful positions themselves, this is probably on the decline with trophy wives on somewhat of an increase. But then, look at our past few first ladies - Hilary Clinton is an obvious one, but Laura and Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan aren't exactly trophy wives either.
I used to volunteer with a group who would bring 11-13 year old girls to MIT for the day and do a bunch of science/math/engineering activities with them, led by mostly female undergrads/grad students/researchers. One of the mothers sent us a letter afterwards saying that her daughter had always liked math and science, but since she started middle school her interest had been declining. After our program, you know what she told her mom? "I didn't know there were women who wear cool nail polish colors AND like math!"
This is the kind of thing that gets preteen girls' attention, for better or for worse.
I have astigmatism and nearsightedness, and when I go to the eyedoctor they skip the little "stand 20 feet away and tell me which direction these Es are pointing" test because I can't even tell that the big blurry block at the top is an E without my glasses on. But I've never thought the fonts on my Mac look blurry (with vision correction). Ugly Windows fonts drive me CRAZY. Even when I had to use Windows at work (not anymore, thank goodness), I didn't come home and think my Mac fonts were blurry.
To be fair, I didn't read slashdot as an undergrad - based on the references to it I'd heard, I assumed it was all Linuxy stuff, and though I used Linux then I had no interest in reading news about it. So my ID# is quite high b/c I didn't get it til after I'd graduated. Even so, UHF came out when I was 10. Given that slashdot was started my freshman year of college, I could have a two-digit ID and still be young enough that I saw UHF before I got to MIT.
Etymology is interesting enough, but how often is the first comment on a slashdot story an explanation of the origin of the name of something if it's based on a common phrase rather than a pop culture reference? If it's a pop culture reference, the first like dozen comments are all about it; if it's a common idiom, it's rarely even mentioned.
But as it stands it will likely just drive down the price of the already bloated cell service costs.
Hey, that's fine with me. I've had the same family plan for about two years now. The contract was only a year, and since then I've been occasionally looking at their plans to see if there is any better deal to switch to. I have yet to see another family plan for the same price, let alone a cheaper one. Technology is not supposed to get MORE expensive over time! They keep upping the minimum number of minutes you can buy, so that those of us who rarely even use half of what we've got are screwed over.
My parents had me as teenagers, we were on government assistance while I was a kid, they never bought me a car and paid for almost none of my college (maybe $1000 total out of a $120,000 education)...
And yet, somehow I still have a sense of humor. I must be one of the lucky ones.
Every 30 second ad is 1/2 minute of your life you'll never have again. Do you really want your life slowly eaten by ads?
I don't think I would want to have a phone with ads, but you can also look at it this way: My husband and I spend about two hours of our combined income a month on our cel phones. So we would have to place 120 calls a month to waste as much time listening to the ads as we do working to pay our cel phone bill. Yes, we probably do make that many calls a month between the two of us, but there are probably people who have higher bills or lower income than us for whom this would be a good deal, time-wise. And if the ads were only ten or fifteen seconds (which seems a bit more reasonable and might even be something I'd be willing to sit through), then it would be a good deal for even more people.
I'd seen UHF before I got to MIT, but only a couple times and not enough for that particular joke to stick (spatula city, however...). By the time I saw it again as an undergrad, I was like, hey, did someone on the writing staff go to MIT? But my point is that now, the phrase is old enough and common enough to me that it didn't even occur to me that it had an "origin" either with MIT or UHF, it's just another idiom. So my first reaction was, "What are you talking about? Just because they use a common phrase in a movie doesn't mean it's from that movie!" It was weird to me that people even thought of it as having an "origin" any more than you would think about the origin of "you bit off more than you can chew."
And now I've given FAR too much explanation. And am still not sure what my ID has to do with it.
One thing on the modding tags - I'd like to be able to distinguish between stories I don't think are worth the front page and bad summaries of those stories. Sure, there's "slownewsday" specifically for bad stories, but "notthebest" or "stupid" could easily mean either - the tags just aren't very precise. Some way to let the editors know "hey, take a look at this, and consider cleaning the summary up or writing a whole new one before putting it on the front page."
You know, I've been used to the MIT reference for so long now that I had forgotten that it's not just a common idiom that anyone would have heard. I was very confused when I saw it attributed to UHF...
Except biometric installations aren't replacing many access control mechanisms with one.
I'm sure right now they're not. But the parent was responding to the article, and part of the point of the article (which may or may not reflect how they are or will be implemented in real life) is that they should:
"Remembering dozens of personal identification numbers and passwords is not the solution to identity theft. PINs and passwords are not only inconvenient to memorize, but also are impractical to safeguard. In essence, they merely tie two pieces of information together; once the secret is compromised, the rest follows. The solution is to be able to tie your private information to your person in a way that cannot be compromised," said Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science and director of the UH Computational Biomedicine Laboratory.
I am sure that I would notice if we were having another bubble. How? I'd be getting free shit right, left, and backwards. Back around 1999, I was constantly getting "$10 off purchase of $10 or more" coupons, 40-60% rebates from major sites, all kinds of stuff. They were throwing money around, and as a college student I was scooping up books and CDs at rates I can't imagine now. Trust me, if they ever start doing that again, I will be first in line until the bubble bursts.
Couldn't it be interpreted as self-marketing in this case? Dvorak wants readers and is paid for having readers, he knows that sensationalism (in the form of FUD) gets readers.
Slashdot Mirror
What, am I the only Barbie nerd on slashdot??
We just didn't use the separate accounts, at all. He is much more frugal than I am, and also much better with money in general, so I generally follow his lead when it comes to money anyhow. If I really want some small thing, and we have the money this month, I'll buy it (sometimes checking with him first) and it's not a big deal. Bigger things we have separate accounts for, that we put a certain amount of money in each month, and I can spend within those accounts pretty freely. For instance, I know how much is in our Dogs account so I don't feel bad buying treats or whatever. And today I'll probably go our and buy curtains for the kitchen out of the house account, because I know that's one of the things that account is meant for. He doesn't particularly *want* to be involved in those decisions, beyond how much is in each account, and I don't have to double-check with him on every single item I buy.
Separate accounts for separate purposes has worked out WAY better than separate accounts for separate people. Sure, it took some negotiation at first - he wanted to put more in the Travel fund each month, but I pointed out that I wanted to save up for getting dogs so some of it wound up in Dogs. But I think in the end negotiating where the money goes is much healthier than just not knowing.
Livejournal does supports OpenID, which is basically what the site in this article is trying to do. Basically, with OpenID, if you're a member of any site that uses OpenID then you can use that login on any other site that uses it, and thus have access to information on all the participating sites. Livejournal, Wordpress, and AOL.com are a few of the sites that use it. I don't know how much use it gets; I don't think I've seen anyone post on Livejournal that doesn't actually have a LJ account, but then I don't check everyone's username. All those I've clicked on led to real LJs, though.
Oh dear god, do you have any idea how lucky you and your daughter are? My master's is in gifted ed, I can tell you that this type of classroom is incredibly rare and has a lot of political resistance holding it back from ever becoming more popular. I'm assuming she goes to a Montessori school, because finding it outside of those is even more rare. Either way, yes, it probably does help a lot.
But for the millions of kids who will never be in such a classroom, there are always girlified math books to try and fill in some of the gaps. It just bugs me that so many people on here seem to look down on the girliness; saying "femininity bad, masculinity good" is no better than "woman bad, man good."
Thank you. When this article first went up, all I saw were comments about how making it girly is "dumbing it down." I'm so glad now there are more comments like this.
I am about the girliest girl possible. I like flowing skirts and long pretty hair and freckles on my cheeks and wearing mascara and pretty colors and celebrity gossip rags and Barbie dolls and cartoony video games etc etc etc.
I'm also an MIT graduate, currently getting a PhD, and am married to a mathematician who's teaching me linear algebra this summer because I never had time to take it as an undergrad and I think it would be fun and useful to know. It's about time girls realized you can have it both ways.
Actually, the quote is "Math class is tough," and only 1.5% of all Teen Talk Barbies said that phrase. If you find one now, it's worth quite a bit of money. (And I'll bet more than 1.5% of the population actually thinks that math class is tough.)
</barbienerd>
a large segment of the educational research community who has picked up on the ways in which males are falling behind females in various areas and that this has become one of the new trendy research areas.
You said:
if anything in general boys are behind girls and need more attention
I'm not disagreeing with the premise that the gender gap has been diminished or erased in many areas - I'm saying that many academics already agree with you and there's no BIG BAD CONSPIRACY out to get you, so calm down.
Shielding your kids from "girliness" doesn't do them any favors. Teach them that they can be girly AND smart, that they don't have to choose between them, and you'll never run the risk that in a moment of weakness they'll choose girly over smart.
If you were anything more than a fringe lunatic out to get one particular group, you'd realize that there actually is quite a large segment of the educational research community who has picked up on the ways in which males are falling behind females in various areas and that this has become one of the new trendy research areas. But have fun with your conspiracy theory, there, bucko. I'm sure it'll get you laid.
Why do you assume that it's dumbed-down just because it includes some "fun" material? Have you actually read the book? Or are you just assuming that one can't write a math book that's fun to read without dumbing it down - or perhaps that one can't write a math book that would catch a preteen girl's attention without dumbing it down?
For pete's sake, people, since when have mnemonics become the work of the dumbing-down devil? No, you can't learn all of math that way, but when it comes to remember the definition of one term it's fine. I still use SOHCAHTOA, I must be an idiot.
Which does not meant that African-American males are not in trouble as well. Strangely enough, more than one group can be trailing other groups at any given time.
Of course, now that so many women are getting powerful positions themselves, this is probably on the decline with trophy wives on somewhat of an increase. But then, look at our past few first ladies - Hilary Clinton is an obvious one, but Laura and Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan aren't exactly trophy wives either.
This is the kind of thing that gets preteen girls' attention, for better or for worse.
I have astigmatism and nearsightedness, and when I go to the eyedoctor they skip the little "stand 20 feet away and tell me which direction these Es are pointing" test because I can't even tell that the big blurry block at the top is an E without my glasses on. But I've never thought the fonts on my Mac look blurry (with vision correction). Ugly Windows fonts drive me CRAZY. Even when I had to use Windows at work (not anymore, thank goodness), I didn't come home and think my Mac fonts were blurry.
Etymology is interesting enough, but how often is the first comment on a slashdot story an explanation of the origin of the name of something if it's based on a common phrase rather than a pop culture reference? If it's a pop culture reference, the first like dozen comments are all about it; if it's a common idiom, it's rarely even mentioned.
Hey, that's fine with me. I've had the same family plan for about two years now. The contract was only a year, and since then I've been occasionally looking at their plans to see if there is any better deal to switch to. I have yet to see another family plan for the same price, let alone a cheaper one. Technology is not supposed to get MORE expensive over time! They keep upping the minimum number of minutes you can buy, so that those of us who rarely even use half of what we've got are screwed over.
And yet, somehow I still have a sense of humor. I must be one of the lucky ones.
I don't think I would want to have a phone with ads, but you can also look at it this way: My husband and I spend about two hours of our combined income a month on our cel phones. So we would have to place 120 calls a month to waste as much time listening to the ads as we do working to pay our cel phone bill. Yes, we probably do make that many calls a month between the two of us, but there are probably people who have higher bills or lower income than us for whom this would be a good deal, time-wise. And if the ads were only ten or fifteen seconds (which seems a bit more reasonable and might even be something I'd be willing to sit through), then it would be a good deal for even more people.
I'd seen UHF before I got to MIT, but only a couple times and not enough for that particular joke to stick (spatula city, however...). By the time I saw it again as an undergrad, I was like, hey, did someone on the writing staff go to MIT? But my point is that now, the phrase is old enough and common enough to me that it didn't even occur to me that it had an "origin" either with MIT or UHF, it's just another idiom. So my first reaction was, "What are you talking about? Just because they use a common phrase in a movie doesn't mean it's from that movie!" It was weird to me that people even thought of it as having an "origin" any more than you would think about the origin of "you bit off more than you can chew."
And now I've given FAR too much explanation. And am still not sure what my ID has to do with it.
One thing on the modding tags - I'd like to be able to distinguish between stories I don't think are worth the front page and bad summaries of those stories. Sure, there's "slownewsday" specifically for bad stories, but "notthebest" or "stupid" could easily mean either - the tags just aren't very precise. Some way to let the editors know "hey, take a look at this, and consider cleaning the summary up or writing a whole new one before putting it on the front page."
You know, I've been used to the MIT reference for so long now that I had forgotten that it's not just a common idiom that anyone would have heard. I was very confused when I saw it attributed to UHF...
I'm sure right now they're not. But the parent was responding to the article, and part of the point of the article (which may or may not reflect how they are or will be implemented in real life) is that they should:
"Remembering dozens of personal identification numbers and passwords is not the solution to identity theft. PINs and passwords are not only inconvenient to memorize, but also are impractical to safeguard. In essence, they merely tie two pieces of information together; once the secret is compromised, the rest follows. The solution is to be able to tie your private information to your person in a way that cannot be compromised," said Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science and director of the UH Computational Biomedicine Laboratory.
I am sure that I would notice if we were having another bubble. How? I'd be getting free shit right, left, and backwards. Back around 1999, I was constantly getting "$10 off purchase of $10 or more" coupons, 40-60% rebates from major sites, all kinds of stuff. They were throwing money around, and as a college student I was scooping up books and CDs at rates I can't imagine now. Trust me, if they ever start doing that again, I will be first in line until the bubble bursts.
Couldn't it be interpreted as self-marketing in this case? Dvorak wants readers and is paid for having readers, he knows that sensationalism (in the form of FUD) gets readers.