Because with really good physics you can expand the gameplay options a LOT.
I was playing one game where I needed to kill someone who was protected inside a really well-guarded building. Every time I tried to get in through the only entrance to the building I wound up being killed before I could even take down half of the guards (I suck at those kind of scenarios). There was no way to get to the roof of the building - I tried going to all the buildings around it, but the jump distance was *just* too short. Then it occurred to me - there were flammable barrels a couple of miles away (in game terms) and I could run into them to knock them over and then kind of keep bumping them to keep them moving. I I ran off, pushed 5 or 6 barrels over to a spot right around the corner from the entrance, shot at one of the guards and ran around the corner. Half of the guards ran after me, and once they all came around the corner, I shot the barrels - huge explosion, half the guards were dead in one shot, and then I was able to handle the remaining guards.
Without decent physics, I wouldn't have had that option unless the developers specifically put it into the game. Good physics allows for emergent gameplay, which can be really good.
There are some modern games that seem to have figured out how to have more realistic (in some ways) physics and outstanding control schemes.
Prototype is one example - you're capable of doing some REALLY crazy and physics defying stuff, but when you don't use any of the "special" powers or moves the physics tends to be more or less real. The engine lends itself to some emergent stuff. Another example is one of the Hulk games - I don't even bother with the missions in that one, I just piss the army off to the point where they're sending everything they've got at me, and then I beat them to death with their own people and vehicles. Great fun.
There are plenty of ways to give games realistic (or more realistic) physics and still have them be tremendous fun. There are quite a few of the modern games that are *damn* fun to play because of their physics. I suspect that the difference you're really getting at is that in the olden days there could be more of a focus on the game play since shiny rendering and physics engines weren't enough to sell a game. Fortunately, there are modern games with great gameplay AND all the shiny.
If by "worst behaved" you simply mean the ones that would challenge authority and "color outside the lines," then sure - those kinds of "misbehaviors" are pretty common among people who are really good at their job. That seems to be a pretty milquetoast version of "worst behaved" though.
As someone who went to Chicago Public Schools, I can say that the "worst behaved" students are the ones who were unable to handle any kind of structured environment, were disruptive and violent towards other students, were often high if they bothered to show up for classes, and generally couldn't handle even remedial work. The few of these kids that eventually straightened themselves out might make good mentors or counselors at programs to help at-risk children, but generally wouldn't be what I'd call good teachers because they're usually lacking the academic accomplishment that really good teachers must have.
On the issue of taking one to know one - I think it's possible to be a good security expert without being a convicted felon. Given the choice between hiring someone who is very good but a convicted felon vs. someone who is very good and who has the moral compass necessary to avoid committing acts that are criminal, I'll take the latter any time. There are *millions* of people the world over who do computer security - most of them without criminal records - it's not exactly like it's some kind of arcane art or a skillset so hard to come by that one must hire a (hopefully former) black-hat.
My guess is some of these guys are being hired by organizations who want to use their felony record as some kind of street cred - "Our security is the best; we've got one of the worst of the hackers in charge of it!" etc.
It's also possible that he has some ideas already and has investigated it but wants to get the opinions of other people. From the tone of your response, it's obvious that you are dismissive of this practice, but it's actually a good thing to do. Frequently when people self-educate on a given topic they'll not cover or consider aspects that might crop up and surprise them - getting information from others (as many others as you can, assuming you have a halfway decent way of making it comprehensible rather than a flood) is a good thing.
And perhaps he's using this as a way to pick the few countries he might later go to and visit, given that people here might offer up suggestions that might never have occurred to him. For example, in my case, it would never have occurred to me that moving to a native-american reservation was even an option for non-natives, and New Zealand would have completely slipped my mind as well. Not everyone is, apparently, the testosterone driven, self-contained world traveler you are - some people like to actually consult with other people to get ideas before they go do something.
Even if he hasn't done other research on his own, it's still an interesting thing to talk about and an interesting thing to discuss. Some of the tangential conversations in this thread have informed me of things I never even thought about.
That *is* the purpose of this website, right? For people to discuss things of some relevance to geeks? If so, why shit on that discussion by being so dismissive in your tone?
(end of derail - it just irks me when people here are so dismissive of other people just because they ask questions)
For example, in my case, I best write legibly and easily only with my left hand, can draw well with either hand, most accurately throw a ball with my right, throw a stronger punch with my left, switch-hit, etc. I'm essentially ambidextrous (as are many other people who think they're only left or right handed). Oh, and I hold my phone to my left ear - I tend to space out on what people are saying if I have it held to my right ear.
In one of our studies, we have participants answer 10 questions about which hand they use to do certain tasks - left, right or either. Approximately 5% of our participants answer 8+ questions as being ONLY left or right handed, 5% answer 8+ questions with left AND right handedness, and everyone else is split pretty evenly. If we only talk about writing, then 80% say only right hand, 15% or so lefties, and 5% ambidextrous.
So, just because a majority of people are (when it comes to writing) right-handed, that doesn't necessarily extend to other domains.
This is slashdot. Half of the people here will insist that they were misunderstood geniuses when they were children and the only reason they never came up with anything remotely interesting or original in their lives is because The Man crushed their spirits and turned them into underachieving misanthropes who can only get jobs working help desk.
The other half will loudly pipe up any time there's a poorly written article (so, all the time) that mischaracterizes some new development in science, pointing out the "obvious" flaws that the hundreds of PhD's involved in the project couldn't possibly have been aware of or understood. They also work help desk, but they haven't been turned into bitter, soulless things in vaguely human form yet.
The final half are the geek-lites, like me, who are bad at maths, either work in graphic design or the "soft" sciences, and are probably typing their replies on a Mac while sitting at a café. We're only bitter when our foreign language fashion magazines fail to impress those around us.
The problem with getting funding from sources with a financial interest in the outcome of your research is "What happens if your research leads to them losing money?"
The answer to that is: They won't give out more money unless the people doing the research are willing to toe the line, which leads to such truly abhorrent things as "studies" that show no link between smoking and cancer.
What happens if you go with non-corporate sources for funding? Well, if you go to any organization with an agenda (read: all of them) you wind up with research that is so methodologically flawed and the results so massively misrepresented for the sake of political expediency that it's worse than if no study was done at all.
I know this may sound absurd, but federal funds are actually quite necessary if you want to have research (especially social/community psych or public health) stuff that isn't really just dressing to ram home an agenda.
Just like with software Q&A, when we design research protocols we need to account for "What the FUCK were you THINKING?" moments on the part of our participants. The meetings where we try to brainstorm ways for our participants to break the interview are some of the most fun parts of my job.
I've also developed an amazing poker-face thanks to conducting dozens of these interviews - you never know what you're going to hear, but we also ask some questions that are so incredibly personal and graphic that we require extensive training of our interviewers so that they don't completely lose it when asking.
Because they aren't separate for teenagers. If teenagers actually did practice proper condom purchasing and maintenance behaviors, we could completely separate the two aspects - but they don't.
Guy is over at his boy or girlfriend's house, they're making out and want to have sex. Does either one have a condom? What if they don't? Oh, "I think my dad has some... let me look..." Hey, if dad's using it, it's got to be a good kind, right? Oh, "I bought this from a bathroom vending machine, it should be good, right?" Oh, "Uh, I think I have one laying around that I got from some safe-sex deal..." In all of those cases, properly using the condom ABSOLUTELY means knowing the stuff you say is part of maintenance. People make the assumption that if there's a condom around it has to be good because it wouldn't be available if it weren't, and because of that, they need to know that all that "maintenance" stuff is essential to proper use.
They have a condom, now what? "Oh, it's kinda tight... what can we use for lube?" I've had participants tell me they used *salad dressing* for lube because they couldn't find anything legit and thought it *had* to be safe because you eat it. Or people putting petroleum jelly on because "it doesn't say oil." What to put on the condom is every bit as important as knowing how to put the condom on for proper use.
We absolutely have to consider realistic scenarios when talking about proper use, and that ups the complexity. We want to get measures of what people *actually* know and might realistically practice, not whether they know some overly simplified and idealized method of putting things on.
On the plus side, trying to find the humor in it, I'm lucky enough to work in a lab that, because we do sexual research, research on youth, and research on queer topics (and often all combined), I've been told that I, personally, am what's wrong with the world today. It's really kind of empowering, knowing that when civilization falls, it'll be because I asked teenagers about buttsex.
Let me explain in more detail, though I think I more or less covered this in my first and follow-up post:
We're doing research to find out how much people actually know. To do this, we need to set up situations where there is a very small chance of people accidentally getting the "right" answer simply by guessing. So in addition to the proper steps, we add in ones that are not relevant when we do the sorting exercise and ask the participants to remove the steps they think are irrelevant. A participant who knows how to properly use a condom will be able to discard the irrelevant steps and put the few remaining relevant ones into proper order. If we simply gave them the steps that are relevant, there would be a non-trivial chance that we'd get people getting the right answer by guesswork, and that would be bad science.
We're using the results of this research to come up with interventions/educational programs which present the information in vastly simplified ways, but ones that actually work. We're using the research to inform the intervention because, you know, just sort of guessing what might work doesn't actually work as well as some people would like to think. It turns out that in many unexpected ways many of the current educational models fail horribly. One example of this is the idea of catchy slogans and cartoons about condom use - some people assume that because cartoons are being used that it can't be all that serious a thing, since if it were important the educators would be taking it Very Seriously. Another example of the current model is that cultural competence is often missing - programs designed for affluent white suburban kids often don't work for poverty stricken african-american kids living in the city. Stuff that works great for guys does absolutely nothing for girls (and knowing how to use condoms properly is just as important for females, as is the idea that you can INSIST that your partner use a condom and refuse to have sex if he won't).
And, though you say it isn't rocket science, you were, in fact, incorrect when you explained how to put it on. You neglected to check the foil to make sure it was sealed. You neglected to make sure that the condom was new rather than some crusty thing that's been sitting in a wallet for several years. You neglected to check to make sure it was a latex condom and lubricated rather than one made from animal products or dry. You neglected to make sure that whatever lubricant you're using is not oil based/is latex safe. Oops. You might say that those steps are no-brainers or implied, but the fact is, they aren't no-brainers, they aren't implied, and they are very, very, VERY important parts of proper condom use. I won't even get into things like knowing that ANY penetration without a condom is risky, or that if you do fuck up and put the wrong end on first that you can't just flip it over, and numerous other things - they aren't part of the "20 steps" measure, but the second measure I mentioned where we assess actual errors with condom usage.
I really do wish it were as simple as some people want to make it out to be. I would love it if this part of my job were made obsolete.
You misunderstand the nature of the measure we give. We aren't, with that measure, trying to actually teach them - we're trying to understand where previous teachings have gone wrong or fallen short. The bogus steps are included to reduce the chances of someone randomly getting it right, but also to see how well what they have been taught has stuck. Some of the steps are "basic maintenance" kinds of things - making sure the condoms were obtained within the last 2 months, wrapper is unbroken, they're made of latex and not animal products, etc., but aren't directly related to putting one on.
Once we know that, then we can come up with the easiest and most easily remembered way to teach proper usage. Right now, however, many of the programs that have been developed to teach people have been assembled based not on science but on (often completely wrong) well-intentioned intuition and "obvious" answers. Some programs have been piloted with a very specific group of teenagers and work well with that set, but are completely broken when it comes to working with teens from other backgrounds.
On the cartoon front, you'd be surprised at how badly that actually works. Among kids who are already more or less doing it right or very knowledgeable about safer sex, cartoonish things and simple slogans work really well (my theory here is that they're very knowledgeable *because* the cartoons and keep-it-simple slogans work). But for teenagers from some other backgrounds, it absolutely doesn't work for a variety of reasons, and the education they need is a bit more involved because it needs not only to inform but also to overcome certain cultural hurdles.
I really wish it *were* as simple as some people in this thread are making it sound - I'd happily turn my attention to other research areas if it meant lower HIV/STI and pregnancy rates among the teenagers we're studying!
... and the study mentioned in the article makes perfect sense. The article is propaganda that intentionally misunderstands what the study is about in order to stir up their readership.
In one of our studies of (mostly queer) sexually active teenagers. One of the key things we look at is condom use knowledge and condom errors. Most people know that they should use a condom if they're having sex, but quite a large swath of the population doesn't know how to *properly* use them and what they do and do not protect against. Some people are perfectly willing to use condoms, but they get frustrated because they're using them wrong, and so the condoms break or come off, and they stop using them out of frustration.
One measure we give is we have 20 different "steps" for using a condom properly, and they're out of order, and some are not real steps. Out of ~250 teenagers, most of whom have taken sex ed, been exposed to safer sex info all their lives, only 6 got that exercise 100% correct (all real steps in proper order, all fake steps removed), and only 42 got all the real steps in the correct order (but kept some of the fake steps). The kids have been taught, but retention isn't so hot - we're coming up with better ways to teach this.
Another measure we have is taking an inventory of experiences with recent condom use, and most of our participants report some level of difficulty with condom use, with most of those reports coming along the lines of it being too confusing to remember all of the steps they were taught while in the heat of the moment etc. They want to use condoms, but they've learned all of that in a very "academic" environment - we're trying to develop interventions that will help teach people how to handle themselves when they're not at their most rational.
A final measure we give which is related to condom use is an HIV & STI knowledge quiz with true, false and "don't know" answers. Most of our participants score 70% or better, but certain segments average scores below 30%. By identifying the lagging segments and then examining what it is that is leading to this dearth of HIV & STI knowledge, we're able to come up with plans to get this information out to those groups because the current techniques clearly aren't working.
It's neither an obvious nor simple area of research, despite what some in this thread will say. $400k to potentially save quite a few lives (or protect the quality of many lives) is a bargain. If you're a wretched excuse for a human being and you think that people who get HIV "deserve" it, you probably don't care that a lifetime of treatment for a single case of HIV infection will run around $400-500k (minimum) so this kind of research is also cost effective from that standpoint.
There are a number of these the world over. The show "World Without People" on the History Channel has featured several:
Gary, Indiana (which isn't abandoned entirely, but large parts of it essentially are) One I cannot recall the name of which was a gold-mining town in the early 1900's (desert) One I also cannot remember the name of which is on an island just off of Japan and was an industrial city until it was abandoned
It's really fascinating to see the things that have happened in those various areas.
I don't think that it would be possible to do it in a more rigorous fashion - the existence of the cordons/fencing/whatever would have an impact on the reclaiming (if it happens) by animals and other natural forces.
Anyway, check out that show and you'll see some real life examples in every episode. It's kind of hokey at times, but the parts about places where it's already happened are really fascinating and they have some of that in each episode.
My brother in law used to call me up, frequently, to ask me for tech support help. He's a doctor, so I solved it by calling him up every single day to ask him some inane question about medicine.
"Hey, so I'm at the store and I want to buy band-aids. Which ones are best?" "Hey, it's me again - so when I called up 5 minutes ago to ask about band-aids, I didn't realize they had purple ones. Are those going to work differently than the beige ones?" "Oh, hi, me again... I was walking by the frozen food section and it was kind of cold there but it's a really hot day outside - can I catch sick from the temperature differential?" "Yeah, it's... well, this is a bit strange. But I was at work today and one of my co-workers kind of has a limp. Can you tell me what that's from? I don't wanna ask him - let me put him on with you, maybe you can fix him..." "So I was on a date last night and we went to a used bookstore and I started sneezing. Is that the swine flu? Well, yeah, it was dusty in there, but Oprah was talking about the Swine Flu, and I had bacon the other day so maybe I'm going to... hello? Helloooo?"
For people who don't have a particular profession, calling them up at odd hours to ask them for tiny favors also works. My next-door neighbor used to ask me for tech support all the time, so I started asking him to pick things up at the store for me, give me rides, loan me odd random items ("Can I borrow one of your bookends?" "Do you have a shoehorn I can use for a couple of days? Mine's in the shop.")
I strongly doubt it, but why do you ask? There's nothing to prevent a person from getting books from many sources.
I've had a Kindle for a little over a year now and I've bought 3 books from the amazon store - the bulk of the books I've gotten have been either public domain (Gutenberg Project), freebies given away by publishers, textbooks, and books from other sites where I'm able to get them for a price that's much more in-line with what I think is reasonable.
I dunno about other cities, but Chicago's Public Libraries have an e-book check-out system. I've checked out a couple of books with it just to see how it worked and while it was a bit clunky in ways, ultimately it was pretty simple. Not a great selection when I checked, but that there was anything at all was pretty great.
Worse was the Apple II Reset button - originally it was (if I remember right) more or less right above the Return key. Back in the days when saving was a matter of screwing around with cassette tapes and luck, it was incredibly frustrating to accidentally brush the Reset button. Fortunately it was possible to re-wire it so it required you to press CTRL + Reset to reset, and then we also got a floppy drive so that it was MUCH less obnoxious to save stuff.
I wonder how many hours of lost work that reset button was responsible for over all Apple II users.
I'm fascinated by people who take the time and expend the effort to mention 1-button mice but can't be bothered to learn that apple's mice have been 2 (well, 3, including a scroll wheel) buttoned for quite some time now.
If it's important enough for you to bring up, perhaps it should be important enough for you to actually be informed on.
And, actually, 1 button mice were quite wonderful at the time. As someone who has taught her fair share of introductory "how to use a computer" courses and seen normally intelligent people completely baffled by the idea that the left and right mouse buttons don't do exactly the same thing, it makes a fair amount of sense to have the input device behave how a novice user might expect it to and make it explicit that they need to do something special (hold down a key) to make it behave differently.
Nowadays, it's probably fair to think that most people have used a mouse and can handle the idea of having 2 different buttons do 2 different things, but back when mice were first becoming popular, a 1-button mouse wasn't a bad idea for people who were intimidated by the new tech.
F=MA doesn't have a term in it for atmospheric resistance. Before suggesting other people learn and understand, you might want to make absolutely sure you've got it right. F=MA has absolutely nothing to do with atmospheric resistance (save in that atmospheric resistance will have an effect on A).
If it were simply dropped within the atmosphere with no impetus, yes - it'd hit terminal velocity.
But if it actually came from space, it could have been traveling hellaciously fast, been slowed down somewhat by the atmosphere, but by no means just down to whatever terminal velocity would be.
Think about it this way - if you fire a gun from the top of a building, the bullet would still hit faster than terminal velocity because it had something propelling it. Same for a meteorite.
You said it yourself - we work under the *assumption* that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. It's nice to be able to test to make sure our assumptions are true, or at least not obviously false. And massive amounts of progress are usually made when we find out our assumptions are wrong rather than when we just confirm they're right, so we *should* always test the things we're assuming (but haven't really demonstrated) to be true.
As to what we gain, we gain better instruments and more tools in our toolbox for studying the universe, and a tool that might be useful in other unexpected ways down the line. In another slashdot story today, a drug that was once going to be used to treat ulcers might now prove to be a very good medication for leukemia treatment. The scientist decided to test 2500 compounds on stem-cells and see if anything interesting happened and lo, it did. The scientists in this story decided to try out a new technique and demonstrated that they could find a (relatively) tiny object far, far away. I'm no astronomer, but I'd say that technique will likely have other applications.
Intellectual curiosity is not a bad thing, and can lead to amazing stuff.
Why worry about what they call you? Anyone who feels the need to insult people just because they don't feel the urge to be dicks to people or to put up with being treated like shit is not what I'd call a healthy person, and their opinions are pretty much irrelevant. There's a schizophrenic guy who lives in a box in my alley, and when I see him he never fails to scream abuse at me - but he's a schizophrenic guy who lives in a box, so I don't really care what he thinks, you know? These people who are insisting that anyone who doesn't behave like a dick online are just the electronic version of that, and I certainly wouldn't want to spend time in the Forest of Feelings with them.
I PvP on occasion, and it's to have fun, not to make other people miserable. What's fun for me is the need to be vigilant when going somewhere that could have an ambusher. What's fun for me is finding the perfect spot to hang out and wait for unwitting prey to come past to be taken out by a well-aimed shot. What's fun for me is seeing a big battle happening and just wading into the mayhem. What's fun for me is working with a small team to go and take out an objective that is being guarded by the other team. What's fun for me is trying to find a good way to defend something from the enemy I know is about to come in any minute - preparing for a frontal assault, but also keeping an eye out for more sneaky tactics. It's fun to do those things.
Unfortunately, as you point out, it's pretty hard to find other people who feel the same way - for every one of me, there's a dozen people who just see PvP as a tool with which to annoy other people rather than a fun thing in and of itself. So what I do is I just avoid being a jerk to other people when I'm on the winning side, won't hang out with people who seem to just want to annoy other people rather than have fun with it.
I've been camped in WoW and I handled it in a way that was fun for me - I went back to my corpse and found a spot that I thought would give me 5 seconds to rez and recover before my camper could reasonably get to me and I either bugged out or tried to learn a new tactic for defeating him. When it has been someone much higher level, I've organized a posse to go after him, which was fun in it's own way and learned from the whole encounter. In fact, I daresay, getting ganked repeatedly by people higher level than me was a great way to get actually *good* at PvP because I had to use every trick in the book to either delay my death or get away (or, rarely, actually beat someone 10+ levels higher than me).
Maybe it's just my mindset, but I just don't get upset - it always just seems like an opportunity to learn how to handle a difficult situation.
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Because with really good physics you can expand the gameplay options a LOT.
I was playing one game where I needed to kill someone who was protected inside a really well-guarded building. Every time I tried to get in through the only entrance to the building I wound up being killed before I could even take down half of the guards (I suck at those kind of scenarios). There was no way to get to the roof of the building - I tried going to all the buildings around it, but the jump distance was *just* too short. Then it occurred to me - there were flammable barrels a couple of miles away (in game terms) and I could run into them to knock them over and then kind of keep bumping them to keep them moving. I I ran off, pushed 5 or 6 barrels over to a spot right around the corner from the entrance, shot at one of the guards and ran around the corner. Half of the guards ran after me, and once they all came around the corner, I shot the barrels - huge explosion, half the guards were dead in one shot, and then I was able to handle the remaining guards.
Without decent physics, I wouldn't have had that option unless the developers specifically put it into the game. Good physics allows for emergent gameplay, which can be really good.
There are some modern games that seem to have figured out how to have more realistic (in some ways) physics and outstanding control schemes.
Prototype is one example - you're capable of doing some REALLY crazy and physics defying stuff, but when you don't use any of the "special" powers or moves the physics tends to be more or less real. The engine lends itself to some emergent stuff. Another example is one of the Hulk games - I don't even bother with the missions in that one, I just piss the army off to the point where they're sending everything they've got at me, and then I beat them to death with their own people and vehicles. Great fun.
There are plenty of ways to give games realistic (or more realistic) physics and still have them be tremendous fun. There are quite a few of the modern games that are *damn* fun to play because of their physics. I suspect that the difference you're really getting at is that in the olden days there could be more of a focus on the game play since shiny rendering and physics engines weren't enough to sell a game. Fortunately, there are modern games with great gameplay AND all the shiny.
If by "worst behaved" you simply mean the ones that would challenge authority and "color outside the lines," then sure - those kinds of "misbehaviors" are pretty common among people who are really good at their job. That seems to be a pretty milquetoast version of "worst behaved" though.
As someone who went to Chicago Public Schools, I can say that the "worst behaved" students are the ones who were unable to handle any kind of structured environment, were disruptive and violent towards other students, were often high if they bothered to show up for classes, and generally couldn't handle even remedial work. The few of these kids that eventually straightened themselves out might make good mentors or counselors at programs to help at-risk children, but generally wouldn't be what I'd call good teachers because they're usually lacking the academic accomplishment that really good teachers must have.
On the issue of taking one to know one - I think it's possible to be a good security expert without being a convicted felon. Given the choice between hiring someone who is very good but a convicted felon vs. someone who is very good and who has the moral compass necessary to avoid committing acts that are criminal, I'll take the latter any time. There are *millions* of people the world over who do computer security - most of them without criminal records - it's not exactly like it's some kind of arcane art or a skillset so hard to come by that one must hire a (hopefully former) black-hat.
My guess is some of these guys are being hired by organizations who want to use their felony record as some kind of street cred - "Our security is the best; we've got one of the worst of the hackers in charge of it!" etc.
It's also possible that he has some ideas already and has investigated it but wants to get the opinions of other people. From the tone of your response, it's obvious that you are dismissive of this practice, but it's actually a good thing to do. Frequently when people self-educate on a given topic they'll not cover or consider aspects that might crop up and surprise them - getting information from others (as many others as you can, assuming you have a halfway decent way of making it comprehensible rather than a flood) is a good thing.
And perhaps he's using this as a way to pick the few countries he might later go to and visit, given that people here might offer up suggestions that might never have occurred to him. For example, in my case, it would never have occurred to me that moving to a native-american reservation was even an option for non-natives, and New Zealand would have completely slipped my mind as well. Not everyone is, apparently, the testosterone driven, self-contained world traveler you are - some people like to actually consult with other people to get ideas before they go do something.
Even if he hasn't done other research on his own, it's still an interesting thing to talk about and an interesting thing to discuss. Some of the tangential conversations in this thread have informed me of things I never even thought about.
That *is* the purpose of this website, right? For people to discuss things of some relevance to geeks? If so, why shit on that discussion by being so dismissive in your tone?
(end of derail - it just irks me when people here are so dismissive of other people just because they ask questions)
Most people aren't 100% one-hand-dominant.
For example, in my case, I best write legibly and easily only with my left hand, can draw well with either hand, most accurately throw a ball with my right, throw a stronger punch with my left, switch-hit, etc. I'm essentially ambidextrous (as are many other people who think they're only left or right handed). Oh, and I hold my phone to my left ear - I tend to space out on what people are saying if I have it held to my right ear.
In one of our studies, we have participants answer 10 questions about which hand they use to do certain tasks - left, right or either. Approximately 5% of our participants answer 8+ questions as being ONLY left or right handed, 5% answer 8+ questions with left AND right handedness, and everyone else is split pretty evenly. If we only talk about writing, then 80% say only right hand, 15% or so lefties, and 5% ambidextrous.
So, just because a majority of people are (when it comes to writing) right-handed, that doesn't necessarily extend to other domains.
This is slashdot. Half of the people here will insist that they were misunderstood geniuses when they were children and the only reason they never came up with anything remotely interesting or original in their lives is because The Man crushed their spirits and turned them into underachieving misanthropes who can only get jobs working help desk.
The other half will loudly pipe up any time there's a poorly written article (so, all the time) that mischaracterizes some new development in science, pointing out the "obvious" flaws that the hundreds of PhD's involved in the project couldn't possibly have been aware of or understood. They also work help desk, but they haven't been turned into bitter, soulless things in vaguely human form yet.
The final half are the geek-lites, like me, who are bad at maths, either work in graphic design or the "soft" sciences, and are probably typing their replies on a Mac while sitting at a café. We're only bitter when our foreign language fashion magazines fail to impress those around us.
The problem with getting funding from sources with a financial interest in the outcome of your research is "What happens if your research leads to them losing money?"
The answer to that is: They won't give out more money unless the people doing the research are willing to toe the line, which leads to such truly abhorrent things as "studies" that show no link between smoking and cancer.
What happens if you go with non-corporate sources for funding? Well, if you go to any organization with an agenda (read: all of them) you wind up with research that is so methodologically flawed and the results so massively misrepresented for the sake of political expediency that it's worse than if no study was done at all.
I know this may sound absurd, but federal funds are actually quite necessary if you want to have research (especially social/community psych or public health) stuff that isn't really just dressing to ram home an agenda.
Just like with software Q&A, when we design research protocols we need to account for "What the FUCK were you THINKING?" moments on the part of our participants. The meetings where we try to brainstorm ways for our participants to break the interview are some of the most fun parts of my job.
I've also developed an amazing poker-face thanks to conducting dozens of these interviews - you never know what you're going to hear, but we also ask some questions that are so incredibly personal and graphic that we require extensive training of our interviewers so that they don't completely lose it when asking.
Because they aren't separate for teenagers. If teenagers actually did practice proper condom purchasing and maintenance behaviors, we could completely separate the two aspects - but they don't.
Guy is over at his boy or girlfriend's house, they're making out and want to have sex. Does either one have a condom? What if they don't? Oh, "I think my dad has some... let me look..." Hey, if dad's using it, it's got to be a good kind, right? Oh, "I bought this from a bathroom vending machine, it should be good, right?" Oh, "Uh, I think I have one laying around that I got from some safe-sex deal..." In all of those cases, properly using the condom ABSOLUTELY means knowing the stuff you say is part of maintenance.
People make the assumption that if there's a condom around it has to be good because it wouldn't be available if it weren't, and because of that, they need to know that all that "maintenance" stuff is essential to proper use.
They have a condom, now what? "Oh, it's kinda tight... what can we use for lube?" I've had participants tell me they used *salad dressing* for lube because they couldn't find anything legit and thought it *had* to be safe because you eat it. Or people putting petroleum jelly on because "it doesn't say oil." What to put on the condom is every bit as important as knowing how to put the condom on for proper use.
We absolutely have to consider realistic scenarios when talking about proper use, and that ups the complexity. We want to get measures of what people *actually* know and might realistically practice, not whether they know some overly simplified and idealized method of putting things on.
On the plus side, trying to find the humor in it, I'm lucky enough to work in a lab that, because we do sexual research, research on youth, and research on queer topics (and often all combined), I've been told that I, personally, am what's wrong with the world today. It's really kind of empowering, knowing that when civilization falls, it'll be because I asked teenagers about buttsex.
Now I know how the butterfly feels! Rawr!
Let me explain in more detail, though I think I more or less covered this in my first and follow-up post:
We're doing research to find out how much people actually know. To do this, we need to set up situations where there is a very small chance of people accidentally getting the "right" answer simply by guessing. So in addition to the proper steps, we add in ones that are not relevant when we do the sorting exercise and ask the participants to remove the steps they think are irrelevant. A participant who knows how to properly use a condom will be able to discard the irrelevant steps and put the few remaining relevant ones into proper order. If we simply gave them the steps that are relevant, there would be a non-trivial chance that we'd get people getting the right answer by guesswork, and that would be bad science.
We're using the results of this research to come up with interventions/educational programs which present the information in vastly simplified ways, but ones that actually work. We're using the research to inform the intervention because, you know, just sort of guessing what might work doesn't actually work as well as some people would like to think. It turns out that in many unexpected ways many of the current educational models fail horribly. One example of this is the idea of catchy slogans and cartoons about condom use - some people assume that because cartoons are being used that it can't be all that serious a thing, since if it were important the educators would be taking it Very Seriously. Another example of the current model is that cultural competence is often missing - programs designed for affluent white suburban kids often don't work for poverty stricken african-american kids living in the city. Stuff that works great for guys does absolutely nothing for girls (and knowing how to use condoms properly is just as important for females, as is the idea that you can INSIST that your partner use a condom and refuse to have sex if he won't).
And, though you say it isn't rocket science, you were, in fact, incorrect when you explained how to put it on. You neglected to check the foil to make sure it was sealed. You neglected to make sure that the condom was new rather than some crusty thing that's been sitting in a wallet for several years. You neglected to check to make sure it was a latex condom and lubricated rather than one made from animal products or dry. You neglected to make sure that whatever lubricant you're using is not oil based/is latex safe. Oops. You might say that those steps are no-brainers or implied, but the fact is, they aren't no-brainers, they aren't implied, and they are very, very, VERY important parts of proper condom use. I won't even get into things like knowing that ANY penetration without a condom is risky, or that if you do fuck up and put the wrong end on first that you can't just flip it over, and numerous other things - they aren't part of the "20 steps" measure, but the second measure I mentioned where we assess actual errors with condom usage.
I really do wish it were as simple as some people want to make it out to be. I would love it if this part of my job were made obsolete.
You misunderstand the nature of the measure we give. We aren't, with that measure, trying to actually teach them - we're trying to understand where previous teachings have gone wrong or fallen short. The bogus steps are included to reduce the chances of someone randomly getting it right, but also to see how well what they have been taught has stuck. Some of the steps are "basic maintenance" kinds of things - making sure the condoms were obtained within the last 2 months, wrapper is unbroken, they're made of latex and not animal products, etc., but aren't directly related to putting one on.
Once we know that, then we can come up with the easiest and most easily remembered way to teach proper usage. Right now, however, many of the programs that have been developed to teach people have been assembled based not on science but on (often completely wrong) well-intentioned intuition and "obvious" answers. Some programs have been piloted with a very specific group of teenagers and work well with that set, but are completely broken when it comes to working with teens from other backgrounds.
On the cartoon front, you'd be surprised at how badly that actually works. Among kids who are already more or less doing it right or very knowledgeable about safer sex, cartoonish things and simple slogans work really well (my theory here is that they're very knowledgeable *because* the cartoons and keep-it-simple slogans work). But for teenagers from some other backgrounds, it absolutely doesn't work for a variety of reasons, and the education they need is a bit more involved because it needs not only to inform but also to overcome certain cultural hurdles.
I really wish it *were* as simple as some people in this thread are making it sound - I'd happily turn my attention to other research areas if it meant lower HIV/STI and pregnancy rates among the teenagers we're studying!
... and the study mentioned in the article makes perfect sense. The article is propaganda that intentionally misunderstands what the study is about in order to stir up their readership.
In one of our studies of (mostly queer) sexually active teenagers. One of the key things we look at is condom use knowledge and condom errors. Most people know that they should use a condom if they're having sex, but quite a large swath of the population doesn't know how to *properly* use them and what they do and do not protect against. Some people are perfectly willing to use condoms, but they get frustrated because they're using them wrong, and so the condoms break or come off, and they stop using them out of frustration.
One measure we give is we have 20 different "steps" for using a condom properly, and they're out of order, and some are not real steps. Out of ~250 teenagers, most of whom have taken sex ed, been exposed to safer sex info all their lives, only 6 got that exercise 100% correct (all real steps in proper order, all fake steps removed), and only 42 got all the real steps in the correct order (but kept some of the fake steps). The kids have been taught, but retention isn't so hot - we're coming up with better ways to teach this.
Another measure we have is taking an inventory of experiences with recent condom use, and most of our participants report some level of difficulty with condom use, with most of those reports coming along the lines of it being too confusing to remember all of the steps they were taught while in the heat of the moment etc. They want to use condoms, but they've learned all of that in a very "academic" environment - we're trying to develop interventions that will help teach people how to handle themselves when they're not at their most rational.
A final measure we give which is related to condom use is an HIV & STI knowledge quiz with true, false and "don't know" answers. Most of our participants score 70% or better, but certain segments average scores below 30%. By identifying the lagging segments and then examining what it is that is leading to this dearth of HIV & STI knowledge, we're able to come up with plans to get this information out to those groups because the current techniques clearly aren't working.
It's neither an obvious nor simple area of research, despite what some in this thread will say. $400k to potentially save quite a few lives (or protect the quality of many lives) is a bargain. If you're a wretched excuse for a human being and you think that people who get HIV "deserve" it, you probably don't care that a lifetime of treatment for a single case of HIV infection will run around $400-500k (minimum) so this kind of research is also cost effective from that standpoint.
There are a number of these the world over. The show "World Without People" on the History Channel has featured several:
Gary, Indiana (which isn't abandoned entirely, but large parts of it essentially are)
One I cannot recall the name of which was a gold-mining town in the early 1900's (desert)
One I also cannot remember the name of which is on an island just off of Japan and was an industrial city until it was abandoned
It's really fascinating to see the things that have happened in those various areas.
I don't think that it would be possible to do it in a more rigorous fashion - the existence of the cordons/fencing/whatever would have an impact on the reclaiming (if it happens) by animals and other natural forces.
Anyway, check out that show and you'll see some real life examples in every episode. It's kind of hokey at times, but the parts about places where it's already happened are really fascinating and they have some of that in each episode.
My brother in law used to call me up, frequently, to ask me for tech support help. He's a doctor, so I solved it by calling him up every single day to ask him some inane question about medicine.
"Hey, so I'm at the store and I want to buy band-aids. Which ones are best?" ... hello? Helloooo?"
"Hey, it's me again - so when I called up 5 minutes ago to ask about band-aids, I didn't realize they had purple ones. Are those going to work differently than the beige ones?"
"Oh, hi, me again... I was walking by the frozen food section and it was kind of cold there but it's a really hot day outside - can I catch sick from the temperature differential?"
"Yeah, it's... well, this is a bit strange. But I was at work today and one of my co-workers kind of has a limp. Can you tell me what that's from? I don't wanna ask him - let me put him on with you, maybe you can fix him..."
"So I was on a date last night and we went to a used bookstore and I started sneezing. Is that the swine flu? Well, yeah, it was dusty in there, but Oprah was talking about the Swine Flu, and I had bacon the other day so maybe I'm going to
For people who don't have a particular profession, calling them up at odd hours to ask them for tiny favors also works. My next-door neighbor used to ask me for tech support all the time, so I started asking him to pick things up at the store for me, give me rides, loan me odd random items ("Can I borrow one of your bookends?" "Do you have a shoehorn I can use for a couple of days? Mine's in the shop.")
I strongly doubt it, but why do you ask? There's nothing to prevent a person from getting books from many sources.
I've had a Kindle for a little over a year now and I've bought 3 books from the amazon store - the bulk of the books I've gotten have been either public domain (Gutenberg Project), freebies given away by publishers, textbooks, and books from other sites where I'm able to get them for a price that's much more in-line with what I think is reasonable.
I dunno about other cities, but Chicago's Public Libraries have an e-book check-out system. I've checked out a couple of books with it just to see how it worked and while it was a bit clunky in ways, ultimately it was pretty simple. Not a great selection when I checked, but that there was anything at all was pretty great.
Worse was the Apple II Reset button - originally it was (if I remember right) more or less right above the Return key. Back in the days when saving was a matter of screwing around with cassette tapes and luck, it was incredibly frustrating to accidentally brush the Reset button. Fortunately it was possible to re-wire it so it required you to press CTRL + Reset to reset, and then we also got a floppy drive so that it was MUCH less obnoxious to save stuff.
I wonder how many hours of lost work that reset button was responsible for over all Apple II users.
I'm fascinated by people who take the time and expend the effort to mention 1-button mice but can't be bothered to learn that apple's mice have been 2 (well, 3, including a scroll wheel) buttoned for quite some time now.
If it's important enough for you to bring up, perhaps it should be important enough for you to actually be informed on.
And, actually, 1 button mice were quite wonderful at the time. As someone who has taught her fair share of introductory "how to use a computer" courses and seen normally intelligent people completely baffled by the idea that the left and right mouse buttons don't do exactly the same thing, it makes a fair amount of sense to have the input device behave how a novice user might expect it to and make it explicit that they need to do something special (hold down a key) to make it behave differently.
Nowadays, it's probably fair to think that most people have used a mouse and can handle the idea of having 2 different buttons do 2 different things, but back when mice were first becoming popular, a 1-button mouse wasn't a bad idea for people who were intimidated by the new tech.
And of course, by asteroid, I meant meteorite.
F=MA doesn't have a term in it for atmospheric resistance. Before suggesting other people learn and understand, you might want to make absolutely sure you've got it right. F=MA has absolutely nothing to do with atmospheric resistance (save in that atmospheric resistance will have an effect on A).
I wonder if it was a nickel-irony asteroid?
If it were simply dropped within the atmosphere with no impetus, yes - it'd hit terminal velocity.
But if it actually came from space, it could have been traveling hellaciously fast, been slowed down somewhat by the atmosphere, but by no means just down to whatever terminal velocity would be.
Think about it this way - if you fire a gun from the top of a building, the bullet would still hit faster than terminal velocity because it had something propelling it. Same for a meteorite.
You said it yourself - we work under the *assumption* that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. It's nice to be able to test to make sure our assumptions are true, or at least not obviously false. And massive amounts of progress are usually made when we find out our assumptions are wrong rather than when we just confirm they're right, so we *should* always test the things we're assuming (but haven't really demonstrated) to be true.
As to what we gain, we gain better instruments and more tools in our toolbox for studying the universe, and a tool that might be useful in other unexpected ways down the line. In another slashdot story today, a drug that was once going to be used to treat ulcers might now prove to be a very good medication for leukemia treatment. The scientist decided to test 2500 compounds on stem-cells and see if anything interesting happened and lo, it did. The scientists in this story decided to try out a new technique and demonstrated that they could find a (relatively) tiny object far, far away. I'm no astronomer, but I'd say that technique will likely have other applications.
Intellectual curiosity is not a bad thing, and can lead to amazing stuff.
Why worry about what they call you? Anyone who feels the need to insult people just because they don't feel the urge to be dicks to people or to put up with being treated like shit is not what I'd call a healthy person, and their opinions are pretty much irrelevant. There's a schizophrenic guy who lives in a box in my alley, and when I see him he never fails to scream abuse at me - but he's a schizophrenic guy who lives in a box, so I don't really care what he thinks, you know? These people who are insisting that anyone who doesn't behave like a dick online are just the electronic version of that, and I certainly wouldn't want to spend time in the Forest of Feelings with them.
I PvP on occasion, and it's to have fun, not to make other people miserable. What's fun for me is the need to be vigilant when going somewhere that could have an ambusher. What's fun for me is finding the perfect spot to hang out and wait for unwitting prey to come past to be taken out by a well-aimed shot. What's fun for me is seeing a big battle happening and just wading into the mayhem. What's fun for me is working with a small team to go and take out an objective that is being guarded by the other team. What's fun for me is trying to find a good way to defend something from the enemy I know is about to come in any minute - preparing for a frontal assault, but also keeping an eye out for more sneaky tactics. It's fun to do those things.
Unfortunately, as you point out, it's pretty hard to find other people who feel the same way - for every one of me, there's a dozen people who just see PvP as a tool with which to annoy other people rather than a fun thing in and of itself. So what I do is I just avoid being a jerk to other people when I'm on the winning side, won't hang out with people who seem to just want to annoy other people rather than have fun with it.
I've been camped in WoW and I handled it in a way that was fun for me - I went back to my corpse and found a spot that I thought would give me 5 seconds to rez and recover before my camper could reasonably get to me and I either bugged out or tried to learn a new tactic for defeating him. When it has been someone much higher level, I've organized a posse to go after him, which was fun in it's own way and learned from the whole encounter. In fact, I daresay, getting ganked repeatedly by people higher level than me was a great way to get actually *good* at PvP because I had to use every trick in the book to either delay my death or get away (or, rarely, actually beat someone 10+ levels higher than me).
Maybe it's just my mindset, but I just don't get upset - it always just seems like an opportunity to learn how to handle a difficult situation.