What is it with actually researching opinions these days? Has it gone out of fashion or something? Did I miss the memo?
What's the point of weighing in with a baseless opinion that's easily-verifiable, only to be made to look stupid in front of the whole internet when an Anonymous Coward shoots down your entire thesis with one link?
I mean, it happens such a lot there must be some upside to it, or you'd think people would learn and stop doing it... <:-/
(And no, this isn't entirely directed at 140Mandak262Jamuna - it's a general thought that was sparked by this example, that's all).
Perhaps I am somewhat... left of center or whatever you might call it, but when I read the political and historical articles on Wikipedia, I feel they are just a regurgitation of the same nonsense I get from the corporate media.
Oddly enough, Wikipedia is always getting lambasted for perceived "liberal" bias by right-wingers, too.
I'm fairly left-wing, and I've never noticed overt bias in Wikipedia (at least, none that's not obviously quickly-removed vandalism). OTOH, I've heard legions of very, very left- or right-wingers complaining that Wikipedia is "clearly biased" against them.
It's always remember that "neutral" means the (absolute) middle of the scale - it's not relative to your position.
If you're left-wing and the majority of the articles are right of you, that's because "neutral" is to the right of you. Equally, the majority of articles should be left of a right-winger.
"Neutral" is "in the middle of the scale", not "wherever I am on the scale" as most people seem to instinctively believe.
I hear about how the press is free in the US, but when I go to my local bookstore I am hard-pressed to find, say, a book about Russia which isn't written from a perspective that denounces the Russian revolution
Do you think:
There is a huge overarching conspiracy to suppress these books?
Anyone is telling anyone else that they "can't" publish such a book because of the book's politics?
Or, perhaps:
Consensus opinion doesn't agree with your interpretation, so while there will be books that tout the Russian Revolution as great, they'll be massively outnumbered by those that reflect consensus reality.
Because minority interpretations are... a... minority, there will be less demand for such a book, so it's less likely to get commissioned or picked up by publishers, leading to less books like this?
Your favourite bookshop is crap?
There have been thousands of books about the Russian revolution, how come I can't walk into a library or bookstore and read alternative views on it?
Because (in the extreme case) who's going to put down their publishing company's money on a book that says the Russian Revolution was financed by gay martians acting through the Masons as a front organisation?
Your interpreatation obviously differs from the mainstream. Therefore you should either look for other non-mainstream media (vanity publishers, self-published books or blog-rantings on the internet, for example) or just accept the fact that if 99% of people disagree with you, then you'll disagree with 99% (or more!) of things you read.
Claiming an opinion is being repressed simply because it's unpopular is both ridiculous and annoyingly popular these days. Again, unless you can point to a specific entity (and no, vague statements about "big media" or "the military-industrial complex" doesn't count - they have to be entities you can point to) who's repressing an idea, it's almost certain that the idea is simply too ridiculous for the majority to take seriously.
Dismissal of a daft idea != Repression/Censorship/Conspiracy.
and the whole point of a free press is that you can read alternative, non-mainstream views on it. Just don't scream "censorship" because they aren't published by "mainstream" outlets. Duh.
Is that any different than our accusations about the USSR only allowing a party line? Why can't I make up my own mind?
Yes, it is.
You can disagree with the mainstream position all you want, and nobody will seriously censor you for it. They might not listen, and they might not give you airtime on their TV/radio station or printing press, but that's their perogative.
You can say and do what you like, and they can say and do what they like
You make a valid point, but I don't know if I agree that text is inherently inferior.
Certainly rich media are useful for communicating complex concepts, but the richer the media gets, the more inherently limiting it becomes. Think of it as necessarily increasing "specialisation" with "richness".
For example, classic "text" (as in "written words") is undoubtedly the most basic communication mechanism - atonal, no inflection, no unambiguous emotional indicators, etc.
However, it's also:
The most versatile - you can use it to describe literally anything, even if that description runs to pages and pages of dense prose and isn't easy to parse out.
The most accessible (easy scanning, paging and random-access).
Easiest to translate into other forms (although "a picture's worth a thousand words", ever tried to tell a thousand-word short story in a single picture?)
Easiest to parse for machine learning (machines can extract meaning from text a hell of a lot easier than they can extract meaning from pictures or video)
Extensible - even if there's no inherent emotional "channel" in the communication, elements like emoticons, faux-HTML tags and simple statements like "Of course, I'm being sarcastic here" serve to transmit the same meaning, albeit a little more baldly and verbosely
In contrast, all "richer" media are somehow limited or limiting - we've already touched on the difficulty of telling a thousand-word story in a single picture, but how about accurately communicating a tune as a simulation, or a simulation as a picture? Every other (richer) medium loses something in the translation, often needing to be accompanied by text to explain the bits the "primary" medium can't communicate. Think about it - when was the last time you saw a diagram explaining a complicated concept without any accompanying text to explain it? And how often do you see text descriptions without any accompanying video, diagram, picture or simulation?
Text is like XML - basic, verbose but complete, and capable of describing anything the human mind can conceive.
Other media are more like subsets of XML (say, MathML or SVG), or binary alternatives (I dunno, COM or similar) - very useful and efficient for their domain (try describing a complex differential equation, or all the processing and simulation of a business object, in XML!), but in no way a "general" solution.
To summarise, I'd argue that the fact that Wikipedia is basically "a book with a few pictures" is probably exactly why it's been so successful - the most accessible medium, and one which can represent any concept we could ever wish to discuss. And the fact that simulations/diagrams/video/etc are so good at representing certain types of information is what inherently limits them to a "niche" application.
Like it or loathe it, text is (and always will be) our primary and "best" method of communication.
I think that these days "most kids" play computer games, at least occasionally.
The only kids I know these days who don't play any games at all tend to be the ultra-nerdy ones who don't own a computer and whose family resents even having a TV.
You know the type - kids who really enjoy playing chess or bridge with their parents, or going to the library as their main recreational activity.
Not, obviously, that there's anything wrong with that - I was saying that those kids are exactly the ones most likely to do well in school. My point was that they do well in school because of a lifestyle that prioritises study and leaves little time for other activities (like computer games), rather than the obvious "computer games are killing our kids IQs! Oh noes!!!11!1!one!" interpretation.
Bingo - and that was one of the main things about it that made me uncomfortable.
If self reported grades reliably correlate with actual performance, and kids who play games on weeknights (subjectively) report lower performance, then what you have is an interesting correlation between playing games and lower performance.
It's not "proven", "demonstrated" or even "shown" that there's a definite connection.
"You are correct, but I believe that this does not disprove that they also actually do worse in school. It may actually prove both points, that kids who routinely play computer games on weekdays (added for clarity) perceive and do worse in school than those who don't."
Nope. It only proves (well, demonstrates) that the kids perceive they do worse in school.
The strong correlation between self-reporting and objective performance may indicate that they also actually do worse, but this study doesn't show that conclusively in any way.
That said, I'm not adverse to the idea that video games do harm kids' performances, but to claim this study demonstrates that in any meaningful way would seem to me to be an overstatement. At best it merely indicates this may be the case.
"Many literalists (may I assume that you are such?) refuse to accept self-examination as sound evidence simply because it is subjective. Subjectivity, however, does not necessarily make it erroneous."
I don't refute self-examination as a useful tool. True it's subjective, and that makes it inherently inferior to "objective" methods, but it also allows it to offer information in areas that you can't quantify "objectively" (flavour, for example, or comfort, emotion, happiness, etc).
However, how well the kids are doing in school is an objective metric (grades achieved), not subjective, so it seemed an oddly unscientific choice to go with a measurement which is both more subjective and less precise than necessary.
"They also pointed out (and you quoted this) that "students of all stripes over-report, leading Dr. Sharif to conclude that self-reporting is a viable means of collecting data in this case." This is sound science, whether you agree with it or not."
Well, there is, I'll admit, evidence that self-reporting of grades isn't inherently useless, and indeed is much more reliable than I had thought.
Nevertheless, what part of "leading Dr. Sharif to conclude" is scientific? This is a personal opinion by one person. He ran the study that way, so of course he had decided that it was an acceptable way to run such a study.
If self-reporting of grades is an established, mainstream method in this kind of study then I'll happily withdraw my objection. However, "the bloke who wrote the study thought it was good enough" on its own isn't scientific.
"Also, regarding your point on "bullshit agenda-driven experiment," I'd like to express my frustration over how frequently someone uses this argument to counter a point that they disagree with. Just because you don't agree doesn't mean that the other party has a hidden agenda. It does, however, mean that you have an obvious one."
Heh, indeed it does.
As a video game player I would prefer to think that video games helped kids to develop, so I will be automatically slightly biased against a study like this.
However, I was objecting to perceived inadequacies in the experimental method, not merely to the fact of the study's existence.
This was exacerbated by the propensity of the various fundamentalist and right-wing family groups who regularly trot out cod-science pseudo-investigations that routinely "prove" video games cause mental illness, juvenile delinquency, low birth-weight babies, the rise of Communism (retroactively) and indeed Armageddon.
As I said to a previous poster - I perceived an agenda and my knee jerked. It's strapped down now so hopefully it won't happen again.
And merely disagreeing with me doesn't ever mean you're biased. However, leaving (what looks like) whacking great holes in your experimental methodology, deliberately choosing a less-precise measurement metric and having "conclusions" reported that the study (apparently) doesn't adequately support did indicate possible bias in the results, in my book.
How many kids do you know, these days, who don't play video games?
I know of only one or two, and their parents are uptight, academic luddites who resent even having a TV in the house.
When you factor in PC gaming, Flash games on the web, consoles, portable consoles and mobile phone games, I barely know anyone who doesn't play games at least "occasionally".
This was true (to a lesser extent) even in the early 90s - hardly any kid in my area didn't have either:
1. A PC with games on it 2. Access to a family PC with games on it, or 3. A Sega/Nintendo/PlayStation/3DO/CD32/whatever...
I mean, sure - nerdy kids play computer games a lot and self-identify as "gamers", but even "normal" kids played video games fairly regularly. The ones who didn't were generally the geekiest of the geeks - the kind who'd rather play chess or bridge because computer games bored them.
Strictly speaking even the police blotter contains "bias", since someone has to select which facts to report on it and selective reporting is one of the hardest elements of "bias" to detect.
Again, I was talking specifically about deliberate bias, which I should have made clear.
I think we're disagreeing on the definition of "bias".
To me, the factors you listed are merely incomplete presentations of the situation - bias is only when someone is deliberately giving you an incomplete presentation intended to influence your perception in a certain way.
Maybe I should have said "deliberate bias" instead, but people do have this tendency to smooth over details and decide that because offering a perfectly complete representation of facts is almost impossible, that's a get-out-of-jail-free card to engage in deliberate bias.
Fair point. I confess I was judging based on TFA rather than TFOP (original paper).
I smelled an agenda, and my knee jerked - mea culpa.
Nevertheless, it does seem that this paper is getting a hell of a lot more media exposure than it actually warrents - reading through the quote above it basically notes a (possible) effect from a (small) study, then qualifies itself until it basically says nothing.
I'll confess I'm surprised by the high self-evaluation-to-actual-evaluation correlation, too. Kids' self-evaluation is reliable and consistent enough to use in a scientific study - who'd a thunk it?
However, the remainder of my post was lambasting them for not considering the correlation vs. causation angle. It turns out they didn't, but at least they admitted so in the paper.
It's just a shame it's getting picked up and sensationalised by the media, who will completely ignore the correlation != causation explicit in the exerpt you provided.
The "you" at site A will enter an undefined quantum state, and then (simultaneously, less the transit-time between the points at the speed of light) the block of mass at site B will become "you".
IE, the process is:
An atom of "you" exists at Site A, and an atom of "misc. matter" exists at Site B. The atom of you is entangled - it stops being an atom of "you" and becomes an atom in an undefined quantum state. The "you-ness" of the atom is sent to Site B at the speed of light, where it subsequently merges with an atom of "misc. matter", transferring its "you-ness" to the atom.
Therefore, excepting the transit-time (at the speed of light) each change happens instantaneously in one step. No two-step duplication-then-deletion occurs, as Quantum Mechanics forbids a distinct quantum state from ever being duplicated.
The Daily Show is a comedy show. It exists to amuse people. Now, it may do that by lampooning and referencing real events, but anyone who watches the show is completely aware that it should not be taken seriously. sure, it can inform you, and sure it can educate you, but by virtue of its presentation it's screaming that you shouldn't believe anything on it without double-checking.
Crossfire (and other news media shows) are inherently claiming objectivity, and signally failing to deliver on the promise.
Do you honestly not see the difference?
The Daily Show is supposed to be funny, admits it's not always the objective truth, and yet still manages to inform and educate people.
Crossfire is supposed to be informative and educational, claims it is, and signally fails to deliver on it.
If Crossfire wanted to stop claiming credibility as a hard news show, it could get away with whatever it wanted, just like TDS.
I think this is kind of the point of the article - news shows should be aiming at True and Informative, and are frequently missing.
The Daily Show is aiming at Funny and still hitting True or Informative as often as the news shows.
In addition, you know the Daily Show isn't aiming primarily at True or Informative, so you don't automatically believe everything you hear, but are more likely to check elsewhere for confirmation.
News shows claim a monopoly on Truth and Informativeness, and rely on a historical veneer of impartiality to stop people checking up on them elsewhere.
Thus the Daily Show is arguably a better primary source of information than mainstream news shows - at least it admits it's inaccurate, and tries relatively hard to skewer both main parties equally. That's way better than a one-sided partial propaganda organ that nevertheless claims it's "fair and balanced"...
it is free to say things that traditional news shows can't or won't (ironically, because they want to preserve their reputation for "objectivity", which is in tatters nevertheless... because objectivity is an impossible standard to reach, even in principle. One person's "straight facts" are another person's "obvious bias").
Sorry - I agree with almost everything you said, but unless you were being sarcastic here I have to call complete bullshit.
1. The news media's credibility is in tatters because in the USA you lack a proper, independant news media - almost every show or channel is shilling for one party or the other, separated only by degree. The fact is that the news media isn't even trying for objectivity any more, let alone trying and failing.
2. Objectivity is an "impossible standard to reach", but then so is "law-abiding", "equality" and "moral". That doesn't stop anyone from agreeing we should try to be each of those, so why does it excuse the news media's descent into partiality?
Maybe you weren't offering this phrase as any kind of excuse, but it's the favourite get-out of media-bias apologists and a pet hate of mine so I'm kind of on a hair-trigger for it now - apologies if so.
3. "Straight facts" are straight facts, and "obvious bias" is obvious bias. People always try to claim their opinions are facts, but these people are wrong. Please don't imply they're in any way interchangeable, even jokingly. There are plenty of fuckwits out there who honestly believe this is true already.
These people also often try to claim that "obvious facts" are "someone else's opinion". These people are retreating from reality, refusing to confront essential facts, and are arguably therefore not merely wrong, but actually insane.
In addition, has anyone noticed the really, really important part of the article? The bit where it says, right up-front:
Researchers asked the students to rate their own performance in school on a scale ranging from "below average" to "excellent," instead of looking directly at their grades or other metrics of academic performance. The study also took different parenting styles into account, but did not look at specific household rules covering homework, gaming, and watching TV.
Study coauthor Dr. Iman Sharif belives that using students' own self-ratings of academic performance provided data accurate enough to draw conclusions from. Although students routinely exaggerate their academic performance when asked, according to other studies, students of all stripes over-report, leading Dr. Sharif to conclude that self-reporting is a viable means of collecting data in this case.
This doesn't prove jack-shit. The conclusion of this study should have been that kids who routinely play computer games perceive they're doing worse in school than those who don't.
How many kids did you know in school who didn't play computer games? I haven't been in school for fifteen years, and even then the only people who never played computer games were the handful of nerdy geek kids who didn't own a computer and/or would rather play scrabble with their parents.
Big surprise if the ultra-nerdy kids who real encyclopedias for fun on average, as a group are more intelligent than those who play computer games (ie, a significant fraction of "everyone").
It's a bit like comparing people who listen to classical music or join the debate club with "everyone else". Generally it's the really nerdy academic kids that do this, but according to the logic of this article the conclusion should be that not arguing with people makes me thicker. Oh noes!!!!111!11one!
This smacks of a bullshit agenda-driven experiment. Why get kids to self-report on their progress? Why not use actual grades achieved? It's subjective as all hell. And why merely use "the amount of TV watched", rather than taking into account different parenting styles, whether kids or their parents chose how much TV was watched, etc, etc, etc.
A noble sentiment, but one which doesn't seem to me to be internally consistent.
Kids can call each other "gay" these days without even thinking about homosexuality (and see the previous replier, who used the insult back in the 80s without ever intending any homosexual reference).
Language changes, and while people might have started substituting "gay" for "rubbish" because they were prejudices against homosexuals, a real case could be made that by now the word has two equally-valid meanings, and as such it's possible to use the word without indicating prejudice (however the word first arose).
People who disagree (those who are implicitly trying to hold on to the earlier meaning) don't really have a case, as technically they should call the individuals homosexuals, since by exactly the same logic "gay" only means "happy", not homosexual.
I initially resisted using the term, but now I'm quite happy to do so (assuming there aren't any people present who'd misunderstand and be offended by it). The thing is that meanings change, and it's no more defensible to draw a line and refuse to budge from when "gay" meant "homosexual" than it is to draw a line when gay meant "happy" or when "gay" also meant "crap".
As an aside, this is exactly why people find the phrase "that is the gayest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen two dudes fucking" amusing. If "gay" only meant homosexual the statement would be a tautology, and tautologies aren't amusing. In contrast, this statement is recognised as a pun, using the two different meanings of "gay", which rather implies that people recognise "gay" as having two distinct meanings.
There Has Never Been A Study Which Indicated Cubicles Improve Productivity.
The original claim came from the advertising material for the Action Office, designed by Robert Propst. It was a completely baseless claim when the Action Office was being marketed, and after the AO was bastardised and nickle-and-dimed into the cubicles we know and... well.. know today, it was even more untrue.
Now, you may be able to improve productivity over the normal levels experienced in a cubicle, but that's a bit like being able to jump higher than an elephant, isn't it?
Sure, many gay people don't like the fact that it's more recently been co-opted by the younger generation to mean "rubbish". However, to quote a homosexual friend of mine:
"We can't really complain when people use 'gay' to mean crap, after all, we're the ones who took a word meaning 'happy' and turned it into a word meaning 'likes bum-sex with other boys'."
I think you get the point.
P.S. WTF is 'yiffing'? [Googles]. Oh, right. So you know what that means but don't know what 'gay' means? Or were you just trying to be clever?
"For the Confederacy, I could go on about the whole surrender thing again. That was the understanding of warfare at the time. The war is fought by soldiers, when it's over, the soldiers get to go home, burned though it may be."
As an additional (serious) note, it's worth noticing that the WWII examples are all of one country fighting another - even though it's a bitterly-fought war both sides were relatively equal, and the losing side "lost on its own merits".
In modern western warfare it's generally one tooled-up uber-teched western power against a bunch of little brown people with catapults and the occasional SAM they've managed to save up to buy from Russia.
In this situation it's less a fair fight, and more a slightly-embarrassing steamrollering. The conflict is entirely one-sided, and everyone knows it. It's no longer about western countries fighting for their right to exist, and it's all about rich, decadent western countries pushing the little guy about and generally being a bully[1]. If you can't beat someone fairly, to their face, your only recourse is to hit them in the head with a half-brick in a dark alley somewhere. This is also likely to factor into the increased likelihood of terrorism/insurgency.
[1] At least, from the point of view of a local, whose country is being invaded by the western power.
1. Airport checking is still abominably slow, so saving ten seconds when you've just queued for two hours isn't going to make much difference to anyone.
2. We're already agreeing on frequency and cryptography standards. What makes a "hardware" standard any more onerous? Especially if, as a previous poster pointed out, you just ensured the chip was a set distance from a specific corner of the medium.
3. RF is the most covenient, but also the most insecure. Unless you wrap your passport in multiple layers of tinfoil, you might as well wander about the place screaming "I'm an american citizen! I'm an american citizen!"[1], since anyone who wants to know can buy a cheap RFID reader, jack up its signal-strength and pick you out of a crowd.
[1] Obviously, given the current state of world affairs, this is not recommended behaviour. But now we're being mandated to carry a passport that does it for us?
"Which part of "I think they're a horrible idea" do I need to clarify?"
I think the bit where you disavowed support for it but then presented a really terrible argument as a justification for it.
"Also, I was referencing FIRE as an organization, not that particular weblog entry, but as long as you're discussing it:"
Fair play. But there mere existence of an organisation doesn't prove squat. There are Elvis sighter orgnaisations, but that doesn't prove the King is still with us.
And it especially doesn't prove anything with the (forgive me, but...) notoriously knee-jerk reactionary always-playing-the-victim fundamentalist right as the supposed victims.
"You must have missed the part where there is precedent set in multiple Supreme Court cases stating the opposite, and where there is a ruling from the 7th Circuit which is binding upon UW but which the school has ignored."
Not at all. I merely think it's a bloody stupid decision, and that the university was right to ignore it.
In the UK we have similar student societies in schools and universities. If they want funding and official status at the institution they have to admit anyone. This is why there are athiest or agnostic members of the Christian Union, and the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual societies are technically "GLB & Supporters" societies.
"You make is sound like those who profess a certain belief aren't entitled to support by the state."
Not at all. Every individual should be entitled to state support. We all pay for it, so we should all be entitled to it.
Any group that obeys the rules should be entitled to state support, too. Unfortunately, one of those "rules" is that you shouldn't discriminate based on race, religion or sexuality.
Now, if you don't want to play by the state's rules that's fine, but you then have no right to claim they should fund you like they fund the non-discriminatory groups. If "everyone's" paying for it, then "everyone" should be allowed to join. If not everyone's allowed to join, they have no right to claim funding from "everyone". If the members want a closed, discriminatory club then they can fund it themselves.
If I want I should be able to start a school club where membership is only open to male athiests with three toes and four balls then I should be allowed to. However, if I'm intentionally excluding whole sections of the student body, then I have no right to claim funds intended to benefit the entire student body.
"The state actively NOT supporting a certain religious group IS a violation of church and state."
Sorry, this logic is so bent it's practically pretzel-shaped.
If the school is showing preference or partiality in their funding, funding some religious/athiest groups but not others, then yes, it's wrong.
However, in this case the school is de-funding the Knights of Columbus and also 6-12 other groups. They've apparently blanket-defunded all the religious groups that won't accept "anyone" as a member, and offered to allow funding if they will allow anyone in.
There is no partiality here. There is no violation of church and state here. You are not the victim here. Christians are not being singled out here. There is no left-wing conspiracy to kill Christmas.
Strap down jerking knee, smooth down hackles and engage brain before continuing, mmmkay?
"If a school wants to start up and only admit people who believe what they believe should be entitled to, and should be given support in proportion to the number of students attending. If there is 10 million in the budget for a particular area and 1/10 of the children's parents want them to attend said school, then 1 million should go to that school."
Errrrm, no. If a school wants funding by "everybody" then it should be open to "everybody". Kids should be exposed to a cross-section of society and different cultures - it's exactly this which prevents boneheaded parochial attitudes like those so prevalent in the USA. If I want to segregate my kids from "different" people then I should be allowed to, but:
1. This is not a good idea, or good for them in the sense of making them reasonable, rounded people. 2. I have no right to make anyone else pay for me to do it.
You seem to have a blind spot about the difference between "support" and "pay for me to do whatever the hell I want". If there are perfectly good state schools and I choose to send my kid elsewhere, then damn straight I should have to pay for it. "Support" guarantees an education, not that said education will take place in Ancient greek, on Mars, taught exclusively by eunuchs merely because I decide that's what I want.
"Look, if you don't believe what they believe then why on earth would you want to go to the school in the first place? You don't, you go to the school that holds your beliefs."
Sorry? This is the University of Wisconsin we're talking about here. It is not a religious college. Did you even bother to read TFA before jumping in with your opinion?
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! Pwned.
What is it with actually researching opinions these days? Has it gone out of fashion or something? Did I miss the memo?
What's the point of weighing in with a baseless opinion that's easily-verifiable, only to be made to look stupid in front of the whole internet when an Anonymous Coward shoots down your entire thesis with one link?
I mean, it happens such a lot there must be some upside to it, or you'd think people would learn and stop doing it... <:-/
(And no, this isn't entirely directed at 140Mandak262Jamuna - it's a general thought that was sparked by this example, that's all).
Oddly enough, Wikipedia is always getting lambasted for perceived "liberal" bias by right-wingers, too.
I'm fairly left-wing, and I've never noticed overt bias in Wikipedia (at least, none that's not obviously quickly-removed vandalism). OTOH, I've heard legions of very, very left- or right-wingers complaining that Wikipedia is "clearly biased" against them.
It's always remember that "neutral" means the (absolute) middle of the scale - it's not relative to your position.
If you're left-wing and the majority of the articles are right of you, that's because "neutral" is to the right of you. Equally, the majority of articles should be left of a right-winger.
"Neutral" is "in the middle of the scale", not "wherever I am on the scale" as most people seem to instinctively believe.
Do you think:
Or, perhaps:
Because (in the extreme case) who's going to put down their publishing company's money on a book that says the Russian Revolution was financed by gay martians acting through the Masons as a front organisation?
Your interpreatation obviously differs from the mainstream. Therefore you should either look for other non-mainstream media (vanity publishers, self-published books or blog-rantings on the internet, for example) or just accept the fact that if 99% of people disagree with you, then you'll disagree with 99% (or more!) of things you read.
Claiming an opinion is being repressed simply because it's unpopular is both ridiculous and annoyingly popular these days. Again, unless you can point to a specific entity (and no, vague statements about "big media" or "the military-industrial complex" doesn't count - they have to be entities you can point to) who's repressing an idea, it's almost certain that the idea is simply too ridiculous for the majority to take seriously.
Dismissal of a daft idea != Repression/Censorship/Conspiracy.
and the whole point of a free press is that you can read alternative, non-mainstream views on it. Just don't scream "censorship" because they aren't published by "mainstream" outlets. Duh.
Yes, it is.
You can disagree with the mainstream position all you want, and nobody will seriously censor you for it. They might not listen, and they might not give you airtime on their TV/radio station or printing press, but that's their perogative.
You can say and do what you like, and they can say and do what they like
That might be because Special Relativity is... y'know... esoteric?
And the first line of the article:
For a non-technical introduction to the topic, please see Introduction to special relativity.
Certainly rich media are useful for communicating complex concepts, but the richer the media gets, the more inherently limiting it becomes. Think of it as necessarily increasing "specialisation" with "richness".
For example, classic "text" (as in "written words") is undoubtedly the most basic communication mechanism - atonal, no inflection, no unambiguous emotional indicators, etc.
However, it's also:
In contrast, all "richer" media are somehow limited or limiting - we've already touched on the difficulty of telling a thousand-word story in a single picture, but how about accurately communicating a tune as a simulation, or a simulation as a picture? Every other (richer) medium loses something in the translation, often needing to be accompanied by text to explain the bits the "primary" medium can't communicate. Think about it - when was the last time you saw a diagram explaining a complicated concept without any accompanying text to explain it? And how often do you see text descriptions without any accompanying video, diagram, picture or simulation?
Text is like XML - basic, verbose but complete, and capable of describing anything the human mind can conceive.
Other media are more like subsets of XML (say, MathML or SVG), or binary alternatives (I dunno, COM or similar) - very useful and efficient for their domain (try describing a complex differential equation, or all the processing and simulation of a business object, in XML!), but in no way a "general" solution.
To summarise, I'd argue that the fact that Wikipedia is basically "a book with a few pictures" is probably exactly why it's been so successful - the most accessible medium, and one which can represent any concept we could ever wish to discuss. And the fact that simulations/diagrams/video/etc are so good at representing certain types of information is what inherently limits them to a "niche" application.
Like it or loathe it, text is (and always will be) our primary and "best" method of communication.
I think that these days "most kids" play computer games, at least occasionally.
The only kids I know these days who don't play any games at all tend to be the ultra-nerdy ones who don't own a computer and whose family resents even having a TV.
You know the type - kids who really enjoy playing chess or bridge with their parents, or going to the library as their main recreational activity.
Not, obviously, that there's anything wrong with that - I was saying that those kids are exactly the ones most likely to do well in school. My point was that they do well in school because of a lifestyle that prioritises study and leaves little time for other activities (like computer games), rather than the obvious "computer games are killing our kids IQs! Oh noes!!!11!1!one!" interpretation.
Bingo - and that was one of the main things about it that made me uncomfortable.
If self reported grades reliably correlate with actual performance, and kids who play games on weeknights (subjectively) report lower performance, then what you have is an interesting correlation between playing games and lower performance.
It's not "proven", "demonstrated" or even "shown" that there's a definite connection.
"You are correct, but I believe that this does not disprove that they also actually do worse in school. It may actually prove both points, that kids who routinely play computer games on weekdays (added for clarity) perceive and do worse in school than those who don't."
Nope. It only proves (well, demonstrates) that the kids perceive they do worse in school.
The strong correlation between self-reporting and objective performance may indicate that they also actually do worse, but this study doesn't show that conclusively in any way.
That said, I'm not adverse to the idea that video games do harm kids' performances, but to claim this study demonstrates that in any meaningful way would seem to me to be an overstatement. At best it merely indicates this may be the case.
"Many literalists (may I assume that you are such?) refuse to accept self-examination as sound evidence simply because it is subjective. Subjectivity, however, does not necessarily make it erroneous."
I don't refute self-examination as a useful tool. True it's subjective, and that makes it inherently inferior to "objective" methods, but it also allows it to offer information in areas that you can't quantify "objectively" (flavour, for example, or comfort, emotion, happiness, etc).
However, how well the kids are doing in school is an objective metric (grades achieved), not subjective, so it seemed an oddly unscientific choice to go with a measurement which is both more subjective and less precise than necessary.
"They also pointed out (and you quoted this) that "students of all stripes over-report, leading Dr. Sharif to conclude that self-reporting is a viable means of collecting data in this case." This is sound science, whether you agree with it or not."
Well, there is, I'll admit, evidence that self-reporting of grades isn't inherently useless, and indeed is much more reliable than I had thought.
Nevertheless, what part of "leading Dr. Sharif to conclude" is scientific? This is a personal opinion by one person. He ran the study that way, so of course he had decided that it was an acceptable way to run such a study.
If self-reporting of grades is an established, mainstream method in this kind of study then I'll happily withdraw my objection. However, "the bloke who wrote the study thought it was good enough" on its own isn't scientific.
"Also, regarding your point on "bullshit agenda-driven experiment," I'd like to express my frustration over how frequently someone uses this argument to counter a point that they disagree with. Just because you don't agree doesn't mean that the other party has a hidden agenda. It does, however, mean that you have an obvious one."
Heh, indeed it does.
As a video game player I would prefer to think that video games helped kids to develop, so I will be automatically slightly biased against a study like this.
However, I was objecting to perceived inadequacies in the experimental method, not merely to the fact of the study's existence.
This was exacerbated by the propensity of the various fundamentalist and right-wing family groups who regularly trot out cod-science pseudo-investigations that routinely "prove" video games cause mental illness, juvenile delinquency, low birth-weight babies, the rise of Communism (retroactively) and indeed Armageddon.
As I said to a previous poster - I perceived an agenda and my knee jerked. It's strapped down now so hopefully it won't happen again.
And merely disagreeing with me doesn't ever mean you're biased. However, leaving (what looks like) whacking great holes in your experimental methodology, deliberately choosing a less-precise measurement metric and having "conclusions" reported that the study (apparently) doesn't adequately support did indicate possible bias in the results, in my book.
Heh, but yeah.
How many kids do you know, these days, who don't play video games?
I know of only one or two, and their parents are uptight, academic luddites who resent even having a TV in the house.
When you factor in PC gaming, Flash games on the web, consoles, portable consoles and mobile phone games, I barely know anyone who doesn't play games at least "occasionally".
This was true (to a lesser extent) even in the early 90s - hardly any kid in my area didn't have either:
1. A PC with games on it
2. Access to a family PC with games on it, or
3. A Sega/Nintendo/PlayStation/3DO/CD32/whatever...
I mean, sure - nerdy kids play computer games a lot and self-identify as "gamers", but even "normal" kids played video games fairly regularly. The ones who didn't were generally the geekiest of the geeks - the kind who'd rather play chess or bridge because computer games bored them.
Strictly speaking even the police blotter contains "bias", since someone has to select which facts to report on it and selective reporting is one of the hardest elements of "bias" to detect.
Again, I was talking specifically about deliberate bias, which I should have made clear.
I think we're disagreeing on the definition of "bias".
To me, the factors you listed are merely incomplete presentations of the situation - bias is only when someone is deliberately giving you an incomplete presentation intended to influence your perception in a certain way.
Maybe I should have said "deliberate bias" instead, but people do have this tendency to smooth over details and decide that because offering a perfectly complete representation of facts is almost impossible, that's a get-out-of-jail-free card to engage in deliberate bias.
Fair point. I confess I was judging based on TFA rather than TFOP (original paper).
I smelled an agenda, and my knee jerked - mea culpa.
Nevertheless, it does seem that this paper is getting a hell of a lot more media exposure than it actually warrents - reading through the quote above it basically notes a (possible) effect from a (small) study, then qualifies itself until it basically says nothing.
I'll confess I'm surprised by the high self-evaluation-to-actual-evaluation correlation, too. Kids' self-evaluation is reliable and consistent enough to use in a scientific study - who'd a thunk it?
However, the remainder of my post was lambasting them for not considering the correlation vs. causation angle. It turns out they didn't, but at least they admitted so in the paper.
It's just a shame it's getting picked up and sensationalised by the media, who will completely ignore the correlation != causation explicit in the exerpt you provided.
Not quite.
The "you" at site A will enter an undefined quantum state, and then (simultaneously, less the transit-time between the points at the speed of light) the block of mass at site B will become "you".
IE, the process is:
An atom of "you" exists at Site A, and an atom of "misc. matter" exists at Site B.
The atom of you is entangled - it stops being an atom of "you" and becomes an atom in an undefined quantum state.
The "you-ness" of the atom is sent to Site B at the speed of light, where it subsequently merges with an atom of "misc. matter", transferring its "you-ness" to the atom.
Therefore, excepting the transit-time (at the speed of light) each change happens instantaneously in one step. No two-step duplication-then-deletion occurs, as Quantum Mechanics forbids a distinct quantum state from ever being duplicated.
It's mv, not cp.
The Daily Show is a comedy show. It exists to amuse people. Now, it may do that by lampooning and referencing real events, but anyone who watches the show is completely aware that it should not be taken seriously. sure, it can inform you, and sure it can educate you, but by virtue of its presentation it's screaming that you shouldn't believe anything on it without double-checking.
Crossfire (and other news media shows) are inherently claiming objectivity, and signally failing to deliver on the promise.
Do you honestly not see the difference?
The Daily Show is supposed to be funny, admits it's not always the objective truth, and yet still manages to inform and educate people.
Crossfire is supposed to be informative and educational, claims it is, and signally fails to deliver on it.
If Crossfire wanted to stop claiming credibility as a hard news show, it could get away with whatever it wanted, just like TDS.
I think this is kind of the point of the article - news shows should be aiming at True and Informative, and are frequently missing.
The Daily Show is aiming at Funny and still hitting True or Informative as often as the news shows.
In addition, you know the Daily Show isn't aiming primarily at True or Informative, so you don't automatically believe everything you hear, but are more likely to check elsewhere for confirmation.
News shows claim a monopoly on Truth and Informativeness, and rely on a historical veneer of impartiality to stop people checking up on them elsewhere.
Thus the Daily Show is arguably a better primary source of information than mainstream news shows - at least it admits it's inaccurate, and tries relatively hard to skewer both main parties equally. That's way better than a one-sided partial propaganda organ that nevertheless claims it's "fair and balanced"...
There's a even phrases for exactly this:
"Many a true word spoken in jest"
"Ha ha, only serious",
Etc
Sorry - I agree with almost everything you said, but unless you were being sarcastic here I have to call complete bullshit.
1. The news media's credibility is in tatters because in the USA you lack a proper, independant news media - almost every show or channel is shilling for one party or the other, separated only by degree. The fact is that the news media isn't even trying for objectivity any more, let alone trying and failing.
2. Objectivity is an "impossible standard to reach", but then so is "law-abiding", "equality" and "moral". That doesn't stop anyone from agreeing we should try to be each of those, so why does it excuse the news media's descent into partiality?
Maybe you weren't offering this phrase as any kind of excuse, but it's the favourite get-out of media-bias apologists and a pet hate of mine so I'm kind of on a hair-trigger for it now - apologies if so.
3. "Straight facts" are straight facts, and "obvious bias" is obvious bias. People always try to claim their opinions are facts, but these people are wrong. Please don't imply they're in any way interchangeable, even jokingly. There are plenty of fuckwits out there who honestly believe this is true already.
These people also often try to claim that "obvious facts" are "someone else's opinion". These people are retreating from reality, refusing to confront essential facts, and are arguably therefore not merely wrong, but actually insane.
This doesn't prove jack-shit. The conclusion of this study should have been that kids who routinely play computer games perceive they're doing worse in school than those who don't.
How many kids did you know in school who didn't play computer games? I haven't been in school for fifteen years, and even then the only people who never played computer games were the handful of nerdy geek kids who didn't own a computer and/or would rather play scrabble with their parents.
Big surprise if the ultra-nerdy kids who real encyclopedias for fun on average, as a group are more intelligent than those who play computer games (ie, a significant fraction of "everyone").
It's a bit like comparing people who listen to classical music or join the debate club with "everyone else". Generally it's the really nerdy academic kids that do this, but according to the logic of this article the conclusion should be that not arguing with people makes me thicker. Oh noes!!!!111!11one!
This smacks of a bullshit agenda-driven experiment. Why get kids to self-report on their progress? Why not use actual grades achieved? It's subjective as all hell. And why merely use "the amount of TV watched", rather than taking into account different parenting styles, whether kids or their parents chose how much TV was watched, etc, etc, etc.
A noble sentiment, but one which doesn't seem to me to be internally consistent.
Kids can call each other "gay" these days without even thinking about homosexuality (and see the previous replier, who used the insult back in the 80s without ever intending any homosexual reference).
Language changes, and while people might have started substituting "gay" for "rubbish" because they were prejudices against homosexuals, a real case could be made that by now the word has two equally-valid meanings, and as such it's possible to use the word without indicating prejudice (however the word first arose).
People who disagree (those who are implicitly trying to hold on to the earlier meaning) don't really have a case, as technically they should call the individuals homosexuals, since by exactly the same logic "gay" only means "happy", not homosexual.
I initially resisted using the term, but now I'm quite happy to do so (assuming there aren't any people present who'd misunderstand and be offended by it). The thing is that meanings change, and it's no more defensible to draw a line and refuse to budge from when "gay" meant "homosexual" than it is to draw a line when gay meant "happy" or when "gay" also meant "crap".
As an aside, this is exactly why people find the phrase "that is the gayest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen two dudes fucking" amusing. If "gay" only meant homosexual the statement would be a tautology, and tautologies aren't amusing. In contrast, this statement is recognised as a pun, using the two different meanings of "gay", which rather implies that people recognise "gay" as having two distinct meanings.
Say it with me:
There Has Never Been A Study Which Indicated Cubicles Improve Productivity.
The original claim came from the advertising material for the Action Office, designed by Robert Propst. It was a completely baseless claim when the Action Office was being marketed, and after the AO was bastardised and nickle-and-dimed into the cubicles we know and... well.. know today, it was even more untrue.
Now, you may be able to improve productivity over the normal levels experienced in a cubicle, but that's a bit like being able to jump higher than an elephant, isn't it?
"Gay" can mean happy, homosexual or rubbish.
Sure, many gay people don't like the fact that it's more recently been co-opted by the younger generation to mean "rubbish". However, to quote a homosexual friend of mine:
I think you get the point.
P.S. WTF is 'yiffing'? [Googles]. Oh, right. So you know what that means but don't know what 'gay' means? Or were you just trying to be clever?
Surely that would make your religion mooism, or moosmism? ;-)
"For the Confederacy, I could go on about the whole surrender thing again. That was the understanding of warfare at the time. The war is fought by soldiers, when it's over, the soldiers get to go home, burned though it may be."
;-)
Although, famously, the South will rise again...
As an additional (serious) note, it's worth noticing that the WWII examples are all of one country fighting another - even though it's a bitterly-fought war both sides were relatively equal, and the losing side "lost on its own merits".
In modern western warfare it's generally one tooled-up uber-teched western power against a bunch of little brown people with catapults and the occasional SAM they've managed to save up to buy from Russia.
In this situation it's less a fair fight, and more a slightly-embarrassing steamrollering. The conflict is entirely one-sided, and everyone knows it. It's no longer about western countries fighting for their right to exist, and it's all about rich, decadent western countries pushing the little guy about and generally being a bully[1]. If you can't beat someone fairly, to their face, your only recourse is to hit them in the head with a half-brick in a dark alley somewhere. This is also likely to factor into the increased likelihood of terrorism/insurgency.
[1] At least, from the point of view of a local, whose country is being invaded by the western power.
1. Airport checking is still abominably slow, so saving ten seconds when you've just queued for two hours isn't going to make much difference to anyone.
2. We're already agreeing on frequency and cryptography standards. What makes a "hardware" standard any more onerous? Especially if, as a previous poster pointed out, you just ensured the chip was a set distance from a specific corner of the medium.
3. RF is the most covenient, but also the most insecure. Unless you wrap your passport in multiple layers of tinfoil, you might as well wander about the place screaming "I'm an american citizen! I'm an american citizen!"[1], since anyone who wants to know can buy a cheap RFID reader, jack up its signal-strength and pick you out of a crowd.
[1] Obviously, given the current state of world affairs, this is not recommended behaviour. But now we're being mandated to carry a passport that does it for us?
"Which part of "I think they're a horrible idea" do I need to clarify?"
I think the bit where you disavowed support for it but then presented a really terrible argument as a justification for it.
"Also, I was referencing FIRE as an organization, not that particular weblog entry, but as long as you're discussing it:"
Fair play. But there mere existence of an organisation doesn't prove squat. There are Elvis sighter orgnaisations, but that doesn't prove the King is still with us.
And it especially doesn't prove anything with the (forgive me, but...) notoriously knee-jerk reactionary always-playing-the-victim fundamentalist right as the supposed victims.
"You must have missed the part where there is precedent set in multiple Supreme Court cases stating the opposite, and where there is a ruling from the 7th Circuit which is binding upon UW but which the school has ignored."
Not at all. I merely think it's a bloody stupid decision, and that the university was right to ignore it.
In the UK we have similar student societies in schools and universities. If they want funding and official status at the institution they have to admit anyone. This is why there are athiest or agnostic members of the Christian Union, and the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual societies are technically "GLB & Supporters" societies.
The world has yet to end.
"You make is sound like those who profess a certain belief aren't entitled to support by the state."
Not at all. Every individual should be entitled to state support. We all pay for it, so we should all be entitled to it.
Any group that obeys the rules should be entitled to state support, too. Unfortunately, one of those "rules" is that you shouldn't discriminate based on race, religion or sexuality.
Now, if you don't want to play by the state's rules that's fine, but you then have no right to claim they should fund you like they fund the non-discriminatory groups. If "everyone's" paying for it, then "everyone" should be allowed to join. If not everyone's allowed to join, they have no right to claim funding from "everyone". If the members want a closed, discriminatory club then they can fund it themselves.
If I want I should be able to start a school club where membership is only open to male athiests with three toes and four balls then I should be allowed to. However, if I'm intentionally excluding whole sections of the student body, then I have no right to claim funds intended to benefit the entire student body.
"The state actively NOT supporting a certain religious group IS a violation of church and state."
Sorry, this logic is so bent it's practically pretzel-shaped.
If the school is showing preference or partiality in their funding, funding some religious/athiest groups but not others, then yes, it's wrong.
However, in this case the school is de-funding the Knights of Columbus and also 6-12 other groups. They've apparently blanket-defunded all the religious groups that won't accept "anyone" as a member, and offered to allow funding if they will allow anyone in.
There is no partiality here. There is no violation of church and state here. You are not the victim here. Christians are not being singled out here. There is no left-wing conspiracy to kill Christmas.
Strap down jerking knee, smooth down hackles and engage brain before continuing, mmmkay?
"If a school wants to start up and only admit people who believe what they believe should be entitled to, and should be given support in proportion to the number of students attending. If there is 10 million in the budget for a particular area and 1/10 of the children's parents want them to attend said school, then 1 million should go to that school."
Errrrm, no. If a school wants funding by "everybody" then it should be open to "everybody". Kids should be exposed to a cross-section of society and different cultures - it's exactly this which prevents boneheaded parochial attitudes like those so prevalent in the USA. If I want to segregate my kids from "different" people then I should be allowed to, but:
1. This is not a good idea, or good for them in the sense of making them reasonable, rounded people.
2. I have no right to make anyone else pay for me to do it.
You seem to have a blind spot about the difference between "support" and "pay for me to do whatever the hell I want". If there are perfectly good state schools and I choose to send my kid elsewhere, then damn straight I should have to pay for it. "Support" guarantees an education, not that said education will take place in Ancient greek, on Mars, taught exclusively by eunuchs merely because I decide that's what I want.
"Look, if you don't believe what they believe then why on earth would you want to go to the school in the first place? You don't, you go to the school that holds your beliefs."
Sorry? This is the University of Wisconsin we're talking about here. It is not a religious college. Did you even bother to read TFA before jumping in with your opinion?