I was one of that 70% until college, but that had very little to do with the pregnancy and STD bogeymen that only Americans worry about (Seriously... Have you ever, EVER heard of anyone you know with an STD?). Both are easy to avoid. The main reason I didn't have sex when I was an adolescent is my ridiculous religious upbringing. My brother, however, did not get good grades, did not follow the indoctrination, and had a lot of sex. However, he has a higher IQ than I do (he's well into the genius range).
So what's happening here? Why don't smart people have sex, unless they do?
My suggestion would be that those who are more likely to strive to get good grades in school are also more likely to strive to follow religious nonsense and are therefore more likely to have less time or drive to do more self-centered things like get drunk and get laid. They are people who are worried about how they are perceived by authority, and that has a chilling effect on social relations, especially during their teens. Our society says sex is bad (saying one thing and doing another) and getting good grades is good, and so people who do the latter are likely not to do the former.
Furthermore, I don't know about all of you, but I was damned busy in high school with studying and extracurricular stuff. I literally didn't have time for dating. Good grades don't come for free. However, I regret a lot of that now.
I agree that teens should be having sex. Lots and lots of sex. No one ever tells you when you're growing up that you are going to start feeling actually middle aged around 25. Nobody tells you that your sex drive is going to tank. Nobody tells you that even good-looking people in their 30s and 40s don't look very good with their clothes off, and won't do much to stir passion in their intendeds. They just tell you sex is bad; don't do it.
It's a crime to waste all that energy and drive. To expect people not to have sex during the part of their lives they want it the most. It's sick. It's sadistic. Sex is not dangerous. Sex is not bad. We run around in America, terrified of fucking, but what is it? It's one of the most basic social and bodily functions there is! We refer to "losing" virginity. Why?? Do we feel a tinge of sadness--or even horror--when someone goes to school and "loses" their ignorance? Why would you want to "keep" your inexperience?
I'm in my 30s now. I started having sex when I was 19, and I gotta tell ya: It isn't anywhere near as good now as it was then. I can't go as long, I don't want to go as long, I certainly can't go more than once a day (if that!)... When I think about that, and about how great it was when I started, and how I could have been having that for years before I started, and what positive effects that would have had on my personal and social development, it makes me want to lock up all the evil evangelicals and health teachers who tell young people to feel BAD all the time, and do the equivalent of holding in their shit and wait until they're married to take a dump. It's insane.
Humans reach sexual maturity at 13ish. That is the natural time to start having sex. That's about the age people used to get married, not even too long ago. We now have a society that isn't set up for people of that age to be getting married or getting pregnant, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be having sex. Our sex rules were in place to be sure of inheritance rights, but we now have laws and medical procedures that render such brute-force methods of reproductive control moot.
13 and horny? Fuck away, says I. Just use a condom and don't be a dick about it. It's not going to hurt you, and you'll probably learn a lot about your body, yourself, and the human condition. And it'll be fun and exciting (for the next few years, anyway). Carpe diem and all that. Enjoy it now, because in not too many years, you'll find posting on Slashdot more interesting, and you will know that you have become very old.
Indeed. I just bought my first Mac since 1998 a few weeks ago for that very reason. MacOS X has been stunningly good to work with, stripped of a lot of the annoyances I'd gotten used to on Windows, and with the addition of Boot Camp and VMware Fusion, I can run all my PC-only programs (stats/irt stuff) too, either natively or in virtualization. I have had exactly zero complaints with it. Moving to Intel was the best thing Apple has ever, ever done. If you're a true platform agnostic these days, Apple is a no-brainer.
Is that the 660cc or the 1000? When we bought it, I wondered aloud about if I could find the turbo and a matching scooped hood at a salvage yard and install it, but I'm mentei now because of the modifications I made to my scooter, so perhaps I best let that go...
I live in Japan now, and actually could use such a thing as my only car. It's not really smaller than the Daihatsu Mira Gino Minilite Special I drive now. But in the rural US, where I grew up, that wouldn't really be an option.
What Europeans don't seem to understand is that the US is mostly empty space connected by a really stellar interstate highway system (You can use it for free!!!). People are spread out across large distances and a lot of times you need to get in the car and drive for a couple hours to get something done. In the course of those couple hours, you will need to be traveling about 120kmh (75mph) or above, and when you get where you're going, you might be looking at taking something big, like a chair or something, back with you. That's not going to happen in a car like that.
Even if you don't do longer road trips, a lot of one's commute often takes place on said interstates at said speeds. Again, not going to happen.
And finally, as others have noted, this doesn't take Home Depot / Lowes / Costco / etc. into account. American houses are often built on large lots, and a lot of the home upkeep is done by the home owner. Hardware stores are common and well-frequented. It's one of the things I miss dearly in Japan. We're really not set up for having other people do our repairs, and of course not our basic landscaping. Companies like this go to NYC and SF, etc., and think the US is like Europe, but in all actuality, they flew over most of the Americans there in the middle. We live on plots of land that would be called farms here in Japan, and actually, a great many people still live on farms, miles and miles from the nearest town.
So while I think it's cool tech, I think that if you're in the market for one of these cars, you're in a place not so densely populated as to make car ownership prohibitively expensive (parking), but not so sparsely populated as to necessitate a larger vehicle with greater speed and range. You're in the immediate suburbs around large cities and you only have to drive a few blocks to work (in which case, why drive?)... So that's this car's market: the 120 people in the country with these characteristics.
Ultimately, this thing looks like another Segway. A rich hippie's toy. Unfortunately.
Okay, I'll be as clear as I can be here: Linux will never take over the desktop. Ever. Ever. Why? Because it's a pain in the arse.
Never, in all my years of working on the Mac and Windows, have I been required to type something like "sudo vim/etc/X11/xorg.conf" and then try to tell my computer to display something over 640x480 resolution--and even then not having it work, even after following 3 different, progressively complex, methods of getting an nVidia driver to work.
Every year or so, I try to set up a Linux machine with whatever the new darling distro is. Only once have I gotten one to work acceptably, but there were still issues I wasn't happy with. And that took about a week of reading poorly-written manpages. Just the other day I gave Ubuntu 7.0.4 a shot. I gave up after 2 hours of fiddling to get working video.
That is after having to futz with my CMOS to boot it--a step most people wouldn't know to do.
Linux people are, and I'm going to be brutally honest here, morons. Not computer morons, obviously, because they have the skills and general knowledge required to get Linux to at least boot and display video properly, but morons because they lack even a basic understanding of what other people want from computers. Linux people are, and this will be news to precisely no one, geeks. As such, their opinions on computers are absolutely irrelevant to anyone other than fellow geeks.
People do not want to fuss. They want to buy a computer, turn it on, and start putting in software they bought at Wal-Mart without ever even thinking about what is going on below the UI. Hell, as far as most of them know, there ISN'T anything below the GUI. That's what it has taken to get the computer into every home in every developed country in the world: compatibility and ease-of-use.
Linux offers neither of these things.
Ultimately, the FOSS model is fundamentally flawed. People write things they find fun or that they really need--motivations we in the education business refer to as intrinsic, which is the best kind of motivation there is. The problem is that no one finds things like video drivers fun. There's no huge drive to make sure all the features of the video card are supported, because you won't need them anyway. So, without some kind of extrinsic motivation, like profit, certain jobs just never get done--or at best, get done half-assedly.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the people doing the developing are uber-geeks (we know this for certain because they are evidently coding for fun), and therefore don't sweat having to tweak a text file here and there. They pat themselves on the back for getting it to run at all (as they should--it's quite the accomplishment, and something to be marveled at!) and get so excited that they mistake this small success to be proof that everybody can and should be running Linux just like them. But they shouldn't, because (polishing off my old Slashdot chestnut)...
Linux is a toy.
It is a hobby OS. People have gotten this claptrap toy to do some pretty great things, and it's a no-brainer for any kind of application where the computer isn't expected to do anything very exciting (games, iTunes, iMovie/Windows Movie Maker, hook up any random scanner you buy--Only geeks are "excited" by hosting webpages and/or directing network traffic) or where you need a really small footprint (embedded). But that does not a desktop OS make. Not for the unquantifiably vast majority of computer users, anyway.
Look, everyone hates Microsoft. Apple has their own hassles to deal with. But both are so astonishingly better at serving the customer's needs and desires than the Linux distros will ever be that the fact that some people even need that pointed out to them simply demonstrates, clearly and unequivocally, that those people are, as I have already stated above, morons.
Yup. Convenience isn't necessarily to blame. What do you buy from the jidouhanbaiki? I get Soukenbicha (tea) every frickin' time. My US friends and family who have come to visit over the years all hate it the first time (like I did), and then can't stop drinking it the rest of the trip, and leave wondering why something like that isn't available in the states. It's even a Coca-Cola product.
Something is very rotten in the state of the US when it comes to foodstuffs. I don't really watch my weight that much here; and I don't even walk/bike very much since I got my yansha 50cc and scored a parking place at work for the rainy days, and I still stay pretty svelt. Every time I see a picture of my in the US, I go, "good lord I was tubby." At the time, I felt thin--I was certainly thinner than my friends and most of the people on the street, but compared to what I look like here, I was right portly.
Even with all the carbs from the gohan and sugar in everything and more work-related alcohol than I'd touch in the US, I still am much more healthy here. And this is the third time I've lived here, and the third time I've noticed this. Hontou ni fushigi da yo. Nanka okashii.
1) Yeah, I was one of those token gaijin. If all he's doing is being the human tape recorder, though, that means he's crap. I knew people like that. If you're going to be serious about being an ALT (assistant language teacher), you at least make your own lessons. A big part of that program (I worked for the government; lately schools are turning to private companies) is about just providing entertainment for the kids in hopes that they won't notice that English class, which should be fun and empowering, is the most boring awful experience in school. I have a master's in English, requiring a lot of study of linguistics, but I did not know that there was a "rule" for when to pronounce "the" with a schwa and when to pronounce it with an [i] ("ee"). This is the kind of idiotic crap they teach in English class. If you don't follow the pronunciation pattern, people will still understand what you mean, but if you skip the article or use the wrong one, or use one when you shouldn't, they won't. The problem is, the latter only comes with meaningful communicative practice; the former can be crammed for a multiple-choice test. Ugh, don't get me started.
2) I saw horrible, horrible things in the education system here. Heartbreaking things. I, like much of the Slashdot crowd I'm sure, endured more than my fair share of bullying in junior high and high school, and made it clear to the kids in question that nothing would be tolerated on my watch. A loud and public dressing-down of two bullies who stood up from their desks, walked over and started punching a fat kid from both sides IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS got me a private talking-to by the principal. Telling a kid to go home after he PUSHED ME AND TOOK A SWING AT ME (on the same day that he TRIPPED AN ELDERLY FEMALE TEACHER IN THE HALL) got me a lecture on how I don't have the right to deny this piece of shit an education.
My wife was a teacher at that school for 15 years. She once went on an exchange to a US high school. She couldn't believe how "adult" they were, and she came back horribly depressed (she quit only a couple years after).
As a college teacher, some of the crap I deal with on a daily basis is the stuff of junior high. I have to ask for quiet. I have people carrying on full-volume conversations across the room WHILE I'M TALKING (and not at the beginning of class--right in the middle). I have people who walk into class, plop down, and GO TO SLEEP (these are classes of like 25 people--not lecture halls). I point out that they don't have to come if they don't want. They say they'll be good. "BE GOOD." IN COLLEGE. It is unbelievable. And this is at a pretty good school, and I am (I hear) one of the more interesting teachers. I hope I never find out what it's like to be one of the boring ones.
3) Technology... I just can never figure out where this idea comes from. I'm sitting in front of a computer full of Taiwanese parts designed by American companies. I have a 50M DSL line that runs at 3M on a good day (see, those amazing numbers you read about the speeds here are the speeds AT THE POST--they have little bearing on what you'll get in your house--yay Japanese lack of consumer rights!). My phone is a Sharp (Japanese), but is almost as big as my first Motorola flip-phone in the US (ca 1998), the big difference being that there I could afford to talk on it. My bill is $70/mo, with no minutes. I can call my wife all I want, but I'm careful about using it for anything but. It's 3G, but I once read an article on MSN while waiting for the doctor and when I got my bill I found that that little web surf cost me $25.
When I want tech, I wait until a trip to the US, where I'll have more choice for less money. I just honestly have no idea what people are talking about, "technology" in Japan. Here, more than anywhere else, it seems, technology only serves the companies that sell it. Anything that might make something useful to the user is disabled or requires a trip to Akihabara, which has become a kind of manga
The party thing MAY be changing. The Koumeito Party (which may or may not still be a part of Souka Gakkai, the eyebrow-raising, sorta cultlike, basically Nichiren Buddhist sect that has LOTS of money) seems to be gobbling up power, and it's worrying people a bit. They just pushed through a tax hike that has made it very uncomfortable for a lot of people--gaijin and otherwise--here, with my officemate's take-home being reduced by about $250. However, they still hold that no one's tax actually changed. Very, very strange.
Um, I teach university here in Japan. I've also taught university in the states. So believe me when I say:
These kids are dumb as rocks. Really, really dumb.
The argument for these people being smart and this education system being good is predicated on test scores. As an educator and an assessor, I can't tell you how dumb that is. Basically (and I speak from experience in the K-12 education system here) no one does any learning in school until a few weeks before a big test, and then everyone crams FOR THE TEST. They don't actually learn anything; they just learn how to take the test. The most immediate place you can see this is by trying to talk to any Japanese college graduate in English. These people have all had about 10 years of English. They should be able to carry on a basic conversation, right? But you'll find that they can only spit out a few words, horribly mispronounced, and usually lacking any kind of syntactic structure. Why? Because they've never been expected to DO anything based on what they studied; they were only asked to pass tests. And they do. But they have zero real-world language--or any other kind of--proficiency, unless they've become involved in something in their careers.
Companies here fill the role we in the Western world give to schools. Now, I have many CS friend who bemoan the fact that they didn't really learn how to program well until they hit the corporate world, but that's not even what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that some of my English major students walk out of here into programming jobs--with no prior experience or education or even an interest in programming. Why? Because when they interviewed for the company (and you interview for COMPANIES here--not jobs--the company then will decide if they want you and where you should go and what you should do), they looked like the kind of person who'd make a good programmer.
So if that's the case, what is the impetus to learn anything in school? If it has no bearing on your employability, save the name of the school, why bother actually learning about politics, history, language, ANYTHING? Answer: none. There is no reason whatsoever to learn anything, unless you just happen to be interested. So my boys are interested in drinking and getting laid (nothing wrong with either, mind you), and my girls are interested in Prada and Louis Vuitton (and I have no problem with brand goods, either--although I'm a Gaultier man myself). Very few, however, are interested in anything we'd call "important."
Of COURSE there are exceptions. Of course. But the sick and sad thing that I see over and over is that the exceptions--the people who really did learn things and really are aware of their surroundings--do not fare any better than their benighted colleagues. They don't get better jobs. I'm sure that wherever they end up working, they do a better job, but they still get the same kind of generic jobs with the HORRIFYING starting salaries as the idiots around them.
Japan is not a meritocracy, and it shows. They have done very well for themselves by refusing to compete domestically and by keeping foreign entities on a short leash in Japan. But the lack of sound Japanese leadership has had a lot of repercussions that it seems most people don't realize. Look into who runs Nissan. Who has controlling stakes in Mazda. Mitsubishi. Who runs Sony. Etc. These "Japanese" companies--the companies we point to to say "Japan is amazing"--haven't been run by Japanese people for a long time. The exceptions, of course, are Toyota and Honda, and they're big ones. But still.
PLEASE stop buying the Japan hype, people. If you came over here and lived for a few months, you'd be just like every other gaijin, saying "I always thought Japan was X, but it's actually Y!" It is nothing like what you imagine. It is a silly place.
Health care in Japan is definitely cheap, but I don't know where you found easy or effective.
The list:
No appointments--just schedule the whole day off if you need to go to the doctor, because it just might take that long.
5-minute check, a prescription, and a request to come back in a week for another check. Another request that week, too.
Ridiculously low-grade, old-fashioned, ineffective medicines with more side effects than actual effects. Oh, and you have to take 5 of them at a time. They make sure you come back by giving you only a few days of medicine.
Bad attitudes. Worse among the older doctors. "How DARE you ask a question about your health?"
Medieval facilities. I kid you not, I got my stomach scoped in a room with boxes piled up on one side of it with sheets thrown over them. The beds in the hospital my wife stayed at looked like they were from the 50s and the paint was all falling off.
Ridiculously long hospital stays. My wife was in the hospital FOR THREE MONTHS for pleurisy. I checked with my doctor in the US--that's usually a couple days in the US, and then sent home for rest. She got so depressed I was seriously worried she would kill herself. I ultimately "checked her out" myself.
Regular insurance only covers a small portion of the hospital stay. The rest is up to you or the "hospital insurance" you buy. Even in the latter case, you have to pay the bill first and wait months to find out how much the insurance will reimburse you.
Basically no general practitioners. In the US, if you bang your knee in a bike accident, you go to the doctor. If you have the flu, you go to the doctor. If you have a mild case of seasonal eczema, you go to the doctor. Here, you go to the Yellow Pages and hope whoever you find is worth a crap and has a parking lot.
Expensive and weak over-the-counter meds means you go to the doctor EVERY TIME YOU GET SICK. --That or you sweat bullets as you smuggle DayQuil through customs on your way back from a trip home.
Very questionable competence. I actually did bang the hell out of my knee in a scooter accident a few months ago. I spent hundreds of dollars and days in waiting rooms trying to find someone who could tell me why my knee felt like it was on fire every time I bent it past 90 degrees. Everybody said it was fine. One guy told me to wear a brace. Finally, I had my officemate send my description of the injury and sensation to her doctor sister. Response one hour later: Deep-tissue bruise; get the brace off; that's making it worse. Took the brace off and it cleared up right away.
The worst cross-contamination record in the developed world (read that somewhere--but I believe it).
No recourse for malpractice. My friend's kid has incredibly disfiguring scars down his whole leg, which reduce mobility, because a boiling tea kettle spilled on him when he was a toddler (I think he pulled it down when Mom looked away, if I remember correctly). The doctor they took him to PEELED THE SKIN OFF. It grossly disfigured him, but there was nothing they could do. Very hard to sue in Japan.
Oh, and the medicine here is in no way socialized--health insurance is largely privatized, but your employer is required to put you on it. You only get on the public one if you have no job, and the benefits are lower and the co-pay higher. Price is lower because everyone has insurance, but without the profit motive, there's no reason to provide better service. Right now, getting the person back in the office a million times is incentivized, because it's the only way you could make any money. But in the US, getting someone well ASAP is incentivized for private practitioners, because that wins new patients.
Seriously, if you had some good experiences, I'm happy for you, but you ought to come back and have a sit among people who have seen both ways and hear the horror stories. I am always worried that I'll get really sick here. If you have dece
So, groveling before hired goons with guns is the best way to stop the problem of those goons abusing people? Stroking their massive egos is the best way to solve the runaway problem of police brutality? Hey, I'm always polite as well, but under no circumstances am I required to be. When talking to a cop, I'm not the one being paid to be in the conversation. I am polite as a human courtesy, not because it is my duty. This is not the case for the cop, and my failure to extend that courtesy is not grounds for him to beat me.
See, I don't pay the cops to lose their temper and beat people. I pay them to keep an eye out for trouble, to be helpful when I need them, and to always be the people who DON'T lose their tempers. You know, the Good Guys.
I don't care if an officer feels angry. I don't care if an officer feels threatened. I don't even care if an officer is in grave mortal peril. In fact, that's pretty much what I pay them for. It is their JOB to be in uncomfortable and/or dangerous situations AND DEAL WITH THEM WITH A COOL HEAD.
A police officer is not a regular member of society. We give them souped-up cars, weapons, comm equipment, firearms, and body armor. We do this with the expectation that they will always act in a fair and safe manner. "With great power...," and all that. So while I have sympathy for a civilian who loses his cool, I have nothing but contempt, anger, and fear for a police officer who does the same while wearing that uniform.
Police officers are our servants. Not the other way around. They are beneath us, not above. Increasingly, it seems that US cops don't understand this. That isn't surprising, because, to be honest, I've never met one that wasn't a complete and total moron, and an asshole to boot (think about the people you know from high school who went on to become cops--were you surprised?).
It is our responsibility as freedom-loving citizens of the United States of America to resist them, within our rights, every chance we get. Bone up on some basic law. It's our job to keep the state in its place.
(Here it comes, but it is relevant, I swear.) The Nazis didn't "take power." The Gestapo and the SS didn't just show up overnight. People GAVE them that power, and they gave them that control (power is the ability to punish, but control is something you give up willingly). A lot of everyday Germans had to be pretty pissed about the stupidity and evil they saw around them, but they did nothing to stop it. As we see mace and tasers used against people who pose no threat to society, as we see cops wantonly lie about the law, as we see them violate our civil liberties and abuse the power we gave them to protect us, unless we push back, we have no one to blame but ourselves if/when we find ourselves with a nation, a dream, a grand experiment, a philosophy that says the general goodness of mankind will lead to a peaceful and prosperous nation if we just let people do what they want, left in tatters as we grovel before an army of buzzcut bullies in body armor.
Cops are not like you. Not when they are in uniform, anyway. Just because you think you might lose it and punch someone if they are rude to you doesn't make it right for them to do so. If you did it, you would (and should) be charged with assault. If they do it, they should be too, and be stripped of their badges. Cops do not have MORE rights; they have FEWER. Remember that.
You walk into an electronics store. Each carrier has a section. You can pick the phones that the carrier has. They might all just be the same phones with different color schemes and shiny bits, depending on the carrier, but you'll never know because each carrier makes up their own model numbers. If you know how to read the codes, you can usually figure out at least who makes them, and then go to the manufacturer's website and compare pictures and feature lists until you figure out what the phone actually is. That being said, the feature lists can be very confusing because they are often miserably crippled by the carrier (my mp3-playing phone only plays "secure mp3s"--some idiotic proprietary file format that you can only rip to if you buy a $40 software CD from Sharp). You most certainly can't use them on any other network. If you change networks, you get to input all your address book entries again. You can now keep your number as you move, but it costs.
So why would we go through all that? Because that's the only option. That's just the way it is. You guys in Europe have it sooooo good!
Yup. As much as I defend people for using Windows 'round here (i.e. I don't think people who use Windows are stupid--they have no choice), I am shuffling things around to go back to the Mac after an almost 10-year hiatus. The fact that nowadays, even if I switch, I can still boot Windows (XP) or use Parallels to run any of the Windows-only things I need to run basically means I don't need to worry about what MS has screwed up.
I started out being really excited about Longhorn. Then they took out all the features and loaded it up with self-serving crap and nonsense. Meanwhile the MacOS has become so slick, clean, and unobtrusive that everytime some around me switches (which is happening A LOT these days), I look at it and go, "who knew an OS could suck so little?"
No Vista for me, thanks. I almost bailed with XP, because I was quite happy with 2000, but the better driver support won me over (and the cracked corporate copy--important for broke grad school students). I look at Vista running at the store and just kind of recoil in disgust. It's like everything that has ever sucked about Windows... amplified.
I've looked deep within myself, and I just don't have another MS OS in me.
We do our best to maintain construct validity (i.e. testing what we claim to be testing), but sometimes it is as you say. We often catch those later. In my experience, within a particular section, however, if we find that one item just doesn't match up with the rest of the sub-test, we take a look and very often that's what we see. A question that discriminated well, but was drawing on some kind of other, more general, knowledge.
A lot of people's ire towards tests and testing has nothing to do with test design. That's just the variable they think is most important. Actually, what upsets people the most is test usage. Idiotic things like No Child Left Behind are the product of businesspeople or politicians running with a test without understanding what they are good at and what they aren't. Basically, they are good at giving you a broad, objective categorization of individuals. That should always be paired with real-world observations. It rarely is.
Even one of the best tests out there, the TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language--used to screen candidates for study at US universities, and developed by ETS, the same people who make the GRE), admonishes institutions on the importance of pairing those scores with an interview, or some more specific institutional exam, or SOMETHING. I know of absolutely no schools that do this. There is little we, the developers, can do about this, aside from trying to be as fair and valid as we can be and telling institutions not to do that.
There is, perhaps, light at the end of the tunnel. It is getting easier and easier to incorporate writing tasks with these things. The GRE has replaced its silly brain teaser section with a critiquing and writing arguments section, which has a much better overlap with what you will be expected to do in grad school than the old section. By doing these things computer-based, that text can quickly be sent off to two or more raters for human rating. Again with IRT (my institution uses the program Facets for this), we can look at the relative severity of raters and from that calculate a score for a piece of writing. For some things, this really is the way to go. But it's more expensive as it requires human raters, so only the really big tests can do it.
Of course correlation is not causation, but say you have 3 tests of vocabulary and three tests of listening. You run them all on the same group. Of course there is going to be some overlap, which we can understand to just be general language proficiency, but we would expect to see a much higher correlation within the tests than between them. If we have too much between, then we need to take a closer look at them, because they aren't unidimensional (this is a problem with the TOEIC, but that doesn't stop most of Asia using it to deny people jobs--we have a TOEIC teacher here who has a perfect score, but the English-speaking staff has no idea what she's talking about most of the time, her English is so bad). However, if we see 3 different tasks, all ostensibly measuring the construct of vocabulary, and they are highly correlated, we pretty much have to assume that they are all testing vocabulary, right? Individual items may be floating into some other construct, sure, but taken as a whole, "walks like a duck, talks like a duck."
The problem of construct validity is a tough one, but we are getting better all the time, thanks to advances in cognitive science. As we learn more about how the brain functions, and what kind of tasks light up where in the brain, it's likely that some day not too far in the future, we'll be able to pilot these things on people and see if we're hitting what we are hoping to hit. Granted, that probably will only be true for really big tests, but those are the most important anyway.
Finally, yeah, tests can make mistakes, and people can certainly game tests (I knew a guy from Saudi who I think was actually kind of retarded who took the TOEFL 30 times and finally passed it, because he remembered all
MAYBE. But I've never seen it. You're right; it's possible; but confusing questions are the very ones that usually turn out to be big ol' steaming turds.
That being said, if the "right" people are getting it right, then it's doing its job, so what's the harm? All a test is really designed to do is categorize people. A real test of knowledge is always going to be unprompted. This is why most graduate programs--and a fair number of bachelor programs as well--require a thesis/dissertation. These tell you exactly what somebody knows. A test cannot do that. It can, however, allow objective comparisons among individuals, which things like papers cannot do.
There are ways, however, to pin test scores and even individual items to real-world competencies, but they are extremely time-consuming.
Well, a poorly-written item will always be out-fitting. If the answer doesn't match the question, then everyone will have to guess. If everyone has to guess, the information curve (a great graph I'd love to show you, but can't here, and need to go to bed) will be about flat. There should be a big hump that shows that it gives us a lot of information about people a certain number of standard deviations above or below the mean. Questions like you describe won't have that.
Also, I wrote about this in another comment, but a lot of the items you get on high-stakes tests don't really go toward your score. They are actually pilot items that the company is trying out a few thousand times to see if they work correctly before they start contributing to anyone's score.
I don't know any cheap item-writers, though. Everyone I know in this field has at least a master's degree, and most have PhDs. We don't come cheap.
As for being a good or bad item writer, there are just a handful of rules to follow to avoid the big blunders. After that, it's all about taking them for a spin and seeing how they handle. As I've said a few times now, there's no telling what will happen when you release these things into the wild. I've written items that I doted on and cared for and nurtured and cuddled and put my all into, fully expecting that they would grow up to be model items, ones that the other items would look up to and aspire to becoming, only to be totally and utterly betrayed by them in real-world piloting, my time and devotion wasted, finally having to drag them out back and shoot them in the back of the head. On the other hand, there are sometimes items you add to a section last-minute, just trying to get the number up for piloting or whatever, and find that you have written some ridiculously wonderful item purely by accident.
It gets easier with practice, though. To be fair, I'm not a very good item-writer. But that is why I, especially, need the stats.
Basically, all tests really need to be good is a lot of data. When you sit for the GRE, for example, did you know that a fair number of those items actually aren't used for calculating your score (especially true when dealing with computer-adaptive tests, where the computer might be done figuring you out after a remarkably small number of questions)? This is how pro tests get to be so good and so reliable. Every item that figures in your score has been put through its paces with thousands of people, unscored. When it goes from being an experimental item (as in "we don't know what it's going to do in the wild") to a known-variable, then it is used for calculating the score. No surprises.
I think the problem is that most of the tests people have experience with are just off-the-cuff classroom instruments. Since they kinda look the same as the high-stakes tests that really determine one's future, it's easy to assume they are the same. But they are not. There is an army of psychometricians trying to make sure that you get the score you deserve. We don't set out to make hard tests. We set out to make valid and reliable tests.
Yeah, using it on a classroom-based-test is overdoing it a little, I'd say (Although a colleague of mine does! He's addicted, I think.). But for the kind of high-stakes tests the blogger was talking about, I can't imagine that they aren't doing something along these lines.
Nice post. I agree, but please see my post at: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238713 &cid=19539965
The thing is that tests--important ones, anyway--don't work the way everyone seems to think they work. Individual items are virtually meaningless.
Ugh. I just wrote a pretty polite reply at his page after skimming his idiotic article. Now that I've read it, I'm actually angry.
This guy knows NOTHING about testing. Nothing. He isn't even to the level of Classical Testing Theory (CTT), which is really not much more than means and Pearson correlations, and is nowhere near how high-stakes (and even medium- and low-stakes, increasingly) multiple choice (MC) tests work now, and how they have worked for many many years.
IAAP (I am a psychometrician). A big part of what I do for a living is design a particular MC test, pilot the items, and interpret the results. But I don't just count up the correct items and give you the percentage. Why? Because that would be insane. You can guess on those.
Oh, but he says this:
But suppose the grading attempts to adjust for guessing. There is no way of knowing what is in the mind of the test-taker, so the customary is to subtract, from the number correct, some fraction of the number wrong.
--Which is just fine until I tell you I have NEVER heard of dealing with guessing that way on a professional-level test.
As a general rule, we don't do any easy mathematics. At all.
Here is part of the output for a test I'm working on right now:
This is generated by RUMM2020, a tool for Rasch analysis. The Rasch model was developed in the 60s as an ideal model of item response. These are the stats on 3 items of this test. The two most important columns are Location and Probability.
The location is the item difficulty. Given the sample's performance on this item, and given their ability, how hard is this item? Item 35 is quite difficult; item 36, quite easy.
The probability is the p value for the chi square. Basically, if it's 0.05 or below, that item is operating significantly (statistically significantly, that is) outside of the model. It displays poor "fit." we generally toss these items before going on to the next step (ideally, these are weeded out during pilot testing, before the test goes live--in this case, it is an experimental test of a construct I'm not even sure exists anymore, but I digress). If an item has poor fit with the model, it is too much of a loose cannon, and its results cannot be trusted. This is what the benighted blogger (is there any other kind?) was whining about. That item is hard not because it is good, but because it is evidently stupid. The responses are all over the place, which means people were probably just guessing. Out it goes before it ruins any examinees' lives.
The next step is to get person locations. In the case of people, these numbers indicate the person's ability. This is calculated by looking at their performance on the items, given their difficulty (Which is calculated based on people's performance on them! Incestuous! But given a large enough sample, it all works out to a fine enough grain to be useful). Here is the output for the people:
ID Total Max Miss Locn SE Residual DegFree DataPts 1 67 125 125 0.254 0.21 -0.272 123.60 125 2 77 125 125 0.700 0.21 -0.178 123.60 125 3 86 125 125 1.120 0.22 -1.030 123.60 125
So, the first person didn't do so hot; the last did pretty well (these usually top out at 3ish). As you can see in "DataPts," there were 125 items on this test. I started with 160. Do you hear that, Mr. Unexpected "Truths?" We have your back! We're not just handing you a naked score based on our crap items. WE PULL THE CRAP ITEMS.
That location score will usually be rescaled to something prettier, since no one would really like to see something like
My dad is an insurance adjuster. He had a case just like this when I was a kid in the early 80s, but it was with a conversion van. They were actually really common for awhile, because people, for some reason, thought that "cruise control" meant "autopilot."
Don't know about any won lawsuits, though.
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I was one of that 70% until college, but that had very little to do with the pregnancy and STD bogeymen that only Americans worry about (Seriously... Have you ever, EVER heard of anyone you know with an STD?). Both are easy to avoid. The main reason I didn't have sex when I was an adolescent is my ridiculous religious upbringing. My brother, however, did not get good grades, did not follow the indoctrination, and had a lot of sex. However, he has a higher IQ than I do (he's well into the genius range).
So what's happening here? Why don't smart people have sex, unless they do?
My suggestion would be that those who are more likely to strive to get good grades in school are also more likely to strive to follow religious nonsense and are therefore more likely to have less time or drive to do more self-centered things like get drunk and get laid. They are people who are worried about how they are perceived by authority, and that has a chilling effect on social relations, especially during their teens. Our society says sex is bad (saying one thing and doing another) and getting good grades is good, and so people who do the latter are likely not to do the former.
Furthermore, I don't know about all of you, but I was damned busy in high school with studying and extracurricular stuff. I literally didn't have time for dating. Good grades don't come for free. However, I regret a lot of that now.
I agree that teens should be having sex. Lots and lots of sex. No one ever tells you when you're growing up that you are going to start feeling actually middle aged around 25. Nobody tells you that your sex drive is going to tank. Nobody tells you that even good-looking people in their 30s and 40s don't look very good with their clothes off, and won't do much to stir passion in their intendeds. They just tell you sex is bad; don't do it.
It's a crime to waste all that energy and drive. To expect people not to have sex during the part of their lives they want it the most. It's sick. It's sadistic. Sex is not dangerous. Sex is not bad. We run around in America, terrified of fucking, but what is it? It's one of the most basic social and bodily functions there is! We refer to "losing" virginity. Why?? Do we feel a tinge of sadness--or even horror--when someone goes to school and "loses" their ignorance? Why would you want to "keep" your inexperience?
I'm in my 30s now. I started having sex when I was 19, and I gotta tell ya: It isn't anywhere near as good now as it was then. I can't go as long, I don't want to go as long, I certainly can't go more than once a day (if that!)... When I think about that, and about how great it was when I started, and how I could have been having that for years before I started, and what positive effects that would have had on my personal and social development, it makes me want to lock up all the evil evangelicals and health teachers who tell young people to feel BAD all the time, and do the equivalent of holding in their shit and wait until they're married to take a dump. It's insane.
Humans reach sexual maturity at 13ish. That is the natural time to start having sex. That's about the age people used to get married, not even too long ago. We now have a society that isn't set up for people of that age to be getting married or getting pregnant, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be having sex. Our sex rules were in place to be sure of inheritance rights, but we now have laws and medical procedures that render such brute-force methods of reproductive control moot.
13 and horny? Fuck away, says I. Just use a condom and don't be a dick about it. It's not going to hurt you, and you'll probably learn a lot about your body, yourself, and the human condition. And it'll be fun and exciting (for the next few years, anyway). Carpe diem and all that. Enjoy it now, because in not too many years, you'll find posting on Slashdot more interesting, and you will know that you have become very old.
Granted, I don
Indeed. I just bought my first Mac since 1998 a few weeks ago for that very reason. MacOS X has been stunningly good to work with, stripped of a lot of the annoyances I'd gotten used to on Windows, and with the addition of Boot Camp and VMware Fusion, I can run all my PC-only programs (stats/irt stuff) too, either natively or in virtualization. I have had exactly zero complaints with it. Moving to Intel was the best thing Apple has ever, ever done. If you're a true platform agnostic these days, Apple is a no-brainer.
Is that the 660cc or the 1000? When we bought it, I wondered aloud about if I could find the turbo and a matching scooped hood at a salvage yard and install it, but I'm mentei now because of the modifications I made to my scooter, so perhaps I best let that go...
Indeed.
What I think whenever I see things like this is:
1) Cool; I'd like one of those.
2) But I might still need another car.
I live in Japan now, and actually could use such a thing as my only car. It's not really smaller than the Daihatsu Mira Gino Minilite Special I drive now. But in the rural US, where I grew up, that wouldn't really be an option.
What Europeans don't seem to understand is that the US is mostly empty space connected by a really stellar interstate highway system (You can use it for free!!!). People are spread out across large distances and a lot of times you need to get in the car and drive for a couple hours to get something done. In the course of those couple hours, you will need to be traveling about 120kmh (75mph) or above, and when you get where you're going, you might be looking at taking something big, like a chair or something, back with you. That's not going to happen in a car like that.
Even if you don't do longer road trips, a lot of one's commute often takes place on said interstates at said speeds. Again, not going to happen.
And finally, as others have noted, this doesn't take Home Depot / Lowes / Costco / etc. into account. American houses are often built on large lots, and a lot of the home upkeep is done by the home owner. Hardware stores are common and well-frequented. It's one of the things I miss dearly in Japan. We're really not set up for having other people do our repairs, and of course not our basic landscaping. Companies like this go to NYC and SF, etc., and think the US is like Europe, but in all actuality, they flew over most of the Americans there in the middle. We live on plots of land that would be called farms here in Japan, and actually, a great many people still live on farms, miles and miles from the nearest town.
So while I think it's cool tech, I think that if you're in the market for one of these cars, you're in a place not so densely populated as to make car ownership prohibitively expensive (parking), but not so sparsely populated as to necessitate a larger vehicle with greater speed and range. You're in the immediate suburbs around large cities and you only have to drive a few blocks to work (in which case, why drive?)... So that's this car's market: the 120 people in the country with these characteristics.
Ultimately, this thing looks like another Segway. A rich hippie's toy. Unfortunately.
Okay, I'll be as clear as I can be here: Linux will never take over the desktop. Ever. Ever. Why? Because it's a pain in the arse.
Never, in all my years of working on the Mac and Windows, have I been required to type something like "sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf" and then try to tell my computer to display something over 640x480 resolution--and even then not having it work, even after following 3 different, progressively complex, methods of getting an nVidia driver to work.
Every year or so, I try to set up a Linux machine with whatever the new darling distro is. Only once have I gotten one to work acceptably, but there were still issues I wasn't happy with. And that took about a week of reading poorly-written manpages. Just the other day I gave Ubuntu 7.0.4 a shot. I gave up after 2 hours of fiddling to get working video.
That is after having to futz with my CMOS to boot it--a step most people wouldn't know to do.
Linux people are, and I'm going to be brutally honest here, morons. Not computer morons, obviously, because they have the skills and general knowledge required to get Linux to at least boot and display video properly, but morons because they lack even a basic understanding of what other people want from computers. Linux people are, and this will be news to precisely no one, geeks. As such, their opinions on computers are absolutely irrelevant to anyone other than fellow geeks.
People do not want to fuss. They want to buy a computer, turn it on, and start putting in software they bought at Wal-Mart without ever even thinking about what is going on below the UI. Hell, as far as most of them know, there ISN'T anything below the GUI. That's what it has taken to get the computer into every home in every developed country in the world: compatibility and ease-of-use.
Linux offers neither of these things.
Ultimately, the FOSS model is fundamentally flawed. People write things they find fun or that they really need--motivations we in the education business refer to as intrinsic, which is the best kind of motivation there is. The problem is that no one finds things like video drivers fun. There's no huge drive to make sure all the features of the video card are supported, because you won't need them anyway. So, without some kind of extrinsic motivation, like profit, certain jobs just never get done--or at best, get done half-assedly.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the people doing the developing are uber-geeks (we know this for certain because they are evidently coding for fun), and therefore don't sweat having to tweak a text file here and there. They pat themselves on the back for getting it to run at all (as they should--it's quite the accomplishment, and something to be marveled at!) and get so excited that they mistake this small success to be proof that everybody can and should be running Linux just like them. But they shouldn't, because (polishing off my old Slashdot chestnut)...
Linux is a toy.
It is a hobby OS. People have gotten this claptrap toy to do some pretty great things, and it's a no-brainer for any kind of application where the computer isn't expected to do anything very exciting (games, iTunes, iMovie/Windows Movie Maker, hook up any random scanner you buy--Only geeks are "excited" by hosting webpages and/or directing network traffic) or where you need a really small footprint (embedded). But that does not a desktop OS make. Not for the unquantifiably vast majority of computer users, anyway.
Look, everyone hates Microsoft. Apple has their own hassles to deal with. But both are so astonishingly better at serving the customer's needs and desires than the Linux distros will ever be that the fact that some people even need that pointed out to them simply demonstrates, clearly and unequivocally, that those people are, as I have already stated above, morons.
I'm sorry, but it's true.
And geeks wonder why normal people don't want to be friends with them...
Yup. Convenience isn't necessarily to blame. What do you buy from the jidouhanbaiki? I get Soukenbicha (tea) every frickin' time. My US friends and family who have come to visit over the years all hate it the first time (like I did), and then can't stop drinking it the rest of the trip, and leave wondering why something like that isn't available in the states. It's even a Coca-Cola product.
Something is very rotten in the state of the US when it comes to foodstuffs. I don't really watch my weight that much here; and I don't even walk/bike very much since I got my yansha 50cc and scored a parking place at work for the rainy days, and I still stay pretty svelt. Every time I see a picture of my in the US, I go, "good lord I was tubby." At the time, I felt thin--I was certainly thinner than my friends and most of the people on the street, but compared to what I look like here, I was right portly.
Even with all the carbs from the gohan and sugar in everything and more work-related alcohol than I'd touch in the US, I still am much more healthy here. And this is the third time I've lived here, and the third time I've noticed this. Hontou ni fushigi da yo. Nanka okashii.
1) Yeah, I was one of those token gaijin. If all he's doing is being the human tape recorder, though, that means he's crap. I knew people like that. If you're going to be serious about being an ALT (assistant language teacher), you at least make your own lessons. A big part of that program (I worked for the government; lately schools are turning to private companies) is about just providing entertainment for the kids in hopes that they won't notice that English class, which should be fun and empowering, is the most boring awful experience in school. I have a master's in English, requiring a lot of study of linguistics, but I did not know that there was a "rule" for when to pronounce "the" with a schwa and when to pronounce it with an [i] ("ee"). This is the kind of idiotic crap they teach in English class. If you don't follow the pronunciation pattern, people will still understand what you mean, but if you skip the article or use the wrong one, or use one when you shouldn't, they won't. The problem is, the latter only comes with meaningful communicative practice; the former can be crammed for a multiple-choice test. Ugh, don't get me started.
2) I saw horrible, horrible things in the education system here. Heartbreaking things. I, like much of the Slashdot crowd I'm sure, endured more than my fair share of bullying in junior high and high school, and made it clear to the kids in question that nothing would be tolerated on my watch. A loud and public dressing-down of two bullies who stood up from their desks, walked over and started punching a fat kid from both sides IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS got me a private talking-to by the principal. Telling a kid to go home after he PUSHED ME AND TOOK A SWING AT ME (on the same day that he TRIPPED AN ELDERLY FEMALE TEACHER IN THE HALL) got me a lecture on how I don't have the right to deny this piece of shit an education.
My wife was a teacher at that school for 15 years. She once went on an exchange to a US high school. She couldn't believe how "adult" they were, and she came back horribly depressed (she quit only a couple years after).
As a college teacher, some of the crap I deal with on a daily basis is the stuff of junior high. I have to ask for quiet. I have people carrying on full-volume conversations across the room WHILE I'M TALKING (and not at the beginning of class--right in the middle). I have people who walk into class, plop down, and GO TO SLEEP (these are classes of like 25 people--not lecture halls). I point out that they don't have to come if they don't want. They say they'll be good. "BE GOOD." IN COLLEGE. It is unbelievable. And this is at a pretty good school, and I am (I hear) one of the more interesting teachers. I hope I never find out what it's like to be one of the boring ones.
3) Technology... I just can never figure out where this idea comes from. I'm sitting in front of a computer full of Taiwanese parts designed by American companies. I have a 50M DSL line that runs at 3M on a good day (see, those amazing numbers you read about the speeds here are the speeds AT THE POST--they have little bearing on what you'll get in your house--yay Japanese lack of consumer rights!). My phone is a Sharp (Japanese), but is almost as big as my first Motorola flip-phone in the US (ca 1998), the big difference being that there I could afford to talk on it. My bill is $70/mo, with no minutes. I can call my wife all I want, but I'm careful about using it for anything but. It's 3G, but I once read an article on MSN while waiting for the doctor and when I got my bill I found that that little web surf cost me $25.
When I want tech, I wait until a trip to the US, where I'll have more choice for less money. I just honestly have no idea what people are talking about, "technology" in Japan. Here, more than anywhere else, it seems, technology only serves the companies that sell it. Anything that might make something useful to the user is disabled or requires a trip to Akihabara, which has become a kind of manga
The party thing MAY be changing. The Koumeito Party (which may or may not still be a part of Souka Gakkai, the eyebrow-raising, sorta cultlike, basically Nichiren Buddhist sect that has LOTS of money) seems to be gobbling up power, and it's worrying people a bit. They just pushed through a tax hike that has made it very uncomfortable for a lot of people--gaijin and otherwise--here, with my officemate's take-home being reduced by about $250. However, they still hold that no one's tax actually changed. Very, very strange.
Um, I teach university here in Japan. I've also taught university in the states. So believe me when I say:
These kids are dumb as rocks. Really, really dumb.
The argument for these people being smart and this education system being good is predicated on test scores. As an educator and an assessor, I can't tell you how dumb that is. Basically (and I speak from experience in the K-12 education system here) no one does any learning in school until a few weeks before a big test, and then everyone crams FOR THE TEST. They don't actually learn anything; they just learn how to take the test. The most immediate place you can see this is by trying to talk to any Japanese college graduate in English. These people have all had about 10 years of English. They should be able to carry on a basic conversation, right? But you'll find that they can only spit out a few words, horribly mispronounced, and usually lacking any kind of syntactic structure. Why? Because they've never been expected to DO anything based on what they studied; they were only asked to pass tests. And they do. But they have zero real-world language--or any other kind of--proficiency, unless they've become involved in something in their careers.
Companies here fill the role we in the Western world give to schools. Now, I have many CS friend who bemoan the fact that they didn't really learn how to program well until they hit the corporate world, but that's not even what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that some of my English major students walk out of here into programming jobs--with no prior experience or education or even an interest in programming. Why? Because when they interviewed for the company (and you interview for COMPANIES here--not jobs--the company then will decide if they want you and where you should go and what you should do), they looked like the kind of person who'd make a good programmer.
So if that's the case, what is the impetus to learn anything in school? If it has no bearing on your employability, save the name of the school, why bother actually learning about politics, history, language, ANYTHING? Answer: none. There is no reason whatsoever to learn anything, unless you just happen to be interested. So my boys are interested in drinking and getting laid (nothing wrong with either, mind you), and my girls are interested in Prada and Louis Vuitton (and I have no problem with brand goods, either--although I'm a Gaultier man myself). Very few, however, are interested in anything we'd call "important."
Of COURSE there are exceptions. Of course. But the sick and sad thing that I see over and over is that the exceptions--the people who really did learn things and really are aware of their surroundings--do not fare any better than their benighted colleagues. They don't get better jobs. I'm sure that wherever they end up working, they do a better job, but they still get the same kind of generic jobs with the HORRIFYING starting salaries as the idiots around them.
Japan is not a meritocracy, and it shows. They have done very well for themselves by refusing to compete domestically and by keeping foreign entities on a short leash in Japan. But the lack of sound Japanese leadership has had a lot of repercussions that it seems most people don't realize. Look into who runs Nissan. Who has controlling stakes in Mazda. Mitsubishi. Who runs Sony. Etc. These "Japanese" companies--the companies we point to to say "Japan is amazing"--haven't been run by Japanese people for a long time. The exceptions, of course, are Toyota and Honda, and they're big ones. But still.
PLEASE stop buying the Japan hype, people. If you came over here and lived for a few months, you'd be just like every other gaijin, saying "I always thought Japan was X, but it's actually Y!" It is nothing like what you imagine. It is a silly place.
--Which makes it pretty much like any other open source product.
Health care in Japan is definitely cheap, but I don't know where you found easy or effective.
The list:
Oh, and the medicine here is in no way socialized--health insurance is largely privatized, but your employer is required to put you on it. You only get on the public one if you have no job, and the benefits are lower and the co-pay higher. Price is lower because everyone has insurance, but without the profit motive, there's no reason to provide better service. Right now, getting the person back in the office a million times is incentivized, because it's the only way you could make any money. But in the US, getting someone well ASAP is incentivized for private practitioners, because that wins new patients.
Seriously, if you had some good experiences, I'm happy for you, but you ought to come back and have a sit among people who have seen both ways and hear the horror stories. I am always worried that I'll get really sick here. If you have dece
God bless you.
Unfortunately, I think you're wrong about it not being a lot of people. Ask around. People are stupid.
Perhaps that's why they want to have retarded kids around. Makes them feel intelligent.
So, groveling before hired goons with guns is the best way to stop the problem of those goons abusing people? Stroking their massive egos is the best way to solve the runaway problem of police brutality? Hey, I'm always polite as well, but under no circumstances am I required to be. When talking to a cop, I'm not the one being paid to be in the conversation. I am polite as a human courtesy, not because it is my duty. This is not the case for the cop, and my failure to extend that courtesy is not grounds for him to beat me.
See, I don't pay the cops to lose their temper and beat people. I pay them to keep an eye out for trouble, to be helpful when I need them, and to always be the people who DON'T lose their tempers. You know, the Good Guys.
I don't care if an officer feels angry. I don't care if an officer feels threatened. I don't even care if an officer is in grave mortal peril. In fact, that's pretty much what I pay them for. It is their JOB to be in uncomfortable and/or dangerous situations AND DEAL WITH THEM WITH A COOL HEAD.
A police officer is not a regular member of society. We give them souped-up cars, weapons, comm equipment, firearms, and body armor. We do this with the expectation that they will always act in a fair and safe manner. "With great power...," and all that. So while I have sympathy for a civilian who loses his cool, I have nothing but contempt, anger, and fear for a police officer who does the same while wearing that uniform.
Police officers are our servants. Not the other way around. They are beneath us, not above. Increasingly, it seems that US cops don't understand this. That isn't surprising, because, to be honest, I've never met one that wasn't a complete and total moron, and an asshole to boot (think about the people you know from high school who went on to become cops--were you surprised?).
It is our responsibility as freedom-loving citizens of the United States of America to resist them, within our rights, every chance we get. Bone up on some basic law. It's our job to keep the state in its place.
(Here it comes, but it is relevant, I swear.) The Nazis didn't "take power." The Gestapo and the SS didn't just show up overnight. People GAVE them that power, and they gave them that control (power is the ability to punish, but control is something you give up willingly). A lot of everyday Germans had to be pretty pissed about the stupidity and evil they saw around them, but they did nothing to stop it. As we see mace and tasers used against people who pose no threat to society, as we see cops wantonly lie about the law, as we see them violate our civil liberties and abuse the power we gave them to protect us, unless we push back, we have no one to blame but ourselves if/when we find ourselves with a nation, a dream, a grand experiment, a philosophy that says the general goodness of mankind will lead to a peaceful and prosperous nation if we just let people do what they want, left in tatters as we grovel before an army of buzzcut bullies in body armor.
Cops are not like you. Not when they are in uniform, anyway. Just because you think you might lose it and punch someone if they are rude to you doesn't make it right for them to do so. If you did it, you would (and should) be charged with assault. If they do it, they should be too, and be stripped of their badges. Cops do not have MORE rights; they have FEWER. Remember that.
I live in Japan.
You walk into an electronics store. Each carrier has a section. You can pick the phones that the carrier has. They might all just be the same phones with different color schemes and shiny bits, depending on the carrier, but you'll never know because each carrier makes up their own model numbers. If you know how to read the codes, you can usually figure out at least who makes them, and then go to the manufacturer's website and compare pictures and feature lists until you figure out what the phone actually is. That being said, the feature lists can be very confusing because they are often miserably crippled by the carrier (my mp3-playing phone only plays "secure mp3s"--some idiotic proprietary file format that you can only rip to if you buy a $40 software CD from Sharp). You most certainly can't use them on any other network. If you change networks, you get to input all your address book entries again. You can now keep your number as you move, but it costs.
So why would we go through all that? Because that's the only option. That's just the way it is. You guys in Europe have it sooooo good!
Yup. As much as I defend people for using Windows 'round here (i.e. I don't think people who use Windows are stupid--they have no choice), I am shuffling things around to go back to the Mac after an almost 10-year hiatus. The fact that nowadays, even if I switch, I can still boot Windows (XP) or use Parallels to run any of the Windows-only things I need to run basically means I don't need to worry about what MS has screwed up.
I started out being really excited about Longhorn. Then they took out all the features and loaded it up with self-serving crap and nonsense. Meanwhile the MacOS has become so slick, clean, and unobtrusive that everytime some around me switches (which is happening A LOT these days), I look at it and go, "who knew an OS could suck so little?"
No Vista for me, thanks. I almost bailed with XP, because I was quite happy with 2000, but the better driver support won me over (and the cracked corporate copy--important for broke grad school students). I look at Vista running at the store and just kind of recoil in disgust. It's like everything that has ever sucked about Windows... amplified.
I've looked deep within myself, and I just don't have another MS OS in me.
You got me; I made the whole thing up.
(and that's just ETS)
Yes.
We do our best to maintain construct validity (i.e. testing what we claim to be testing), but sometimes it is as you say. We often catch those later. In my experience, within a particular section, however, if we find that one item just doesn't match up with the rest of the sub-test, we take a look and very often that's what we see. A question that discriminated well, but was drawing on some kind of other, more general, knowledge.
A lot of people's ire towards tests and testing has nothing to do with test design. That's just the variable they think is most important. Actually, what upsets people the most is test usage. Idiotic things like No Child Left Behind are the product of businesspeople or politicians running with a test without understanding what they are good at and what they aren't. Basically, they are good at giving you a broad, objective categorization of individuals. That should always be paired with real-world observations. It rarely is.
Even one of the best tests out there, the TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language--used to screen candidates for study at US universities, and developed by ETS, the same people who make the GRE), admonishes institutions on the importance of pairing those scores with an interview, or some more specific institutional exam, or SOMETHING. I know of absolutely no schools that do this. There is little we, the developers, can do about this, aside from trying to be as fair and valid as we can be and telling institutions not to do that.
There is, perhaps, light at the end of the tunnel. It is getting easier and easier to incorporate writing tasks with these things. The GRE has replaced its silly brain teaser section with a critiquing and writing arguments section, which has a much better overlap with what you will be expected to do in grad school than the old section. By doing these things computer-based, that text can quickly be sent off to two or more raters for human rating. Again with IRT (my institution uses the program Facets for this), we can look at the relative severity of raters and from that calculate a score for a piece of writing. For some things, this really is the way to go. But it's more expensive as it requires human raters, so only the really big tests can do it.
Of course correlation is not causation, but say you have 3 tests of vocabulary and three tests of listening. You run them all on the same group. Of course there is going to be some overlap, which we can understand to just be general language proficiency, but we would expect to see a much higher correlation within the tests than between them. If we have too much between, then we need to take a closer look at them, because they aren't unidimensional (this is a problem with the TOEIC, but that doesn't stop most of Asia using it to deny people jobs--we have a TOEIC teacher here who has a perfect score, but the English-speaking staff has no idea what she's talking about most of the time, her English is so bad). However, if we see 3 different tasks, all ostensibly measuring the construct of vocabulary, and they are highly correlated, we pretty much have to assume that they are all testing vocabulary, right? Individual items may be floating into some other construct, sure, but taken as a whole, "walks like a duck, talks like a duck."
The problem of construct validity is a tough one, but we are getting better all the time, thanks to advances in cognitive science. As we learn more about how the brain functions, and what kind of tasks light up where in the brain, it's likely that some day not too far in the future, we'll be able to pilot these things on people and see if we're hitting what we are hoping to hit. Granted, that probably will only be true for really big tests, but those are the most important anyway.
Finally, yeah, tests can make mistakes, and people can certainly game tests (I knew a guy from Saudi who I think was actually kind of retarded who took the TOEFL 30 times and finally passed it, because he remembered all
MAYBE. But I've never seen it. You're right; it's possible; but confusing questions are the very ones that usually turn out to be big ol' steaming turds.
That being said, if the "right" people are getting it right, then it's doing its job, so what's the harm? All a test is really designed to do is categorize people. A real test of knowledge is always going to be unprompted. This is why most graduate programs--and a fair number of bachelor programs as well--require a thesis/dissertation. These tell you exactly what somebody knows. A test cannot do that. It can, however, allow objective comparisons among individuals, which things like papers cannot do.
There are ways, however, to pin test scores and even individual items to real-world competencies, but they are extremely time-consuming.
Well, a poorly-written item will always be out-fitting. If the answer doesn't match the question, then everyone will have to guess. If everyone has to guess, the information curve (a great graph I'd love to show you, but can't here, and need to go to bed) will be about flat. There should be a big hump that shows that it gives us a lot of information about people a certain number of standard deviations above or below the mean. Questions like you describe won't have that.
Also, I wrote about this in another comment, but a lot of the items you get on high-stakes tests don't really go toward your score. They are actually pilot items that the company is trying out a few thousand times to see if they work correctly before they start contributing to anyone's score.
I don't know any cheap item-writers, though. Everyone I know in this field has at least a master's degree, and most have PhDs. We don't come cheap.
As for being a good or bad item writer, there are just a handful of rules to follow to avoid the big blunders. After that, it's all about taking them for a spin and seeing how they handle. As I've said a few times now, there's no telling what will happen when you release these things into the wild. I've written items that I doted on and cared for and nurtured and cuddled and put my all into, fully expecting that they would grow up to be model items, ones that the other items would look up to and aspire to becoming, only to be totally and utterly betrayed by them in real-world piloting, my time and devotion wasted, finally having to drag them out back and shoot them in the back of the head. On the other hand, there are sometimes items you add to a section last-minute, just trying to get the number up for piloting or whatever, and find that you have written some ridiculously wonderful item purely by accident.
It gets easier with practice, though. To be fair, I'm not a very good item-writer. But that is why I, especially, need the stats.
Computer-adaptive testing! Another sexy subject!
Basically, all tests really need to be good is a lot of data. When you sit for the GRE, for example, did you know that a fair number of those items actually aren't used for calculating your score (especially true when dealing with computer-adaptive tests, where the computer might be done figuring you out after a remarkably small number of questions)? This is how pro tests get to be so good and so reliable. Every item that figures in your score has been put through its paces with thousands of people, unscored. When it goes from being an experimental item (as in "we don't know what it's going to do in the wild") to a known-variable, then it is used for calculating the score. No surprises.
I think the problem is that most of the tests people have experience with are just off-the-cuff classroom instruments. Since they kinda look the same as the high-stakes tests that really determine one's future, it's easy to assume they are the same. But they are not. There is an army of psychometricians trying to make sure that you get the score you deserve. We don't set out to make hard tests. We set out to make valid and reliable tests.
Yeah, using it on a classroom-based-test is overdoing it a little, I'd say (Although a colleague of mine does! He's addicted, I think.). But for the kind of high-stakes tests the blogger was talking about, I can't imagine that they aren't doing something along these lines.
Nice post. I agree, but please see my post at: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238713 &cid=19539965
The thing is that tests--important ones, anyway--don't work the way everyone seems to think they work. Individual items are virtually meaningless.
Ugh. I just wrote a pretty polite reply at his page after skimming his idiotic article. Now that I've read it, I'm actually angry.
This guy knows NOTHING about testing. Nothing. He isn't even to the level of Classical Testing Theory (CTT), which is really not much more than means and Pearson correlations, and is nowhere near how high-stakes (and even medium- and low-stakes, increasingly) multiple choice (MC) tests work now, and how they have worked for many many years.
IAAP (I am a psychometrician). A big part of what I do for a living is design a particular MC test, pilot the items, and interpret the results. But I don't just count up the correct items and give you the percentage. Why? Because that would be insane. You can guess on those.
Oh, but he says this:
But suppose the grading attempts to adjust for guessing. There is no way of knowing what is in the mind of the test-taker, so the customary is to subtract, from the number correct, some fraction of the number wrong.
--Which is just fine until I tell you I have NEVER heard of dealing with guessing that way on a professional-level test.
As a general rule, we don't do any easy mathematics. At all.
Here is part of the output for a test I'm working on right now:
This is generated by RUMM2020, a tool for Rasch analysis. The Rasch model was developed in the 60s as an ideal model of item response. These are the stats on 3 items of this test. The two most important columns are Location and Probability.
The location is the item difficulty. Given the sample's performance on this item, and given their ability, how hard is this item? Item 35 is quite difficult; item 36, quite easy.
The probability is the p value for the chi square. Basically, if it's 0.05 or below, that item is operating significantly (statistically significantly, that is) outside of the model. It displays poor "fit." we generally toss these items before going on to the next step (ideally, these are weeded out during pilot testing, before the test goes live--in this case, it is an experimental test of a construct I'm not even sure exists anymore, but I digress). If an item has poor fit with the model, it is too much of a loose cannon, and its results cannot be trusted. This is what the benighted blogger (is there any other kind?) was whining about. That item is hard not because it is good, but because it is evidently stupid. The responses are all over the place, which means people were probably just guessing. Out it goes before it ruins any examinees' lives.
The next step is to get person locations. In the case of people, these numbers indicate the person's ability. This is calculated by looking at their performance on the items, given their difficulty (Which is calculated based on people's performance on them! Incestuous! But given a large enough sample, it all works out to a fine enough grain to be useful). Here is the output for the people:
So, the first person didn't do so hot; the last did pretty well (these usually top out at 3ish). As you can see in "DataPts," there were 125 items on this test. I started with 160. Do you hear that, Mr. Unexpected "Truths?" We have your back! We're not just handing you a naked score based on our crap items. WE PULL THE CRAP ITEMS.
That location score will usually be rescaled to something prettier, since no one would really like to see something like
My dad is an insurance adjuster. He had a case just like this when I was a kid in the early 80s, but it was with a conversion van. They were actually really common for awhile, because people, for some reason, thought that "cruise control" meant "autopilot." Don't know about any won lawsuits, though.