Okay, this is off topic and perhaps a bit pedantic, but here goes:
In Roman Catholic theology, at least, the wine is not just a metaphor. It is the actual blood of Jesus, present in the wine. That is, when the bread and wine are consecrated, they become -- in their total substance -- the body and blood of Jesus, although still under the appearance of bread and wine.
(Mind you, most other branches of the Christian faith reject this idea, so your statement is not necessarily wrong. And you may consider the notion of drinking Jesus' actual blood even creepier than if the blood is metaphorical.)
This is one of the most insightful comments made so far in this entire discussion.
Not to defend Norris -- I think he's overreacting here -- but the behavior described in the parent post is exactly the sort of thing that publishers (of books, music, etc.) pull all the time. Disney does it -- takes works that have been part of the public imagination for centuries (esp. fairy tales), stripmines them for ideas, and then sues the pants off anyone who tries to make derivative works out of their derivative works.
I'm not a big fan of overprotective legislation and litigation regarding intellectual property. But I'd love to see something happen (not sure what) that would make publishers think twice before trying to defend their own ripoffs from being ripped off.
You make an excellent point. Sadly, I think more and more students are expecting all questions asked by teachers to be 'fill in the blank', 'short answer', or 'multiple choice' questions.
I work for an online chat reference librarian service. Time and again we get kids (from elementary school through grad school) who log in and ask a question whose answer clearly requires the exact setup from their classroom reading or lecture notes -- and they also clearly think that the librarian should be able to pop out an immediate answer like some sort of psychic search engine. Many of them clearly have not been taught even so much critical thinking as to be able to identify that their question is intimately tied to a resource that the teacher/professor gave them. Sometimes they don't even have the critical skills necessary to recognize when we are able to give them exactly the answer -- because the answer is phrased differently. ("What were the accomplishments of Martin Luther King?" is a relatively easy one to answer -- but not if you haven't been taught even enough thinking skills to understand when resource where the answer is found doesn't phrase it as "The accomplishments of Martin Luther King were.... ")
I often wonder, after a reference transaction from which both the student and I (for different reasons) leave frustrated, what kind of grades these students are getting. If the teacher simply fails them for not finding the answer, what will the student have learned? And if the teacher passes them without having taught them what they ought to have done to tackle the question, then again, what will the student have learned?
Lack of web connectivity is a lot more common than you think. My workplace T1 line goes down occasionally, but the network within the building doesn't need the T1 line, so I can still connect to the server. Also, our mobile workers go into very rural areas with very poor cellular coverage, and are often out of touch completely -- web or mobile phone. (They can call via landline, unless they're in Amish country, which is actually often the case.)
Of course, as you say, if they can't even phone in, then scheduling a meeting will be hard; however, if the scheduling system works like Outlook, they can at least have a copy of the calendar as it was updated the last time they were able to log in, which is not the case with Google Calendar or other web-based apps.
studies show that growing up in a home with a variety of books *does* seem to lead to greater intelligence (probably not directly of course).
Your parenthetical comment there should be pointed up. Studies show a correlation between the two. But they are not sufficient to show that one can "lead to" the other. It could be that the two correlated things share a common cause.
Other possibilities include:
* Parents who have diverse interests are both more likely to have a variety of books *and* more likely to exhibit the parenting skills needed to raise children with greater intelligence.
* Parents carrying the genes for greater intelligence are more likely to have a variety of books.
I'm sure there are other explanations that I haven't thought of. But simply increasing the number and/or variety of books available will do diddly-squat, IF either of the possibilities I've listed above is the sufficient explanation for the correlation shown in the studies. (If, however, the correlation is truly due to cause and effect -- i.e., if the increased variety of books itself causes greater intelligence -- then of course it will do more than diddly-squat.)
And what do you say to the kid who (like me) DIDN'T have to work really hard to get A's? There was no academic subject, first grade through grad school, in which I had to work very hard at all to get top marks. Not one. Ever. Some of them I didn't do any work whatsoever, answered everything on the exams off the cuff, and still got 95% or higher. I had classmates begging me to get lower grades in physics and chemistry so the grade curve would be more merciful.
Now, having said that, I have an anecdote to relate. While academic success always came to me effortlessly, I have never been good at dancing. I took a dance class in college specifically to challenge myself, since nothing else I was studying was doing the trick. I worked my ass off in that class, practicing long hours in the arts building and in my apartment. I'm sure my roommate still goes twitchy whenever he hears the song the routine went to. And the day of finals, the professor called each student into her office one by one to discuss their grades. I knew I wasn't nearly as good at the routine we were supposed to have learned as any of the other students, and I was prepared to suffer my first "C" or worse. But the prof told me she was giving me an "A" -- "Not for achievement," she said. "For improvement."
I tell you, I have never been prouder of an "A" in my entire academic career, and have rarely been prouder of any achievement.
Not just how they evolve, but how they work. Linguistics is a crabbedly difficult science, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of exactly how language functions in the human brain. The more evidence we have -- including the widest possible variety of languages, spoken and written -- the better we will be able to glean clues to the neurological mechanisms that underlie one of our most complex and useful behavioral tools.
(Not disagreeing with you at all, you understand -- just elaborating on your point.)
Not to mention the version of kryptonite found in Smallville*. When normal people are exposed to it, it creates (among other things) bug men, invisible girls, people who can split in two, reanimated drowned corpses, and a whole wall of weird.
Yeah, but do you know how long it would take zombies to shuffle all the way here from Peru? Be realistic, dude... you've got weeks before they reach you!
You at least pick up that section of the newspaper and look at it to throw it away
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I said without glancing at the ads therein.
I still see no moral difference between ignoring ads on a web site (by blocking them) and ignoring ads in print (by not looking at them). Or, for that matter, between ignoring web ads by blocking them and ignoring web ads by not looking at them.
Sites are perfectly within their rights to charge for subscriptions. I am perfectly within mine to decline to subscribe. Everybody wins.
Not all papers. Weekly free papers are distributed in many cities. I still feel no obligation to pay any attention whatsoever to the ads in those.
And you're dead wrong. They would still call it stealing if we paid for the web sites, as the cable and satellite companies would for equipment that let you skip the commercials altogether.
6. Advertisers are forced to react to plummeting click through rates with more intrusive ads or inventive measures to get around your countermeasures.
I wouldn't say "forced". They have other options, such as reexamining whether click-through rates are a valid measure of consumer interest (which, to be fair, does resemble your point in your penultimate paragraph).
I don't have a problem at all with ad blocking (as my other posts in this topic make clear), but I agree with you that there is some hypocrisy in the stance that there IS something wrong with it that giving credit for the view somehow expiates.
There are differences in the effect on the web site owner (if their ads use a per-view model and not a per-click model), but there is no difference in what is morally incumbent on me in either case.
That said, I should probably have indicated that I also fail to see how there is any moral obligation on the part of a web site owner to allow every browser to view the site. If the site owner wants to block Firefox in order to ensure that everyone who visits will see the ads, then that is within his or her rights, too.
I fail to see how using Firefox to ignore the ad banners and such is morally any different than throwing out the advertising supplements to the newspaper without glancing at the ads therein.
I always wonder whether acting is taken into consideration when studies like this are done. Are these coding systems ever applied to footage from, say, Laurence Olivier's movies? Dustin Hoffman's? Emma Thompson's? I'd be immensely curious to see whether the faked emotions of actors register under these coding systems as being faked.
I do some theater on the side -- both directing and acting. The best acting recreates emotional states in remarkable physiological detail. In slow moments, waiting in line (at the airport, for instance), I will often be silently practicing different emotional states and situations, either simply hypothetical or actual scenes from shows I'm working on. This discussion makes me wonder whether, if I were rehearsing, say, Jasper's soliloquy from "Drood" (in which he reminisces about his opium-addled attempt at murdering his nephew), I might not display "microexpressions" of murderous fury, fiendish glee, shocked realization, guilty grief. If so, would this coding system register such things?
I know you're joking, but you'd be surprised at the number of Amish who use the Internet at the public libraries in Ohio. Some are researching medical conditions, some are trawling for porn, some are desperate for information on how to leave the Amish community, some are helping their kids with their schoolwork, some are reading up on other Amish communities, some are keeping in touch with relatives in other parts of the country, some are finding out about their favorite authors, some are playing Yahoo games -- all in all, pretty normal Internet users (as library patrons go).
I work in an Ohio public library. The state mandates that our computers be filtered (at our own expense) for us to be able to get the state-supplied T1 line. (Of course, filtering software doesn't work well, but that doesn't matter. It's FOR THE CHILDREN!)
My worry, therefore, is that once this is in place, there will be an argument made that Ohio residents will have to filter their computers (at their own expense, of course) to hook into it -- and FOR THE CHILDREN, the argument will be put into law, and FOR THE CHILDREN, it will be held to be constitutional, with some sops thrown to appease those of us who actually care about porn^H^H^H^H free speech.
You may want to check with your local public library. Many of them offer free home access to the online version of Britannica with your library card. In my home state (Ohio), EVERY public library offers that.
I work in a library. I can't tell you how many patrons we've had come in and ask us if we could print out the Internet for them. The whole thing. No lie.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, this is off topic and perhaps a bit pedantic, but here goes:
In Roman Catholic theology, at least, the wine is not just a metaphor. It is the actual blood of Jesus, present in the wine. That is, when the bread and wine are consecrated, they become -- in their total substance -- the body and blood of Jesus, although still under the appearance of bread and wine.
(Mind you, most other branches of the Christian faith reject this idea, so your statement is not necessarily wrong. And you may consider the notion of drinking Jesus' actual blood even creepier than if the blood is metaphorical.)
This is one of the most insightful comments made so far in this entire discussion.
Not to defend Norris -- I think he's overreacting here -- but the behavior described in the parent post is exactly the sort of thing that publishers (of books, music, etc.) pull all the time. Disney does it -- takes works that have been part of the public imagination for centuries (esp. fairy tales), stripmines them for ideas, and then sues the pants off anyone who tries to make derivative works out of their derivative works.
I'm not a big fan of overprotective legislation and litigation regarding intellectual property. But I'd love to see something happen (not sure what) that would make publishers think twice before trying to defend their own ripoffs from being ripped off.
You make an excellent point. Sadly, I think more and more students are expecting all questions asked by teachers to be 'fill in the blank', 'short answer', or 'multiple choice' questions.
.... ")
I work for an online chat reference librarian service. Time and again we get kids (from elementary school through grad school) who log in and ask a question whose answer clearly requires the exact setup from their classroom reading or lecture notes -- and they also clearly think that the librarian should be able to pop out an immediate answer like some sort of psychic search engine. Many of them clearly have not been taught even so much critical thinking as to be able to identify that their question is intimately tied to a resource that the teacher/professor gave them. Sometimes they don't even have the critical skills necessary to recognize when we are able to give them exactly the answer -- because the answer is phrased differently. ("What were the accomplishments of Martin Luther King?" is a relatively easy one to answer -- but not if you haven't been taught even enough thinking skills to understand when resource where the answer is found doesn't phrase it as "The accomplishments of Martin Luther King were
I often wonder, after a reference transaction from which both the student and I (for different reasons) leave frustrated, what kind of grades these students are getting. If the teacher simply fails them for not finding the answer, what will the student have learned? And if the teacher passes them without having taught them what they ought to have done to tackle the question, then again, what will the student have learned?
Lack of web connectivity is a lot more common than you think. My workplace T1 line goes down occasionally, but the network within the building doesn't need the T1 line, so I can still connect to the server. Also, our mobile workers go into very rural areas with very poor cellular coverage, and are often out of touch completely -- web or mobile phone. (They can call via landline, unless they're in Amish country, which is actually often the case.)
Of course, as you say, if they can't even phone in, then scheduling a meeting will be hard; however, if the scheduling system works like Outlook, they can at least have a copy of the calendar as it was updated the last time they were able to log in, which is not the case with Google Calendar or other web-based apps.
studies show that growing up in a home with a variety of books *does* seem to lead to greater intelligence (probably not directly of course).
Your parenthetical comment there should be pointed up. Studies show a correlation between the two. But they are not sufficient to show that one can "lead to" the other. It could be that the two correlated things share a common cause.
Other possibilities include:
* Parents who have diverse interests are both more likely to have a variety of books *and* more likely to exhibit the parenting skills needed to raise children with greater intelligence.
* Parents carrying the genes for greater intelligence are more likely to have a variety of books.
I'm sure there are other explanations that I haven't thought of. But simply increasing the number and/or variety of books available will do diddly-squat, IF either of the possibilities I've listed above is the sufficient explanation for the correlation shown in the studies. (If, however, the correlation is truly due to cause and effect -- i.e., if the increased variety of books itself causes greater intelligence -- then of course it will do more than diddly-squat.)
And what do you say to the kid who (like me) DIDN'T have to work really hard to get A's? There was no academic subject, first grade through grad school, in which I had to work very hard at all to get top marks. Not one. Ever. Some of them I didn't do any work whatsoever, answered everything on the exams off the cuff, and still got 95% or higher. I had classmates begging me to get lower grades in physics and chemistry so the grade curve would be more merciful.
Now, having said that, I have an anecdote to relate. While academic success always came to me effortlessly, I have never been good at dancing. I took a dance class in college specifically to challenge myself, since nothing else I was studying was doing the trick. I worked my ass off in that class, practicing long hours in the arts building and in my apartment. I'm sure my roommate still goes twitchy whenever he hears the song the routine went to. And the day of finals, the professor called each student into her office one by one to discuss their grades. I knew I wasn't nearly as good at the routine we were supposed to have learned as any of the other students, and I was prepared to suffer my first "C" or worse. But the prof told me she was giving me an "A" -- "Not for achievement," she said. "For improvement."
I tell you, I have never been prouder of an "A" in my entire academic career, and have rarely been prouder of any achievement.
"Flamebait"? This should be "Informative".
Is it alive? Then it is plotting against you.
So the best way to protect yourself without killing the cat is simply never to open the box!
"il est interdit de parler flamand et d'uriner sur les murs" ("It's forbidden to speak Flemish and to piss on the walls")
:-)
Does that apply only if they're done simultaneously?
Not just how they evolve, but how they work. Linguistics is a crabbedly difficult science, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of exactly how language functions in the human brain. The more evidence we have -- including the widest possible variety of languages, spoken and written -- the better we will be able to glean clues to the neurological mechanisms that underlie one of our most complex and useful behavioral tools.
(Not disagreeing with you at all, you understand -- just elaborating on your point.)
we'll all live in a science-driven paradise where everyone will be rationalists
Does this mean I'll finally get my flying car?
Not to mention the version of kryptonite found in Smallville*. When normal people are exposed to it, it creates (among other things) bug men, invisible girls, people who can split in two, reanimated drowned corpses, and a whole wall of weird.
*The news^H^H^H^H fiction program.
Yeah, but do you know how long it would take zombies to shuffle all the way here from Peru? Be realistic, dude... you've got weeks before they reach you!
You at least pick up that section of the newspaper and look at it to throw it away
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I said without glancing at the ads therein.
I still see no moral difference between ignoring ads on a web site (by blocking them) and ignoring ads in print (by not looking at them). Or, for that matter, between ignoring web ads by blocking them and ignoring web ads by not looking at them.
Sites are perfectly within their rights to charge for subscriptions. I am perfectly within mine to decline to subscribe. Everybody wins.
Not all papers. Weekly free papers are distributed in many cities. I still feel no obligation to pay any attention whatsoever to the ads in those.
And you're dead wrong. They would still call it stealing if we paid for the web sites, as the cable and satellite companies would for equipment that let you skip the commercials altogether.
6. Advertisers are forced to react to plummeting click through rates with more intrusive ads or inventive measures to get around your countermeasures.
I wouldn't say "forced". They have other options, such as reexamining whether click-through rates are a valid measure of consumer interest (which, to be fair, does resemble your point in your penultimate paragraph).
I don't have a problem at all with ad blocking (as my other posts in this topic make clear), but I agree with you that there is some hypocrisy in the stance that there IS something wrong with it that giving credit for the view somehow expiates.
Capitalism is an economic system, not a moral one.
Not everyone agrees with you.
Er ... yes, actually, I did read both.
There are differences in the effect on the web site owner (if their ads use a per-view model and not a per-click model), but there is no difference in what is morally incumbent on me in either case.
That said, I should probably have indicated that I also fail to see how there is any moral obligation on the part of a web site owner to allow every browser to view the site. If the site owner wants to block Firefox in order to ensure that everyone who visits will see the ads, then that is within his or her rights, too.
Either way, the ads will not sell me anything.
I fail to see how using Firefox to ignore the ad banners and such is morally any different than throwing out the advertising supplements to the newspaper without glancing at the ads therein.
I always wonder whether acting is taken into consideration when studies like this are done. Are these coding systems ever applied to footage from, say, Laurence Olivier's movies? Dustin Hoffman's? Emma Thompson's? I'd be immensely curious to see whether the faked emotions of actors register under these coding systems as being faked.
I do some theater on the side -- both directing and acting. The best acting recreates emotional states in remarkable physiological detail. In slow moments, waiting in line (at the airport, for instance), I will often be silently practicing different emotional states and situations, either simply hypothetical or actual scenes from shows I'm working on. This discussion makes me wonder whether, if I were rehearsing, say, Jasper's soliloquy from "Drood" (in which he reminisces about his opium-addled attempt at murdering his nephew), I might not display "microexpressions" of murderous fury, fiendish glee, shocked realization, guilty grief. If so, would this coding system register such things?
I know you're joking, but you'd be surprised at the number of Amish who use the Internet at the public libraries in Ohio. Some are researching medical conditions, some are trawling for porn, some are desperate for information on how to leave the Amish community, some are helping their kids with their schoolwork, some are reading up on other Amish communities, some are keeping in touch with relatives in other parts of the country, some are finding out about their favorite authors, some are playing Yahoo games -- all in all, pretty normal Internet users (as library patrons go).
I work in an Ohio public library. The state mandates that our computers be filtered (at our own expense) for us to be able to get the state-supplied T1 line. (Of course, filtering software doesn't work well, but that doesn't matter. It's FOR THE CHILDREN!)
My worry, therefore, is that once this is in place, there will be an argument made that Ohio residents will have to filter their computers (at their own expense, of course) to hook into it -- and FOR THE CHILDREN, the argument will be put into law, and FOR THE CHILDREN, it will be held to be constitutional, with some sops thrown to appease those of us who actually care about porn^H^H^H^H free speech.
You may want to check with your local public library. Many of them offer free home access to the online version of Britannica with your library card. In my home state (Ohio), EVERY public library offers that.
I work in a library. I can't tell you how many patrons we've had come in and ask us if we could print out the Internet for them. The whole thing. No lie.
You're only seeing the conspiracies they WANT you to see ...