Could that possibly be a father as well? Or could that even be any other person that is caring, loving and all those good things? I haven't reviewed the report from the study (I doubt if you have, but that is besides the point) but I very much doubt that the conclusion was "has to be a mother; all else turns monkey into psycho".
the "social interaction" of a daycare baby factory
Children have more social interaction in daycare centers than they do at home, because the average home will have less children of a similar age. I won't spend time on explaining that statistic.
I wouldn't put my kid in a baby factory. If you do, you haven't quite grasped the concept.
What makes you think some overworked daycare "professional" is going to be able to provide any more love?
What makes you think that you (or the other parent, for that matter) can provide educational, caring, loving, nursing one-on-one attention as good as a trained professional can do that? OK, you can, off course. Can you do that 24/7? Can you still do that when your baby has been crying for three days straight for no apparent reason? If you can, I salute you, but you are not part of the majority of real parents.
In addition to that last point: people being able to reproduce does not automatically qualify them as good parents.
Consider your first kid (whether you have it or not): do you know how to do all the things that come with caring for him/her? RTFM is not really an option. Does not come with a man page. In fact is very likely not to conform to any spec you can think of.
My girlfriend runs a day care center and I have taken up the challenge to work there for a day in a work experience type of role. One of the things I found is that the kids are cared for. It scared me shitless to be allowed to handle (supervised by licensed staff--hold the flames) other people's most precious treasure. After that day though (and the odd one since) I have taken to really enjoying the work. (my day time job is with computers) If the kids responses are anything to go by: you can not convince me of the idea that those smiling faces (upon recognition of mine) and reaching arms are those of sociopaths in training.
I don't have kids yet, but obviously my partner and I have some well rounded views on child care. Personally, if I consider the challenge of providing high quality care for my own child, I am big enough to admit that if I had to do that 24/7, I would go bananas within weeks. That doesn't mean I will be a bad father. Not at all. But I think that by putting my children in day care for 2-3 days per week (MAX!) I give myself and my partner the break we need to be very good parents the rest of the time. I would do that regardless of whether we both work or what kind of work we do. Please note that most parents use grandparents or other family for the same purpose. No disrespect to my mother, but a specialised, purpose built and decorated (with triple certified furniture, etc) environment with qualified staff that had better impress me (or my partner, which is much more difficult) is just as good, if not better for the development of a child.
The responsibility of a parent (IMHO) is to raise children with the best care possible. If (hypothetical) parents say that there can be no better care than 100% of the child's own parents should think very hard about who is fooling who.
One last comment on the actual topic: child care is expensive. Good child care is very expensive. Employers subsidising that cost are providing something of great value to their employees and of even greater value to the children. I applaud this happening much more than companies just throwing money at people; to me it shows the company actually cares about what matters to people.
Actually, dreaming about Tetris means you haven't played it enough. What people report mostly is experiencing the falling of the blocks and the way they tumble into the right slots--or not.
I have played Tetris for almost ten years now on a pretty scary level. (Game Boy high score: 1.248.000---that was done whilst waiting for a bus ) What I found is that you only get the (waking) dream phenomenon when you've just started; when you're on the steep part of the learning curve, if you will.
Just a little bit of endurance will get you through that and the dreams will go away.
I've always thought of it like the way muscles will hurt when you've just started working out a particular muscle group. They'll hurt, which means they're (re)building and soom thereafter, the hurt goes and muscle (=ability) appears.
This kind of thing (QA or testing, whatever you want to call it) goes into the category "Things that you could do to aid an open source project even though you aren't necessarily a programmer"
Anybody with experience in larger projects will be able to verify that when projects of any form or shape get beyond a certain number of people involved, there is overhead involved in maintaining the project.
One could think of administrative duties (such as maintaining a web site and communications beyond a message board and a mailing list) but also the things done in commercial software development that are not actually coding.
In other words: why not have QA people (good ones, not bureaucratic, satanic, ignorant organisational outcasts) as a part of an OSS project. That would free the developers from (often tedious) testing work and it would speed up the elimination of bugs.
A possible scenario is that QA people that (like programmers) want to contribute their time would do nothing other than have a box with a known (and published) configuration (VMWare!) that they would install new revisions of a product on and run extensive test suites on it, feeding back the bugs into the project.
btw: this is quite common for Big OSS Projects, but the smaller ones could benefit from it just as much.
I am an OSS proponent as much as the next Good Guy, but this is an area that is a bit misunderstood IMHO.
The idea of many eyeballs making for little surviving bugs is statistically sound, but nothing is ever said about the amount of time that has to pass before the principle kicks in.
Eyeballing code is one thing, but that is not quite the same as testing a product. In other words, considered, tailored and targeted trial-and-error is much more effective than manual code review.
(see my other post for a different take on how to deal with this)
Another thing that you can use (La)TeX for is automatic generation of formatted text.
What I mean is something like a Perl script mangling a data file and spitting out TeX source, which can then be piped to either (beautiful) hardcopy or HTML or whatever other filter you fancy.
You could do the same with, say, RTF or the Word file format, but it would be a hell of a lot murkier to do so. (not to mention uglier).
I heard of a company in London that used the stations on the Circle Line (underground rail) for a part of their network. Another one was a place where they had to set up 52 workstations. The engineers went out and bought a pack of 52 coloured crayons and used the colours as names. Yet another one is to get one of those books with (currently) popular names for your yet-to-be-born kid. Like hurricanes, you could alternate between male and female. You could also completely go that route: there are plenty of named storms already and every year produces new ones. Personally, I use the capitals of US states. That'll keep my home network supplied for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Could that possibly be a father as well? Or could that even be any other person that is caring, loving and all those good things? I haven't reviewed the report from the study (I doubt if you have, but that is besides the point) but I very much doubt that the conclusion was "has to be a mother; all else turns monkey into psycho".
What makes you think that you (or the other parent, for that matter) can provide educational, caring, loving, nursing one-on-one attention as good as a trained professional can do that? OK, you can, off course. Can you do that 24/7? Can you still do that when your baby has been crying for three days straight for no apparent reason? If you can, I salute you, but you are not part of the majority of real parents.
In addition to that last point: people being able to reproduce does not automatically qualify them as good parents.
Consider your first kid (whether you have it or not): do you know how to do all the things that come with caring for him/her? RTFM is not really an option. Does not come with a man page. In fact is very likely not to conform to any spec you can think of.
My girlfriend runs a day care center and I have taken up the challenge to work there for a day in a work experience type of role. One of the things I found is that the kids are cared for. It scared me shitless to be allowed to handle (supervised by licensed staff--hold the flames) other people's most precious treasure. After that day though (and the odd one since) I have taken to really enjoying the work. (my day time job is with computers) If the kids responses are anything to go by: you can not convince me of the idea that those smiling faces (upon recognition of mine) and reaching arms are those of sociopaths in training.
I don't have kids yet, but obviously my partner and I have some well rounded views on child care. Personally, if I consider the challenge of providing high quality care for my own child, I am big enough to admit that if I had to do that 24/7, I would go bananas within weeks. That doesn't mean I will be a bad father. Not at all. But I think that by putting my children in day care for 2-3 days per week (MAX!) I give myself and my partner the break we need to be very good parents the rest of the time. I would do that regardless of whether we both work or what kind of work we do. Please note that most parents use grandparents or other family for the same purpose. No disrespect to my mother, but a specialised, purpose built and decorated (with triple certified furniture, etc) environment with qualified staff that had better impress me (or my partner, which is much more difficult) is just as good, if not better for the development of a child.
The responsibility of a parent (IMHO) is to raise children with the best care possible. If (hypothetical) parents say that there can be no better care than 100% of the child's own parents should think very hard about who is fooling who.
One last comment on the actual topic: child care is expensive. Good child care is very expensive. Employers subsidising that cost are providing something of great value to their employees and of even greater value to the children. I applaud this happening much more than companies just throwing money at people; to me it shows the company actually cares about what matters to people.
Actually, dreaming about Tetris means you haven't played it enough. What people report mostly is experiencing the falling of the blocks and the way they tumble into the right slots--or not.
I have played Tetris for almost ten years now on a pretty scary level. (Game Boy high score: 1.248.000---that was done whilst waiting for a bus ) What I found is that you only get the (waking) dream phenomenon when you've just started; when you're on the steep part of the learning curve, if you will.
Just a little bit of endurance will get you through that and the dreams will go away.
I've always thought of it like the way muscles will hurt when you've just started working out a particular muscle group. They'll hurt, which means they're (re)building and soom thereafter, the hurt goes and muscle (=ability) appears.
Just my $0.02
Schmolle
This kind of thing (QA or testing, whatever you want to call it) goes into the category "Things that you could do to aid an open source project even though you aren't necessarily a programmer"
Anybody with experience in larger projects will be able to verify that when projects of any form or shape get beyond a certain number of people involved, there is overhead involved in maintaining the project.
One could think of administrative duties (such as maintaining a web site and communications beyond a message board and a mailing list) but also the things done in commercial software development that are not actually coding.
In other words: why not have QA people (good ones, not bureaucratic, satanic, ignorant organisational outcasts) as a part of an OSS project. That would free the developers from (often tedious) testing work and it would speed up the elimination of bugs.
A possible scenario is that QA people that (like programmers) want to contribute their time would do nothing other than have a box with a known (and published) configuration (VMWare!) that they would install new revisions of a product on and run extensive test suites on it, feeding back the bugs into the project.
btw: this is quite common for Big OSS Projects, but the smaller ones could benefit from it just as much.
Food for thought, I hope.
Schmolle
(QA Manager -- FT.com)
I am an OSS proponent as much as the next Good Guy, but this is an area that is a bit misunderstood IMHO.
The idea of many eyeballs making for little surviving bugs is statistically sound, but nothing is ever said about the amount of time that has to pass before the principle kicks in.
Eyeballing code is one thing, but that is not quite the same as testing a product. In other words, considered, tailored and targeted trial-and-error is much more effective than manual code review.
(see my other post for a different take on how to deal with this)
Schmolle
(QA Manager for FT.com)
What I mean is something like a Perl script mangling a data file and spitting out TeX source, which can then be piped to either (beautiful) hardcopy or HTML or whatever other filter you fancy.
You could do the same with, say, RTF or the Word file format, but it would be a hell of a lot murkier to do so. (not to mention uglier).
I heard of a company in London that used the stations on the Circle Line (underground rail) for a part of their network. Another one was a place where they had to set up 52 workstations. The engineers went out and bought a pack of 52 coloured crayons and used the colours as names. Yet another one is to get one of those books with (currently) popular names for your yet-to-be-born kid. Like hurricanes, you could alternate between male and female. You could also completely go that route: there are plenty of named storms already and every year produces new ones. Personally, I use the capitals of US states. That'll keep my home network supplied for a while.