See the part where I said "...therefore reflected in the articles - in the topic, in the construction, in the arguments, in the sources cited."? People choose those elements, and, by choosing them, are making a de facto opinion about their superiority, and therefore those facts are couched in opinion -- and bias.
Wikipedia has a stated goal of being unbiased. I think that most people would recognize that as being a worthwhile goal. When men write the majority of the articles, then the material is based towards male perspectives.
Many posters in this thread so far have made comments about how men and women are different, with different desires and goals and motivations hard-wired into their brains, so let's stick with that theory for now. If that is true, then men do indeed have a thought process that is markedly different from women's in some way, and that is therefore reflected in the articles - in the topic, in the construction, in the arguments, in the sources cited. There is bias. I guess, as men, maybe you don't care since the current content is written to suit you?
Every time this discussion comes up, no one acknowledges that women have unique and valuable mental contributions. There's a lot of hand-waving about 'Let's not force them to be in field XYZ if they don't want to be' but very little discussion of what the consequences of them not being in field XYZ are. Posters immediately think of how the solution cannot work and do not even acknowledge there IS a problem. It's the same issue here with Wikipedia.
It's a problem when the biggest fact-based document in history is virtually devoid of a female perspective. Just because you don't see a practical solution in the 10 seconds it took you to skim the summary doesn't mean this is not a problem worth trying to solve or that there is no solution. It's okay to talk about problems with no solution. You don't have to diminish them into non-problems.
It's often said that men find women frustrating because women want to discuss issues just to discuss them, whereas men want to solve them and find they cannot in some cases, particularly when it is emotional or involves other people. It's ironic that, in a way, this kind of pattern leads to the dismissal of 'unsolvable' gender-gaps, and yet the existence of this pattern is exactly what makes gender gaps worrying. Men and women DO think differently, and therefore there perspectives are unique valuable, and if one is lacking, they should be sought out.
I have never seen Scrum done correctly anywhere either. It's usually half-assed in a way that completely misses the point. The people that espouse it seem a touch arrogant, too -- my favorite was an article from the late Dr Dobbs magazine that said "If your Scrum/Agile approach failed, it was just because you were doing it wrong." What? Your software development process fits everything perfectly, all the time? Yeah, kill it with fire.
These processes seem to be made for the lowest common denominator; lazy or inept coders who need a lot of hand-holding. The only good side is that this gives startups quite the leg up -- they are less likely to hire the lazy, inept people, can get rid of them easier, and can code without the overhead of stand-up meetings, scrummasters, and sprints. As long as corporations are bogged down with useless meetings and an army of crappy coders, there's an opening to steal a little bit of their lunch.
This happened to me in Yosemite, too, minus the loss of bowel control. When I was perhaps 14, my family got stuck driving out of the park in the dark on a moonless night. My dad stopped, and I got out of the car for some reason. Until that day, I had thought that the movie sets with a sky saturated with stars was fake and purposely overexaggerated. I lived in a semi-rural community with a hunting range, and I thought I knew the sky. I had seen the moon through a telescope. I knew constellations. That day, I discovered I was wrong, and it is honestly in the top 20 memories on my entire life.
I've driven out to the Vegas desert, back to Yosemite, and driven the cliffs of Big Sur at night to try to see the sky like I did that day and show it to my husband, too. The moon and other light pollution has thwarted me. Next week, I got to the Oregon coast, Mt Hood, and Mt St Helens, and I'm still hoping to get that view again.
memories on my entire life.
In my quest for perfect darkness, I've learned that the Milky Way was once not only bright enough that it could be identified with the naked eye, but that it cast a shadow on the ground. There are few places you can go to have that experience. You'd have to go as far as Peru now, deep into the mountains. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen has a long article touching upon light pollution and its affects on the night sky.
You trade those days of occasional discomfort with all the extra time public transit gives you. When I briefly switched to a job that made me drive, I hated it - the frustrating traffic, the gas, the wear on my car, the variable times getting home. The train is consistent, and I can read, sleep, or work on it, so I can reclaim that traveling time to some extent. I'm a lot less stressed out, and it is actually quicker.
Rain, snow, hot weather -- yes, it sucks to be sweaty or wet, but my husband and I manage to make it work with umbrellas, boots, appropriate layers, etc. Train use is common enough in North Jersey that some of the towns here have shuttles to take you from your street to the station if you can't or won't walk it. Adopting similar measures in other train hubs might help convert the lazier people.
My company can have a few of my ideas, with no monetary compensation, because I know that ideas are useless without the means to execute them. I do not have the audience or the resources to do what they can. I could do nothing with that idea. I gain nothing by keeping it. If I give it away, and the company does it, either customers' lives, employees' lives, or the market is enriched. Why sit on it?
If it is an idea I can execute on my own, like a book plot, a startup site, or a new type of spoon, then yes, I'll keep it. However, how many of the ideas people would offer at work are really like that?
With that distinction made, the "Pay me for my idea that I can't actually make happen on my own" sentiment I am seeing modded +5 right now is in conflict with the Slashdot meme of "patents should expire for people who do nothing with them." In both cases, people want a reward for ideas they cannot execute. The difference is that patents actively stop other people from executing the ideas, but the underlying belief in both statements is still that an idea alone is worth something. Which is it?
They're shady alright. I am pretty bothered by how they react to people wearing fur. Throwing flour and paint and other things is simply unacceptable. It's a stretch to call it assault, but it is still invading your personal space in an effort to force you to comply with their ideas of good behavior.
I have a right to choose to wear fur. It's not illegal. You also have the right to disagree with my choice. You do not have the right to terrorize me into agreeing with you. You do not have the right to make me afraid to go somewhere in a fur coat just because we do not agree. But I guess the rights of people they dislike (evil, awful animal-killers!) don't count.
That said, I don't have a fur coat, and I do like animals, and I was a vegetarian for awhile. I just really have a problem with PETA in particular because of those tactics.
No, there's an art and skill and subtlety to communication and the human mind. It's not just the written word. Speech has just as much nuance.
I know Latin and Japanese fairly well, in addition to handfuls of words, sentences, songs, and poems in many other languages, because it is a hobby of mine. I have found that there are words in these other languages that English does not have an equivalent for. When I think of something really, meltingly cute with a child-like simplicity, I use the Japanese word kawaii. Adorable and cute are not quite right. Similarly, mu -- unask the question -- has a certain connotation and elegance to it that 'unask the question' lacks.
In the same vein, <3 means something to me that an English word cannot convey.:D is different than:) and =), too. There are subtle levels of happiness and silliness there. They are complex. They change with context. They get a message across consistently. The fact that they are made out of punctuation is the only thing that separates them from a word -- and honestly, even words and letters are just stick drawings anyway. A letter just happens to represent a sound. Why is it superior? It seems a little arbitrary.
Yes, we have a dictionary to agree on a letter's pronunciation and its related words. We just don't need one for emoticons, because they're generally so obvious. <3 is heart and love, but my social circle has a nuanced definition of it unique to us -- just like we have an certain nuanced definition of the word taters.
Yes, people can use emoticons to be mentally lazy, expressing generic 'happy' rather than a specific level of happiness, but they can do that in words, too. People will be lazy no matter what. You can't blame the tool for that.
Ironically, I actually considered going into the military, was forbidden by my mother due to said harassment, and ended up at an engineering school, studying computer science. I ended up getting my cs degree but also a literature degree at the same time to keep me sane.
There were only 5 other females in my 300+ graduating class and maybe 2-3 in my actual classrooms at any given time. As freshmen, most of my female friends dropped out of the major and in some cases, the school at large, to go to a liberal arts college instead. My friend doing comp sci at a state school also dropped out of that major, too, and chose history. This was all several years ago.
I wouldn't say I was stalked or harassed. I actually would say there seemed to be communication issues, with other students, TAs, and professors. Profs and TAs told me and another female friend we just needed to program more. They couldn't explain things. This was true in some ways -- when I finally found a language that suited me, and I just started programming random stuff, things started to make a lot more sense. I was also really helped by my future life-partner who had the patience and know-how to answer my vital questions. When I sat in algorithms class, and the prof told us "Just make a class, with whatever member variables you want.", I'd wonder, "How? I can't just... make stuff up. How will the compiler know to do that? Why would it listen to me? It can't be as easy as just typing out a definition. That doesn't *do* anything." I was not willing to just accept the 'magic' there. There were many sticking points like that. Luckily, my SO was a C++ god, and once I understood the foundation or resolved any mental conflicts, everything fell into place.
You can make a strong case that the above is an overall teaching issue. (For instance, the situation was actually worse when the professor was female.) I do think that it is fair to at least wonder if male and female brains process info differently, due either to genetics or cultural emphasis on certain tasks. If so, maybe those brains need to approach certain subjects in different ways, too. Someone more verbally-oriented might need more 'why' instead of just 'how'.
There's a very large US company called Hitwise that does exactly that.
They watch traffic that comes through ISPs and report on traffic, search terms, and competitor activity. It's all at an aggregate level, so there's no identifying information, and they use %-s of traffic rather than hard numbers, so that's why the ISPs don't view it as a privacy issue. Last I heard, they are audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers to make sure they're anonymizing correctly. The only difference between them and NebuAd is that they don't create ads, just sell information.
It is the same service as Comscore and Compete provide, but without a 'panel'. The reason is that these panels (~1 mil people) know they're being watched and in fact signed up for it. In addition, Comscore can only extrapolate their behavior to the millions of internet users. With Hitwise, you on your ISP have no idea anyone is watching, so it is not biased, and there's a sample size of millions.
As a whole, Republicans want to over-turn Roe Vs Wade (under the pretense of not legislating from the bench) and make sure women cannot have abortions. Let me restate that: they believe abortions are wrong. They are not pro-choice, they are anti-abortion. Now, there is a sizable group of women who believe that to take away a woman's choice to not carry a fetus she does not want is to fundamentally be against women's rights.
Given the old boys network image, the image of chauvinism invoked by the love of guns, and the abortion issue, the republicans paint a picture that they do not view women equally.
So, when Democrats present a woman who is extremely educated, has a good deal of political and corporate experience, and also *happens to identifies with strong working women*, it is a logical choice, because she has the necessary qualifications.
When Republicans present a former beauty-queen and hockey mom who would take choices away from women, in a party that generally does not love women, when there were many male candidates and even some female candidates with more experience and education, then.. yes, something is wrong.
Even if there's not something wrong, you can see how someone might easily wonder if this is a gimmick, given Palin's spotty record. PTA, city council, mayor, governor, VP, president? Odd.
The current system (existing structures, to keep running with your metaphor) is pretty sophisticated, requiring money, lobbyists, and time.
Time is the real issue at this point -- if nerds want to make a difference for November, they should not have waited until now. Let's try for next time, though. Beyond that, special interest groups, lobbying, and money get things done in Washington. Sheer hope and reason do not. You'd need several years to build up an influence, but not that many. To do so, we need more more organizations devoted to legal and judiciary technical advisement, bill-passing, and lobbying. There is no voice for tech in Washington that represents the Slashdot group except Google, Bill Gates, and the EFF*. Notably, the first two have a ton of money and an extremely vested interest.
Where's the group with your vested interests -- and by extension, your *money*? That is what it takes; money to pay lobbyists, who take politicans and their aides out to dinner and explain issues to them. Money to run campaigns, to craft a message, to distribute it. Money to recruit members until there's enough constituents that a politician pays attention.
I'm worried that the personality of most technical people means that these kinds of groups will never form. Their inclination is not to advocate, schmooze, or market. Maybe this means we'll always be under-represented politically.
*Note my star next to the EFF -- please prove me wrong and post other groups. I suspect even the EFF doesn't have high visibility in Washington when compared to say, Autism awareness, etc.
Back in my day folks didn't particularly care if you were vacuuming, or watching a DVD.
Sorry, but they did care. They want to know if it's Spiderman, because they've been meaning to watch that, too. They want to know if you're vacuuming because that means you can't go out with them, or that you'll be more likely to want to go to the bar after (depending on how you feel about vacuuming).
Every single one of your friends didn't care about your activities, but there was a strong probability that at least one did. They wanted to participate, or they wanted something to talk about, or they wanted to hang out with any friend for an afternoon, whoever wasn't busy.
Of my 5 friends, 4 don't care that I was at the state fair on Tuesday, but if friend #5 was iffy on going, now they can 1) ask me how it is 2) go and meet up with me. The other 4 ignore a 140 char message. Similarly, perhaps I post that I love the new cafe that opened on Washington Ave. The 2/5 friends who like to try new places to eat now have a "Someone said it was good" reference point. The other 3 discard the info.
Twitter is basically an AIM away message or an email list. It's more portable (now I can get away messages on my phone!:p), and it's also very noncommittal -- my friends sign UP for my messages, rather than me making up an email list every time. It's also easier for you because you don't have to decide who you should tell when the information is so generic that any of your friends may or may not care.
Depending on your type of friends or social life, maybe that's not interesting to you, but I think Twitter has a definite utility to many people. I don't think those people are necessarily braindead or vapid social butterflies as some./ers imply, either.
"No one in their right mind would give a flying shit what I waste all of my time on. "
Except they do. People can keep making these statements like 'No one cares, (|micro|geo|)blogging is stupid' when it is obvious other people read blogs and therefore DO care. People do. Your friends do. It's not even about advertisers.
You are a certain type of person. I can see what kind of person you are by what you choose to post OR not post. You are saying something right now just by posting that list: you drink coffee, and you think this microblogging trend is stupid.
I know something about you. You expressed yourself and revealed something. You purposely didn't express a lot. That also says something.
When you see me on the street, you see my physical appearance. My clothing says something about me -- something I, mostly, control. My hair, too, is a statement that I purposely construct to reveal something about myself. I am telling the world I am a certain type of person: trendy, soccer mom, professional, casual, sporty, etc.
But it's vague. It's up for interpretation. Is my hair 33 inches long because I am lazy or because I like the elvish look?
When I add a badge to MySpace that I took a quiz and it says my fantasy creature is an elf, now you have a clue. My favorite movie listed on Facebook is LOTR? More clues. Suddenly you know more about me in a way that I control. I choose what specifics you get. Clothing, hair, it's all up for interpretation, necessity, and sometimes there are things there I don't want you to see, or things that *mis*represent me.
Blogging, social media, twittering -- it's all a way to add to that persona I create. Yes, I don't think you, specifically, care that I am eating a bagel on 59th street. However, of my 7 friends, maybe someone does, because they found a great bagel place and now wonder if I might like it. I twitter I saw a movie -- 6 of my friends don't want to know but 1 wanted to see that movie. Those 6 friends ignore the 140 char message, the 1 friend benefits, and I benefit from ensuing conversation. Adding in geo data now lets me say 'Hey, I go traveling every weekend to take pictures'. You now know I spend a lot of free time taking pictures, and you know me better. I didn't have to tell you, in case you didn't care.
People want to be known. Microblogging, geoblogging, social media, all of it helps that. You chose to say 'work and coffee'. You didn't really want to be known in that post except as someone who feels 'This is silly'. You controlled your persona. Other people choose to control their persona in other ways. They're just expressing themselves. They want to show how unique they are. They want to make sure people see them they want they want to be seen. That is what it is all about.
"Adding more steps to any program guarantees you'll lose some participants. Perhaps that's what the AP board intended with their new regs."
No, the College Board introduced the AP Audit because some of their members, the colleges, said that they were seeing too many students with AP classes on their records that were completely half-assed and not even college prep level. The kids took the exam and consistently failed because the teachers were not teaching the exam topics, but labeling regular history as "AP History, take the exam if you feel like".
This was troublesome for both kids and admissions counselors. They thought they were getting a college prep class and/or that they'd be able to score a 4 on the exam, and neither were true. Similarly, the college that admitted them thought that they were either not so smart for failing that AP exam or thought they had a much more rigorous high school career than they did.
"How do Fandango and Overstock know that the buyer has an account on Facebook? How do the two get linked up? Cookies?"
Any site that is part of the Beacon affiliate network has a script that can read your Facebook cookies. The code is here, for any interested. http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php
You buy a product on Overstock. It gets some information on your Facebook account, then asks if you wish to 'publish this story' to your Facebook account. You can click: 1) Learn more. 2) This isn't you. No publish. 3) No thanks. No publish. 4) Close. Publish later. 5) Ignore. Publish later.
4 is the problem; you can ignore or close the box, and it will, instead of thinking that means a No Publish, ask you AGAIN when you log in to Facebook. If you ignore that one, too, or do anything but specifically click No (the X in this case), it *will* publish. It's unintuitive.
Whether this is user-error or intentional design, users are also reporting that they have to opt-out of these affiliates site by site to stop publishing, because opting out of Beacon itself is insufficient or not possible. That's why people are irritated -- they never downloaded an app or asked for Beacon, didn't realize they had to specifically tell it 'no', and can't figure out how to turn it off.
"Calories in, calories out. It's so easy!" You are missing the point and the reason all these low-carb, low-fat, low-whatever suggestions exist. Calories in, calories out works in a lab environment where you can measure intake, consumption methods, and waste precisely. You cannot do that with humans. There are too many variables.
1) You don't know what your calories out are.
You have no idea what you are really burning, standing around, unless you get a battery of tests performed to check your metabolism, lung function, and body heat during any given activity.
There are a ton of things that affect your metabolic rate; your core temperature, insulin levels, sugar sensitivity, allergies, your inclination to fidget, whether you are building muscle at a given time, whether you are healing wounds or recovering from sickness. There has even been researching suggesting that 3 months of consistent exercise actually changes your energy consumption at a mitochondrial level. Did you know soy and broccoli reduce the level of iodine in your body and therefore inhibit metabolic function?
2) You don't know what your calories in are.
You know what the government knows about broccoli: that if you light it on fire, it burns at x rate, and it leaves behind x waste. They extrapolate its structure from there. That has nothing to do with how well your body actually digests the food and uses that energy. You could have an extremely acidic stomach, or lock up calories with excess fiber, or drink too much and hurry food through your intestinal track before you can extract all its energy.
You also don't know how well-marbled their test steak was, how saturated with water their chicken breast was (did you know supermarket chicken is injected with saltwater?), or how aerated their whipped cream was. This will all lead to a difference in caloric value. These little differences all add up.
These diet plans that discard certain foods do so with the idea that we might be able to find a diet that works by minimizing a variable; eat fewer carbs to reduce insulin levels, isolate sugar sensitivity, eat less wheat to minimize allergies, eat less meat to reduce hormones, salt, and saturated fat, etc.
Asians are genetically different; they have different musculatures (they might have smaller thighs, for instance, meaning they burn less calories because that's a very large muscle group), different insulin levels, they may produce heat differently than Europeans due to their environment. There's also cultural differences; less dairy, more lean meat, etc. You're just not making an apples to apples comparison.
Then don't use Alexa. You can measure traffic in ways beyond toolbars. Try the following:
1) Compete. It is free. It uses toolbars AND panels AND isps. It's not that accurate compared to Comscore.. but maybe Comscore is wrong.
2) Buy something. Comscore uses a panel method with a careful demographic spread so they can extrapolate from their sample with a small percent-error.
3) Buy Hitwise for percentages. It doesn't give you unique visitors, but it can give you comparisons and ranks and whatnot. They lay on top of ISPs and use a few panels. It is 20-30K for a year or so.
4) Wait awhile until the IAB's audit leads to some common definitions and standards among the aforementioned companies. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and Media Rating Council are auditing Nielsen and Comscore to make sure there is more transparency into what defines all these metrics, how they are counted, and how they should be counted, forever after. In a few years, there might be some consistency in the industry, which will at least stop you from comparing apples and oranges once you get beyond over-counting SEO spammers.
If you are concerned about the demographics and unselfconscious web surfing, you need to go with a company that looks at ISP data. That's right, everyone -- your service contracts with larger ISPs allow them to anonymously watch your traffic and sell it to companies like Hitwise with your demographic information. Suddenly, the 35-54 white male demographic with a 80K income in the south can be fully represented in the balloon-popping video site genre, until they start hiding behind a proxy. Because it is anonymous, it is even better than a panel, because they don't know they are being watched and don't change their behavior.
No, the penetration is 55% as of Fall 2006. 55% of American children 12-17 have made a social networking profile, with a margin of +10% because their parents might have been listening to the phone call. http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_SNS_Data_Memo_ Jan_2007.pdf
"It's an asinine argument and if that paper was written for course credit, I hope they didn't get a decent grade. If it was written as a professional document for a publication then "ethnographic research " is either a joke science or someone needs to read articles submitted for publication more carefully."
She's a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley. This paper here is a better representation of her work: http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf. In it, she discusses her methods for data collection and capitalizes 'I' - because it is actually a published paper/article.
The slashdot link is not to a 'paper' -- it's a 'blog essay'. Whoever wrote this summary did her a disservice by calling it otherwise, because now she looks like an unprofessional idiot.
"Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life" is actually a very good explanation of why kids like MySpace and Facebook and what they are trying to accomplish there. It also outlines why they put up public information that should be 'private' like those illicit pictures, as well as describes the battle against adults for unregulated time. If you don't 'get' social networking, that pdf is a much better read.
The overblown language -- "frantic" and "trembling in fear" -- suits the submitter well, considering he seems to have submitted his own blog post if the matching links are any indication. All chance of impartiality was thrown out the window right there.
* Trademark your name right away.
* AOL sucks
* "IP" Law sucks, so the first lesson may also be a waste of time. " Unsurprisingly, AOL has been down this path before.
See http://www.techlawjournal.com/courts/aolvatt/Defau lt.htm, which features our favorite judge, Judge Claude Hilton of Vonage injunction fame. Basically, AOL tried to sue AT&T for using the terms Buddy List, You've Got Mail, and IM, and not only did the judge rule that these terms were too generic for AOL to 'own', but actually cancelled AOL's trademark on the term Buddy List and pending trademark on You've Got Mail.
So, AOL does suck, but the law does seem to work fairly in some cases. Conversely, that means that even if GAIM had trademarked their name, it could have been dismissed.. and thus a waste of time as you suggest. GIM would have been fine, though, since "instant message" was deemed generic.
I can't respond to you about whether it is just or not, but just for general knowledge, I want to point out the significance of your "we'd rather not spend the money investigating" statement. Giving everyone accused of a crime a full trial would indeed be extremely expensive in both time and money. Our current system operates at the speed and cost that it does with only a 5%-to-trial rate. ("95% of felony convictions in State courts were achieved through guilty plea.." U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, State Court Sentencing of Convicted Felons, 2000, 43 (2003))
In Canada, they resolve 92% of their cases via plea bargaining -- but their justice system still costs 12 billion a year. Our courts would be severely stressed under 100% case-load, and the result - quick, unthorough trials or trials taking years to even begin - might be even more undesirable than guilty people getting away with a smaller sentence.
I find it more disgusting that Dunn got off for being ill with cancer, then had the nerve to say "I have always had faith that the truth would win out and justice would be served - and it has been." Justice is.. that people with cancer can commit crimes? Funnily enough, if you're in pain from.. say.. cancer and take marijuana, you can go to prison as of today's ruling.
"Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric."
The abc news article is useless so I can't address anything specific in it, but to answer the general question of what's wrong with high school -- I want to say it is the culture.
I hated every day of it. I both took abuse myself and watched it heaped on others for being black, supposedly gay, poor, or simply there. The teachers consistently did nothing. They saw people psychologically and physically harassed and did not say a word. I did not go to a school in the city or a ghetto. It was a bucolic, predominantly white area with a school of about ~1200 students.
And yet for everything that happened to the people I know, we ended up as functioning adults. Functioning adults with anorexia and whatnot, but we didn't drop out, went to college, got jobs, etc.
The people who were the ones dealing out the unpleasantness, however, did not. The people who should have walked away psychologically unscathed are the ones who dropped out high school or college and led uninspiring, financially challenged lives.
What would an exit poll on how much people liked high school reveal? What kind of person enjoys it? How do the scores correlate to success [in its many shades] and contentment later in life?
Does any of this even matter if high school is just a holding pen for still-immature, dangerous people who can't fully contribute to society yet?
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia is a curated selection of facts.
See the part where I said "...therefore reflected in the articles - in the topic, in the construction, in the arguments, in the sources cited."? People choose those elements, and, by choosing them, are making a de facto opinion about their superiority, and therefore those facts are couched in opinion -- and bias.
Thank YOU for playing. Sir.
Wikipedia has a stated goal of being unbiased. I think that most people would recognize that as being a worthwhile goal. When men write the majority of the articles, then the material is based towards male perspectives.
Many posters in this thread so far have made comments about how men and women are different, with different desires and goals and motivations hard-wired into their brains, so let's stick with that theory for now. If that is true, then men do indeed have a thought process that is markedly different from women's in some way, and that is therefore reflected in the articles - in the topic, in the construction, in the arguments, in the sources cited. There is bias. I guess, as men, maybe you don't care since the current content is written to suit you?
Every time this discussion comes up, no one acknowledges that women have unique and valuable mental contributions. There's a lot of hand-waving about 'Let's not force them to be in field XYZ if they don't want to be' but very little discussion of what the consequences of them not being in field XYZ are. Posters immediately think of how the solution cannot work and do not even acknowledge there IS a problem. It's the same issue here with Wikipedia.
It's a problem when the biggest fact-based document in history is virtually devoid of a female perspective. Just because you don't see a practical solution in the 10 seconds it took you to skim the summary doesn't mean this is not a problem worth trying to solve or that there is no solution. It's okay to talk about problems with no solution. You don't have to diminish them into non-problems.
It's often said that men find women frustrating because women want to discuss issues just to discuss them, whereas men want to solve them and find they cannot in some cases, particularly when it is emotional or involves other people. It's ironic that, in a way, this kind of pattern leads to the dismissal of 'unsolvable' gender-gaps, and yet the existence of this pattern is exactly what makes gender gaps worrying. Men and women DO think differently, and therefore there perspectives are unique valuable, and if one is lacking, they should be sought out.
I have never seen Scrum done correctly anywhere either. It's usually half-assed in a way that completely misses the point. The people that espouse it seem a touch arrogant, too -- my favorite was an article from the late Dr Dobbs magazine that said "If your Scrum/Agile approach failed, it was just because you were doing it wrong." What? Your software development process fits everything perfectly, all the time? Yeah, kill it with fire.
These processes seem to be made for the lowest common denominator; lazy or inept coders who need a lot of hand-holding. The only good side is that this gives startups quite the leg up -- they are less likely to hire the lazy, inept people, can get rid of them easier, and can code without the overhead of stand-up meetings, scrummasters, and sprints. As long as corporations are bogged down with useless meetings and an army of crappy coders, there's an opening to steal a little bit of their lunch.
This happened to me in Yosemite, too, minus the loss of bowel control. When I was perhaps 14, my family got stuck driving out of the park in the dark on a moonless night. My dad stopped, and I got out of the car for some reason. Until that day, I had thought that the movie sets with a sky saturated with stars was fake and purposely overexaggerated. I lived in a semi-rural community with a hunting range, and I thought I knew the sky. I had seen the moon through a telescope. I knew constellations. That day, I discovered I was wrong, and it is honestly in the top 20 memories on my entire life.
I've driven out to the Vegas desert, back to Yosemite, and driven the cliffs of Big Sur at night to try to see the sky like I did that day and show it to my husband, too. The moon and other light pollution has thwarted me. Next week, I got to the Oregon coast, Mt Hood, and Mt St Helens, and I'm still hoping to get that view again. memories on my entire life.
In my quest for perfect darkness, I've learned that the Milky Way was once not only bright enough that it could be identified with the naked eye, but that it cast a shadow on the ground. There are few places you can go to have that experience. You'd have to go as far as Peru now, deep into the mountains. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen has a long article touching upon light pollution and its affects on the night sky.
You trade those days of occasional discomfort with all the extra time public transit gives you. When I briefly switched to a job that made me drive, I hated it - the frustrating traffic, the gas, the wear on my car, the variable times getting home. The train is consistent, and I can read, sleep, or work on it, so I can reclaim that traveling time to some extent. I'm a lot less stressed out, and it is actually quicker.
Rain, snow, hot weather -- yes, it sucks to be sweaty or wet, but my husband and I manage to make it work with umbrellas, boots, appropriate layers, etc. Train use is common enough in North Jersey that some of the towns here have shuttles to take you from your street to the station if you can't or won't walk it. Adopting similar measures in other train hubs might help convert the lazier people.
My company can have a few of my ideas, with no monetary compensation, because I know that ideas are useless without the means to execute them. I do not have the audience or the resources to do what they can. I could do nothing with that idea. I gain nothing by keeping it. If I give it away, and the company does it, either customers' lives, employees' lives, or the market is enriched. Why sit on it?
If it is an idea I can execute on my own, like a book plot, a startup site, or a new type of spoon, then yes, I'll keep it. However, how many of the ideas people would offer at work are really like that?
With that distinction made, the "Pay me for my idea that I can't actually make happen on my own" sentiment I am seeing modded +5 right now is in conflict with the Slashdot meme of "patents should expire for people who do nothing with them." In both cases, people want a reward for ideas they cannot execute. The difference is that patents actively stop other people from executing the ideas, but the underlying belief in both statements is still that an idea alone is worth something. Which is it?
"PETA is a shady political group with an agenda."
They're shady alright. I am pretty bothered by how they react to people wearing fur. Throwing flour and paint and other things is simply unacceptable. It's a stretch to call it assault, but it is still invading your personal space in an effort to force you to comply with their ideas of good behavior.
I have a right to choose to wear fur. It's not illegal. You also have the right to disagree with my choice. You do not have the right to terrorize me into agreeing with you. You do not have the right to make me afraid to go somewhere in a fur coat just because we do not agree. But I guess the rights of people they dislike (evil, awful animal-killers!) don't count.
That said, I don't have a fur coat, and I do like animals, and I was a vegetarian for awhile. I just really have a problem with PETA in particular because of those tactics.
No, there's an art and skill and subtlety to communication and the human mind. It's not just the written word. Speech has just as much nuance.
I know Latin and Japanese fairly well, in addition to handfuls of words, sentences, songs, and poems in many other languages, because it is a hobby of mine. I have found that there are words in these other languages that English does not have an equivalent for. When I think of something really, meltingly cute with a child-like simplicity, I use the Japanese word kawaii. Adorable and cute are not quite right. Similarly, mu -- unask the question -- has a certain connotation and elegance to it that 'unask the question' lacks.
In the same vein, <3 means something to me that an English word cannot convey. :D is different than :) and =), too. There are subtle levels of happiness and silliness there. They are complex. They change with context. They get a message across consistently. The fact that they are made out of punctuation is the only thing that separates them from a word -- and honestly, even words and letters are just stick drawings anyway. A letter just happens to represent a sound. Why is it superior? It seems a little arbitrary.
Yes, we have a dictionary to agree on a letter's pronunciation and its related words. We just don't need one for emoticons, because they're generally so obvious. <3 is heart and love, but my social circle has a nuanced definition of it unique to us -- just like we have an certain nuanced definition of the word taters.
Yes, people can use emoticons to be mentally lazy, expressing generic 'happy' rather than a specific level of happiness, but they can do that in words, too. People will be lazy no matter what. You can't blame the tool for that.
Are there other objections?
Ironically, I actually considered going into the military, was forbidden by my mother due to said harassment, and ended up at an engineering school, studying computer science. I ended up getting my cs degree but also a literature degree at the same time to keep me sane.
There were only 5 other females in my 300+ graduating class and maybe 2-3 in my actual classrooms at any given time. As freshmen, most of my female friends dropped out of the major and in some cases, the school at large, to go to a liberal arts college instead. My friend doing comp sci at a state school also dropped out of that major, too, and chose history. This was all several years ago.
I wouldn't say I was stalked or harassed. I actually would say there seemed to be communication issues, with other students, TAs, and professors. Profs and TAs told me and another female friend we just needed to program more. They couldn't explain things. This was true in some ways -- when I finally found a language that suited me, and I just started programming random stuff, things started to make a lot more sense. I was also really helped by my future life-partner who had the patience and know-how to answer my vital questions. When I sat in algorithms class, and the prof told us "Just make a class, with whatever member variables you want.", I'd wonder, "How? I can't just... make stuff up. How will the compiler know to do that? Why would it listen to me? It can't be as easy as just typing out a definition. That doesn't *do* anything." I was not willing to just accept the 'magic' there. There were many sticking points like that. Luckily, my SO was a C++ god, and once I understood the foundation or resolved any mental conflicts, everything fell into place.
You can make a strong case that the above is an overall teaching issue. (For instance, the situation was actually worse when the professor was female.) I do think that it is fair to at least wonder if male and female brains process info differently, due either to genetics or cultural emphasis on certain tasks. If so, maybe those brains need to approach certain subjects in different ways, too. Someone more verbally-oriented might need more 'why' instead of just 'how'.
There's a very large US company called Hitwise that does exactly that. They watch traffic that comes through ISPs and report on traffic, search terms, and competitor activity. It's all at an aggregate level, so there's no identifying information, and they use %-s of traffic rather than hard numbers, so that's why the ISPs don't view it as a privacy issue. Last I heard, they are audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers to make sure they're anonymizing correctly. The only difference between them and NebuAd is that they don't create ads, just sell information.
It is the same service as Comscore and Compete provide, but without a 'panel'. The reason is that these panels (~1 mil people) know they're being watched and in fact signed up for it. In addition, Comscore can only extrapolate their behavior to the millions of internet users. With Hitwise, you on your ISP have no idea anyone is watching, so it is not biased, and there's a sample size of millions.
As a whole, Republicans want to over-turn Roe Vs Wade (under the pretense of not legislating from the bench) and make sure women cannot have abortions. Let me restate that: they believe abortions are wrong. They are not pro-choice, they are anti-abortion. Now, there is a sizable group of women who believe that to take away a woman's choice to not carry a fetus she does not want is to fundamentally be against women's rights.
Given the old boys network image, the image of chauvinism invoked by the love of guns, and the abortion issue, the republicans paint a picture that they do not view women equally.
So, when Democrats present a woman who is extremely educated, has a good deal of political and corporate experience, and also *happens to identifies with strong working women*, it is a logical choice, because she has the necessary qualifications.
When Republicans present a former beauty-queen and hockey mom who would take choices away from women, in a party that generally does not love women, when there were many male candidates and even some female candidates with more experience and education, then.. yes, something is wrong.
Even if there's not something wrong, you can see how someone might easily wonder if this is a gimmick, given Palin's spotty record. PTA, city council, mayor, governor, VP, president? Odd.
The current system (existing structures, to keep running with your metaphor) is pretty sophisticated, requiring money, lobbyists, and time.
Time is the real issue at this point -- if nerds want to make a difference for November, they should not have waited until now. Let's try for next time, though. Beyond that, special interest groups, lobbying, and money get things done in Washington. Sheer hope and reason do not. You'd need several years to build up an influence, but not that many. To do so, we need more more organizations devoted to legal and judiciary technical advisement, bill-passing, and lobbying. There is no voice for tech in Washington that represents the Slashdot group except Google, Bill Gates, and the EFF*. Notably, the first two have a ton of money and an extremely vested interest.
Where's the group with your vested interests -- and by extension, your *money*? That is what it takes; money to pay lobbyists, who take politicans and their aides out to dinner and explain issues to them. Money to run campaigns, to craft a message, to distribute it. Money to recruit members until there's enough constituents that a politician pays attention.
I'm worried that the personality of most technical people means that these kinds of groups will never form. Their inclination is not to advocate, schmooze, or market. Maybe this means we'll always be under-represented politically.
*Note my star next to the EFF -- please prove me wrong and post other groups. I suspect even the EFF doesn't have high visibility in Washington when compared to say, Autism awareness, etc.
Back in my day folks didn't particularly care if you were vacuuming, or watching a DVD.
Sorry, but they did care. They want to know if it's Spiderman, because they've been meaning to watch that, too. They want to know if you're vacuuming because that means you can't go out with them, or that you'll be more likely to want to go to the bar after (depending on how you feel about vacuuming).
:p), and it's also very noncommittal -- my friends sign UP for my messages, rather than me making up an email list every time. It's also easier for you because you don't have to decide who you should tell when the information is so generic that any of your friends may or may not care.
./ers imply, either.
Every single one of your friends didn't care about your activities, but there was a strong probability that at least one did. They wanted to participate, or they wanted something to talk about, or they wanted to hang out with any friend for an afternoon, whoever wasn't busy.
Of my 5 friends, 4 don't care that I was at the state fair on Tuesday, but if friend #5 was iffy on going, now they can 1) ask me how it is 2) go and meet up with me. The other 4 ignore a 140 char message. Similarly, perhaps I post that I love the new cafe that opened on Washington Ave. The 2/5 friends who like to try new places to eat now have a "Someone said it was good" reference point. The other 3 discard the info.
Twitter is basically an AIM away message or an email list. It's more portable (now I can get away messages on my phone!
Depending on your type of friends or social life, maybe that's not interesting to you, but I think Twitter has a definite utility to many people. I don't think those people are necessarily braindead or vapid social butterflies as some
"No one in their right mind would give a flying shit what I waste all of my time on. "
Except they do. People can keep making these statements like 'No one cares, (|micro|geo|)blogging is stupid' when it is obvious other people read blogs and therefore DO care. People do. Your friends do. It's not even about advertisers.
You are a certain type of person. I can see what kind of person you are by what you choose to post OR not post. You are saying something right now just by posting that list: you drink coffee, and you think this microblogging trend is stupid.
I know something about you. You expressed yourself and revealed something. You purposely didn't express a lot. That also says something.
When you see me on the street, you see my physical appearance. My clothing says something about me -- something I, mostly, control. My hair, too, is a statement that I purposely construct to reveal something about myself. I am telling the world I am a certain type of person: trendy, soccer mom, professional, casual, sporty, etc.
But it's vague. It's up for interpretation. Is my hair 33 inches long because I am lazy or because I like the elvish look?
When I add a badge to MySpace that I took a quiz and it says my fantasy creature is an elf, now you have a clue. My favorite movie listed on Facebook is LOTR? More clues. Suddenly you know more about me in a way that I control. I choose what specifics you get. Clothing, hair, it's all up for interpretation, necessity, and sometimes there are things there I don't want you to see, or things that *mis*represent me.
Blogging, social media, twittering -- it's all a way to add to that persona I create. Yes, I don't think you, specifically, care that I am eating a bagel on 59th street. However, of my 7 friends, maybe someone does, because they found a great bagel place and now wonder if I might like it. I twitter I saw a movie -- 6 of my friends don't want to know but 1 wanted to see that movie. Those 6 friends ignore the 140 char message, the 1 friend benefits, and I benefit from ensuing conversation. Adding in geo data now lets me say 'Hey, I go traveling every weekend to take pictures'. You now know I spend a lot of free time taking pictures, and you know me better. I didn't have to tell you, in case you didn't care.
People want to be known. Microblogging, geoblogging, social media, all of it helps that. You chose to say 'work and coffee'. You didn't really want to be known in that post except as someone who feels 'This is silly'. You controlled your persona. Other people choose to control their persona in other ways. They're just expressing themselves. They want to show how unique they are. They want to make sure people see them they want they want to be seen. That is what it is all about.
"Adding more steps to any program guarantees you'll lose some participants. Perhaps that's what the AP board intended with their new regs."
No, the College Board introduced the AP Audit because some of their members, the colleges, said that they were seeing too many students with AP classes on their records that were completely half-assed and not even college prep level. The kids took the exam and consistently failed because the teachers were not teaching the exam topics, but labeling regular history as "AP History, take the exam if you feel like".
This was troublesome for both kids and admissions counselors. They thought they were getting a college prep class and/or that they'd be able to score a 4 on the exam, and neither were true. Similarly, the college that admitted them thought that they were either not so smart for failing that AP exam or thought they had a much more rigorous high school career than they did.
"How do Fandango and Overstock know that the buyer has an account on Facebook? How do the two get linked up? Cookies?"
Any site that is part of the Beacon affiliate network has a script that can read your Facebook cookies. The code is here, for any interested. http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php
You buy a product on Overstock. It gets some information on your Facebook account, then asks if you wish to 'publish this story' to your Facebook account. You can click:
1) Learn more.
2) This isn't you. No publish.
3) No thanks. No publish.
4) Close. Publish later.
5) Ignore. Publish later.
4 is the problem; you can ignore or close the box, and it will, instead of thinking that means a No Publish, ask you AGAIN when you log in to Facebook. If you ignore that one, too, or do anything but specifically click No (the X in this case), it *will* publish. It's unintuitive.
Whether this is user-error or intentional design, users are also reporting that they have to opt-out of these affiliates site by site to stop publishing, because opting out of Beacon itself is insufficient or not possible. That's why people are irritated -- they never downloaded an app or asked for Beacon, didn't realize they had to specifically tell it 'no', and can't figure out how to turn it off.
"Calories in, calories out. It's so easy!" You are missing the point and the reason all these low-carb, low-fat, low-whatever suggestions exist. Calories in, calories out works in a lab environment where you can measure intake, consumption methods, and waste precisely. You cannot do that with humans. There are too many variables.
1) You don't know what your calories out are.
You have no idea what you are really burning, standing around, unless you get a battery of tests performed to check your metabolism, lung function, and body heat during any given activity.
There are a ton of things that affect your metabolic rate; your core temperature, insulin levels, sugar sensitivity, allergies, your inclination to fidget, whether you are building muscle at a given time, whether you are healing wounds or recovering from sickness. There has even been researching suggesting that 3 months of consistent exercise actually changes your energy consumption at a mitochondrial level. Did you know soy and broccoli reduce the level of iodine in your body and therefore inhibit metabolic function?
2) You don't know what your calories in are.
You know what the government knows about broccoli: that if you light it on fire, it burns at x rate, and it leaves behind x waste. They extrapolate its structure from there. That has nothing to do with how well your body actually digests the food and uses that energy. You could have an extremely acidic stomach, or lock up calories with excess fiber, or drink too much and hurry food through your intestinal track before you can extract all its energy.
You also don't know how well-marbled their test steak was, how saturated with water their chicken breast was (did you know supermarket chicken is injected with saltwater?), or how aerated their whipped cream was. This will all lead to a difference in caloric value. These little differences all add up.
These diet plans that discard certain foods do so with the idea that we might be able to find a diet that works by minimizing a variable; eat fewer carbs to reduce insulin levels, isolate sugar sensitivity, eat less wheat to minimize allergies, eat less meat to reduce hormones, salt, and saturated fat, etc.
Asians are genetically different; they have different musculatures (they might have smaller thighs, for instance, meaning they burn less calories because that's a very large muscle group), different insulin levels, they may produce heat differently than Europeans due to their environment. There's also cultural differences; less dairy, more lean meat, etc. You're just not making an apples to apples comparison.
No, it's a demon. A dancing demon. No, wait.. something isn't right there.
Then don't use Alexa. You can measure traffic in ways beyond toolbars. Try the following:
1) Compete. It is free. It uses toolbars AND panels AND isps. It's not that accurate compared to Comscore.. but maybe Comscore is wrong.
2) Buy something. Comscore uses a panel method with a careful demographic spread so they can extrapolate from their sample with a small percent-error.
3) Buy Hitwise for percentages. It doesn't give you unique visitors, but it can give you comparisons and ranks and whatnot. They lay on top of ISPs and use a few panels. It is 20-30K for a year or so.
4) Wait awhile until the IAB's audit leads to some common definitions and standards among the aforementioned companies. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and Media Rating Council are auditing Nielsen and Comscore to make sure there is more transparency into what defines all these metrics, how they are counted, and how they should be counted, forever after. In a few years, there might be some consistency in the industry, which will at least stop you from comparing apples and oranges once you get beyond over-counting SEO spammers.
If you are concerned about the demographics and unselfconscious web surfing, you need to go with a company that looks at ISP data. That's right, everyone -- your service contracts with larger ISPs allow them to anonymously watch your traffic and sell it to companies like Hitwise with your demographic information. Suddenly, the 35-54 white male demographic with a 80K income in the south can be fully represented in the balloon-popping video site genre, until they start hiding behind a proxy. Because it is anonymous, it is even better than a panel, because they don't know they are being watched and don't change their behavior.
No, the penetration is 55% as of Fall 2006. 55% of American children 12-17 have made a social networking profile, with a margin of +10% because their parents might have been listening to the phone call. http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_SNS_Data_Memo_ Jan_2007.pdf
a y.asp
The abstract is here: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/198/report_displ
"It's an asinine argument and if that paper was written for course credit, I hope they didn't get a decent grade. If it was written as a professional document for a publication then "ethnographic research " is either a joke science or someone needs to read articles submitted for publication more carefully."
She's a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley. This paper here is a better representation of her work: http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf. In it, she discusses her methods for data collection and capitalizes 'I' - because it is actually a published paper/article.
The slashdot link is not to a 'paper' -- it's a 'blog essay'. Whoever wrote this summary did her a disservice by calling it otherwise, because now she looks like an unprofessional idiot.
"Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life" is actually a very good explanation of why kids like MySpace and Facebook and what they are trying to accomplish there. It also outlines why they put up public information that should be 'private' like those illicit pictures, as well as describes the battle against adults for unregulated time. If you don't 'get' social networking, that pdf is a much better read.
The overblown language -- "frantic" and "trembling in fear" -- suits the submitter well, considering he seems to have submitted his own blog post if the matching links are any indication. All chance of impartiality was thrown out the window right there.
"Lessons learned:
u lt.htm, which features our favorite judge, Judge Claude Hilton of Vonage injunction fame. Basically, AOL tried to sue AT&T for using the terms Buddy List, You've Got Mail, and IM, and not only did the judge rule that these terms were too generic for AOL to 'own', but actually cancelled AOL's trademark on the term Buddy List and pending trademark on You've Got Mail.
* Trademark your name right away.
* AOL sucks
* "IP" Law sucks, so the first lesson may also be a waste of time.
"
Unsurprisingly, AOL has been down this path before.
See http://www.techlawjournal.com/courts/aolvatt/Defa
So, AOL does suck, but the law does seem to work fairly in some cases. Conversely, that means that even if GAIM had trademarked their name, it could have been dismissed.. and thus a waste of time as you suggest. GIM would have been fine, though, since "instant message" was deemed generic.
I can't respond to you about whether it is just or not, but just for general knowledge, I want to point out the significance of your "we'd rather not spend the money investigating" statement. Giving everyone accused of a crime a full trial would indeed be extremely expensive in both time and money. Our current system operates at the speed and cost that it does with only a 5%-to-trial rate. ("95% of felony convictions in State courts were achieved through guilty plea.." U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, State Court Sentencing of Convicted Felons, 2000, 43 (2003))
In Canada, they resolve 92% of their cases via plea bargaining -- but their justice system still costs 12 billion a year. Our courts would be severely stressed under 100% case-load, and the result - quick, unthorough trials or trials taking years to even begin - might be even more undesirable than guilty people getting away with a smaller sentence.
I find it more disgusting that Dunn got off for being ill with cancer, then had the nerve to say "I have always had faith that the truth would win out and justice would be served - and it has been." Justice is.. that people with cancer can commit crimes? Funnily enough, if you're in pain from.. say.. cancer and take marijuana, you can go to prison as of today's ruling.
Marijuana.Evil > Spying.Evil? Ridiculous.
I shall quote Paul Graham here. [Source]
"Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric."
The abc news article is useless so I can't address anything specific in it, but to answer the general question of what's wrong with high school -- I want to say it is the culture.
I hated every day of it. I both took abuse myself and watched it heaped on others for being black, supposedly gay, poor, or simply there. The teachers consistently did nothing. They saw people psychologically and physically harassed and did not say a word. I did not go to a school in the city or a ghetto. It was a bucolic, predominantly white area with a school of about ~1200 students.
And yet for everything that happened to the people I know, we ended up as functioning adults. Functioning adults with anorexia and whatnot, but we didn't drop out, went to college, got jobs, etc.
The people who were the ones dealing out the unpleasantness, however, did not. The people who should have walked away psychologically unscathed are the ones who dropped out high school or college and led uninspiring, financially challenged lives.
What would an exit poll on how much people liked high school reveal? What kind of person enjoys it? How do the scores correlate to success [in its many shades] and contentment later in life?
Does any of this even matter if high school is just a holding pen for still-immature, dangerous people who can't fully contribute to society yet?