Go and talk to the kids that were at Columbine. The people who have talked to the kids at Columbine later found that, after all the hugging and crying, the same jock types were still giving the same geek types exactly the same shit as before. You missed the point of that statement and its context within the arguement entirely. And perhaps missed the point of the arguement in general?
The point isn't whether jocks pick on geeks or anything of the sort. It has nothing to do with whether the event would change underlying social dynamics. The issue at stake is whether the events have had negative psychological impacts that have caused problems with the emotional, social and psychological welfare of the students that were a part of that incident. It has to do with the effect of trauma on social integration, emotional stability and their psychological state.
Well, I definitely appreciate you taking the time to respond. Glad that your not a troll:) Not enough bridges for all of them as it is. heh. My apologies for coming across strongly in my previous post but the news hit me in a personal way and I had an intense reaction to it. Most likely ended up perceiving any response that would moderate my fury as malice where none was intended.
I guess that I'd have to respectfully disagree though, and argue the point about the seriousness of the actions that these teachers took. The thing is that an experience that meets certain criteria is considered traumatic and therefore likely to have negative psychological consequences that span the gamut from mild to extremely serious. These include issues such as drug use, nightmares and insomnia, emotional detachment, despair and depression; issues that will impact their ability to develop normal relationships. Ironically perhaps, the types of issues that these perpetrators of violence in school and office shootings suffer from.
There are studies that have used fMRI and PET scans to measure the physical effects that various types of trauma can cause to brain dynamics and chemical balances. These are very real and very complex changes that are at present still not fully understood. However, the more serious the trauma, and perceived threat to life being at the top of the list, the more significant the changes. These effects can be coupled with their psychological symptoms, catalogued and compared to other patients with similar symptoms driven by more natural causes. They are finding that these changes mirror the imbalances that people with serious psychological illnesses have.
Your right, the children were scared. Very very scared of being killed in a situation that was absolutely horrifying and recently reinforced in their mind with massive national news coverage. And it is this very degree of being scared that qualifies as the emotional and psychological trauma that is clinically proven to have serious physical consequences. These kids were hurt in a real way, and some possibly quite badly.
I have no doubt that you would agree that many students on the campus of Virgina Tech are going to have deep psychological scars that will affect them for the rest of their lives. But these much younger kids will have very similar issues. Because while the trauma may be worsened by the fact that at the end the students at VT knew it was indeed real, the threat to these elementary students was perceived to be real during the event. And that is the principal driver. And younger kids, as you pointed out previously, have less mechanisms to deal with this and are much more susceptible to psychological damage then adults.
There was no reason to do this and people and parents everywhere (me included) are right to be outraged at the incredible lack of understanding of the issues I outlined above. Teachers and care givers should have a more thorough knowledge of this then the average citizen. This is their job, their responsibility, their charge. And for me at least it isn't just, think of the children, it is think of the human lives that you are impacting any time you thrust someone into a traumatic situation. To intentionally and unnecessarily cause harm is more then a bad joke it is criminal.
I am a bit afield here as I am definitely not a psychologist; I am a CS guy going back to school in a Cognitive Science PhD program with just enough exposure to the other interweaved fields of study to be dangerous. But I get a healthy dose of exposure to the science surrounding human psychological development and neuroscience and feel pretty comfortable that I'm not just expousing an opinion that I have but conveying information that I have been made aware of.
I really hope that you reconsider your position and at least entertain the possibility that this is a significant issue. I'm a science guy, I try to look at facts, based on your blog I think that you are as well. Give the hypothesis due process.
Absolutely, we need to ensure that our children grow up with a realistic understanding of reality. They need to understand the rules at play in the world. There are evil people and everything from extremely horrid atrocities to simple childhood cruelties happen. Sh%*t happens. They should be taught how to deal with this reality and be given the mechanisms and tools to negotiate through and live a happy well-adjusted life in spite of the minefield that is our predominantly selfish world. There is however, to your very point, plenty of emotional distress to go around in day to day life just dealing with the crap expounded on above. We owe it to our children to prepare them for this and not to try to hide it, downplay it or somehow shelter them from it. I would in no way shield my kids from the reality of the world around them.
BUT DAMMIT I WILL DECIDE WHEN AND HOW MY 2 CHILDREN LEARN THIS! NOT YOU! NOT SOME ROGUE TEACHER!
Preventing unconscionable acts like this is not over protecting our children. Yes, children will face times of emotional distress and
They are children -they will quickly learn and know how to react and they will become stronger and stronger (if you have a family shaping those conflicts correctly, of course)
But this atrocity is not simply emotional distress or conflict it is NOT indicative of the type of emotional distress and situations that people face regularly as a part of life. This is a cruel subjection of children to a emotionally and psychologically TRAUMATIC experience.
You want to see what kind of damage this insanity, that you seem eager to justify, can do? Go and talk to the kids that were at Columbine. For that matter, why don't you look up and see what effect any of these school shootings have had? And pay close attention to those that occurred at elementary schools. And before you go and cite some post in this thread where 'Joe Bob' says that something similar didn't have any effect on him in no way precludes it from having a dramatic effect on others. Do just a tad bit of research before you open your mouth and utter uninformed and possibly damaging opinions. Skim over this article on emotional and psychological trauma. Read the common elements of a traumatic situation: 1) it was unexpected 2)the person was unprepared 3) there was nothing the person could do to prevent it from happening. A key here is that it doesn't have to be real threat to life but is perceived to be real. Look at the table of effects that this can have.
Are you advocating subjecting children to this? Or did you just knee jerk and spew a poorly thought out opinion taking an easily agreed to premise of not sheltering children from reality and using it completely inappropriately?
And if you want to be so arrogant as to challenge this material or these concepts surrounding the impact of traumatic events I'll be happy to introduce you to a couple war buddies that will set you straight. Or a couple professors I know in the Psych department who practiced child psychology for several years prior to teaching. I'm sure they could quickly point you to plenty of sound research (i.e. not baseless opinions) on this topic in addition to their own observations.
PREPARING my child for these situations is different from intentionally CREATING a NEEDLESS traumatic experience!! Why in hell would I purposefully traumatize them in a calculated way?!?! That's just sick, wrong and stupid.
This is a SCHOOL where I expect that teachers behave ETHICALLY and follow the mandate they have been given. They are there to provide knowledge and understanding of the world around them. And at times this means teaching students to be prepared for dangerous situations. But fire drills, tornado drills (historically bomb drills) are not used to scare the sh*&t out of the kids but to give them the practice at doing the things that will redu
They don't "have to" do anything in most (perhaps all) states. I don't know the breakdown, but the vast majority of states are "at-will" states unless there's a contract involved, meaning either party can terminate employment at any time for any reason. Unless of course they have a track record of providing such a courtesy to their employees. I have seen situations in which a company provided this for several well liked employees (they still had them leave early for 'security' reasons) and then upon failing to do so for a regular joe ended up doing so anyway (after some very polite letters from regular joe's attorney) on the advice of their lawyers (i.e. it never went to court). IANAL however, it seems that absent policy any previous behaviors can be interpreted as de facto standards.
While an interesting observation, in this case it isn't quite relevant as FON doesn't equal telephone. This movement/company has nothing to do with Voice.
From the FON website: "FON is the largest WiFi community in the world, open to anyone who wishes to unite and connect to the Internet for free from any corner of the world without cables. It all started as a simple idea: enjoy WiFi technology everywhere across a WiFi infrastructure built by same members of the FON Community."
This is an very attractive little desk that is perfect for a laptop and even has a comfortable place to put your mouse as well. It easily moves around and has a nice height adjustment. Not the cheapest solution but one that will last quite some time.
Best regards,
Doc
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell
Dangers of using ATA or SATA for Raid
on
SATA vs ATA?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You may want to read this whitepaper and see what they have to say about using ata or sata drives in a raid configuration. It is possible, due to the use of write-back caching, to lose the integrity of the raid array and lose your data eliminating any intial cost benefits. To quote the paper:
Though performance enhancement is helpful, the use use of write back caching in ATA RAID implementations presents at least two severe reliability drawbacks. The first involves the integrity of the data in the write back cache during a power failure event. When power is suddenly lost in the drive bays, the data located in the cache memories of the drives is also lost. In fact, in addition to data loss, the drive may also have reordered any pending writes in its write back cache. Because this data has been already committed as a write from the standpoint of the application, this may make it impossible for the application to perform consisten crash recovery. When this type of corruption occurs, it not only causes data loss to specific applications at specific places on the drive but can frequently corrupt filesystems and effectively cause the loss of all data on the "damaged" disk.
Trying to remedy this by turning off write-back caching severly impacts the performance of the drives and some vendors do not certify the recovery of drives that deactivate write-back caching so this may increase failure rates.
Losing data on an ata raid array happened to a friend of mine and I wouldn't advise using something other than SCSI without understanding the ramifications.
Best regards,
Doc
I made a new years resolution to give up sigs...so far so good!
While the article was a bit hazy the original papers provide substantially more insight. According to a paper published previously by Mary Czerwinski, a test that evaluated the impact of wider fields of view on the ability to navigate a 3D environment found that:
Across three of the measures (trial time, travel height and pointing error), females benefited more than males from wider fields of view...
You can also find the paper that is referenced by the origical article at Carnegie Mellon Women Go With the (Optical) Flow where they summarize some of the research findings to date and then show the results of further testing around the effect of smooth visual presentation of movement within a 3D landscape.
Slashdot Mirror
The people who have talked to the kids at Columbine later found that, after all the hugging and crying, the same jock types were still giving the same geek types exactly the same shit as before. You missed the point of that statement and its context within the arguement entirely. And perhaps missed the point of the arguement in general?
The point isn't whether jocks pick on geeks or anything of the sort. It has nothing to do with whether the event would change underlying social dynamics. The issue at stake is whether the events have had negative psychological impacts that have caused problems with the emotional, social and psychological welfare of the students that were a part of that incident. It has to do with the effect of trauma on social integration, emotional stability and their psychological state.
Hope that clarifies my intent.
---
Regards,
Rob
Well, I definitely appreciate you taking the time to respond. Glad that your not a troll :) Not enough bridges for all of them as it is. heh. My apologies for coming across strongly in my previous post but the news hit me in a personal way and I had an intense reaction to it. Most likely ended up perceiving any response that would moderate my fury as malice where none was intended.
I guess that I'd have to respectfully disagree though, and argue the point about the seriousness of the actions that these teachers took. The thing is that an experience that meets certain criteria is considered traumatic and therefore likely to have negative psychological consequences that span the gamut from mild to extremely serious. These include issues such as drug use, nightmares and insomnia, emotional detachment, despair and depression; issues that will impact their ability to develop normal relationships. Ironically perhaps, the types of issues that these perpetrators of violence in school and office shootings suffer from.
There are studies that have used fMRI and PET scans to measure the physical effects that various types of trauma can cause to brain dynamics and chemical balances. These are very real and very complex changes that are at present still not fully understood. However, the more serious the trauma, and perceived threat to life being at the top of the list, the more significant the changes. These effects can be coupled with their psychological symptoms, catalogued and compared to other patients with similar symptoms driven by more natural causes. They are finding that these changes mirror the imbalances that people with serious psychological illnesses have.
Your right, the children were scared. Very very scared of being killed in a situation that was absolutely horrifying and recently reinforced in their mind with massive national news coverage. And it is this very degree of being scared that qualifies as the emotional and psychological trauma that is clinically proven to have serious physical consequences. These kids were hurt in a real way, and some possibly quite badly.
I have no doubt that you would agree that many students on the campus of Virgina Tech are going to have deep psychological scars that will affect them for the rest of their lives. But these much younger kids will have very similar issues. Because while the trauma may be worsened by the fact that at the end the students at VT knew it was indeed real, the threat to these elementary students was perceived to be real during the event. And that is the principal driver. And younger kids, as you pointed out previously, have less mechanisms to deal with this and are much more susceptible to psychological damage then adults.
There was no reason to do this and people and parents everywhere (me included) are right to be outraged at the incredible lack of understanding of the issues I outlined above. Teachers and care givers should have a more thorough knowledge of this then the average citizen. This is their job, their responsibility, their charge. And for me at least it isn't just, think of the children, it is think of the human lives that you are impacting any time you thrust someone into a traumatic situation. To intentionally and unnecessarily cause harm is more then a bad joke it is criminal.
I am a bit afield here as I am definitely not a psychologist; I am a CS guy going back to school in a Cognitive Science PhD program with just enough exposure to the other interweaved fields of study to be dangerous. But I get a healthy dose of exposure to the science surrounding human psychological development and neuroscience and feel pretty comfortable that I'm not just expousing an opinion that I have but conveying information that I have been made aware of.
I really hope that you reconsider your position and at least entertain the possibility that this is a significant issue. I'm a science guy, I try to look at facts, based on your blog I think that you are as well. Give the hypothesis due process.
---
Regards,
Rob
BUT DAMMIT I WILL DECIDE WHEN AND HOW MY 2 CHILDREN LEARN THIS! NOT YOU! NOT SOME ROGUE TEACHER!
Preventing unconscionable acts like this is not over protecting our children. Yes, children will face times of emotional distress and
They are children -they will quickly learn and know how to react and they will become stronger and stronger (if you have a family shaping those conflicts correctly, of course)
But this atrocity is not simply emotional distress or conflict it is NOT indicative of the type of emotional distress and situations that people face regularly as a part of life. This is a cruel subjection of children to a emotionally and psychologically TRAUMATIC experience.
You want to see what kind of damage this insanity, that you seem eager to justify, can do? Go and talk to the kids that were at Columbine. For that matter, why don't you look up and see what effect any of these school shootings have had? And pay close attention to those that occurred at elementary schools. And before you go and cite some post in this thread where 'Joe Bob' says that something similar didn't have any effect on him in no way precludes it from having a dramatic effect on others. Do just a tad bit of research before you open your mouth and utter uninformed and possibly damaging opinions. Skim over this article on emotional and psychological trauma. Read the common elements of a traumatic situation: 1) it was unexpected 2)the person was unprepared 3) there was nothing the person could do to prevent it from happening. A key here is that it doesn't have to be real threat to life but is perceived to be real. Look at the table of effects that this can have.
Are you advocating subjecting children to this? Or did you just knee jerk and spew a poorly thought out opinion taking an easily agreed to premise of not sheltering children from reality and using it completely inappropriately?
And if you want to be so arrogant as to challenge this material or these concepts surrounding the impact of traumatic events I'll be happy to introduce you to a couple war buddies that will set you straight. Or a couple professors I know in the Psych department who practiced child psychology for several years prior to teaching. I'm sure they could quickly point you to plenty of sound research (i.e. not baseless opinions) on this topic in addition to their own observations.
PREPARING my child for these situations is different from intentionally CREATING a NEEDLESS traumatic experience!! Why in hell would I purposefully traumatize them in a calculated way?!?! That's just sick, wrong and stupid.
This is a SCHOOL where I expect that teachers behave ETHICALLY and follow the mandate they have been given. They are there to provide knowledge and understanding of the world around them. And at times this means teaching students to be prepared for dangerous situations. But fire drills, tornado drills (historically bomb drills) are not used to scare the sh*&t out of the kids but to give them the practice at doing the things that will redu
While an interesting observation, in this case it isn't quite relevant as FON doesn't equal telephone. This movement/company has nothing to do with Voice.
From the FON website: "FON is the largest WiFi community in the world, open to anyone who wishes to unite and connect to the Internet for free from any corner of the world without cables. It all started as a simple idea: enjoy WiFi technology everywhere across a WiFi infrastructure built by same members of the FON Community."
Best regards,
DocIn a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell
Losing data on an ata raid array happened to a friend of mine and I wouldn't advise using something other than SCSI without understanding the ramifications.
Best regards,
Doc
I made a new years resolution to give up sigs...so far so good!
You can also find the paper that is referenced by the origical article at Carnegie Mellon Women Go With the (Optical) Flow where they summarize some of the research findings to date and then show the results of further testing around the effect of smooth visual presentation of movement within a 3D landscape.
Doc