The media has been placing the blame for the imperfect oath on the Chief Justice, but the fault appears to be with the President.
In the clip of the Vice Presidential oath the first phrase is "I [name] do solemnly swear..." Both the Justice and the Vice President get it right. In the clip of the Presidential oath, the Chief Justice attempts to speak the full first phrase, but is interrupted in the middle by the President.
The President is the one who starts the deviation. The Chief Justice then goes on to mangle an important line.
Indeed, and though you were voted down, the one major media article I read on this explained clearly that that was the case. However, the lede took great care to suggest the blame was the CJ's, before the article went on to clarify.
It makes zero difference, but it's an embarrassing illustration of the continuing non-existence of a dominant independent media, that they are so sensitive to protecting Obama against even the slightest image damage. Obviously, if this had happened during Bush's inauguration, the chortles would have been unceasing.
You're approaching it from the wrong perspective. English is the lingua franca. If your colleague were really nice, he would translate his message into Hindi, but that isn't an effective use of time. Neither is writing in Simple English.
Let the recipient use a dictionary. After a while he won't have to anymore.
That isn't really fair to the recipient. Why should he or she spend extra time figuring out what you said, and you spend no time at all making it easier to read?
If the company is paying me 10x what it's paying them then it's probably more cost effective for me to brain dump (if it's clear) than it is to clean up for the reader. This is not about outsourcing the same thing happens with emails from senior management.
On a related note, whuffie is not a new invention. There is no difference whatsoever between whuffie and money. They are perfectly synonymous. I get the feeling the author, and many of his readers, seem to believe that he has created something distinct from money (from the Wikipedia: 'Whuffie has replaced money...'). Whuffie, as a currency, is no more different from the dollar than the króna is from the euro.
As a descriptor of currency in an inconsequential economy it is somewhat useful. I happen to prefer the word "karma."
You mean the math is intentionally "scaled up"? Or that the math is just easier & there is no effort made to rescale it? Given that these scores are used for comparison so often, you'd think they would normalize the scores so that a 700 means the same thing on both sections.
For what it's worth, this is a trend on other standardized tests as well (including the SAT).
Funny, I heard a rumor that the only people who got 800s on the verbal section were foreigners. (Read: people who can't speak English.) The explanation was that they were the only ones willing to invest enough time to form-fit the ETS's method of verbal testing.
In my own experience the verbal section of the GRE was entirely nonsensical. The vocabulary was difficult and exactly the type of vocabulary I would use if it was my goal not to be understood, but at least I could see how it might be a useful and reliable differentiator.
Nobody uses these words often enough for them have any statistically meaningful shades of meaning. If the goal of communication is having other people understand you, why would you deal in words that are notable precisely because they are difficult to understand?
The reading comprehension made less sense. I don't think it's possible to select a passage that has an unambiguous meaning and yet will be misunderstood by a statistically meaningful number of ambitious, college-educated people. So the question-making process must necessarily be corrupt.
I recall many questions which wasted much of my time. Several possible responses, none of which are obviously wrong. I know which one I feel is right---or maybe I do. Which one does the GRE feel is right? Even on sample tests, where I could see the supposed answer, I would read and reread the passages, and understand little about what the correctness or incorrectness of the responses had to do with the meaning of the passage.
I don't think you can presume to have an objective and clear-cut A or B answer as you might on the SAT. The granularity of college-level material is simply too fine. The only thing you can measure is how well you have matched yourself to the GRE's way of thinking, and that is not a particularly valuable expenditure of time.
"If the goal of communication is having other people understand you, why would you deal in words that are notable precisely because they are difficult to understand?"
One important value words have lies in their discriminatory capabilities; the more exact and fine-toothed your toolset is, the more precisely you can express yourself. Sure, it doesn't matter if you're wearing mittens on your vocabulary for most exchanges -- but it sure is nice to be able to take them off once in a while, and say exactly what you mean.
"If the goal of communication is having other people understand you, why would you deal in words that are notable precisely because they are difficult to understand?"
Once in a while you meet someone else like yourself and experience pleasure communicating at high baud.
Really? I take your point to mean that two smart people can communicate better using obscure vocabulary when they are communicating only between themselves. High baud necessarily implies higher average information throughput, so there would have to be a significant number of these words in the communication.
Could you point to some examples of letters between two famous people using this method?
Most notable people seem to prefer simple vocabulary, and in fact, many of them go so far as to recommend it. The people who prefer complex vocabulary (cultural studies journals, intellectuals) do not seem to accomplish anything of value, and indeed they are routinely accused of being obscurantists.
(Ground rule: scientific jargon excepted, since it is not a part of the vocabulary. But, feel free to look at letters by Newton, Einstein, Godel, Hilbert, anyone really.)
It has nothing to do with a preference for complex vocabulary.
When I talk to someone I know has a large vocabulary, I am free to use the best word that occurs to me, and if they think I'm up to snuff, they are free to do the same thing. This makes for a more pleasurable conversation. (Assuming we're actually trying to say something to each other. But if the motivation is to show off, or engage in ego jockeying, that's boring.)
I guess it's more accurate to say that baud rate surges transiently when a rare, but exceptionally precise word enters this sort of conversation.
Obscure vocabulary could be divided into two, one containing obscure synonyms of frequent words, and another is the chunking of information, of many words, to give one label. People familiar with the topic may find it easier to anchor their thoughts with these chunked words of phrases.
A lot of philosophy seems really ridiculous to me, and yet there must be a need to chunk concepts and give them labels. When you agree on the basket of concepts tagged with "logical positivism" or "paleo-conservatism" isn't it easier to just use that phrase and not repeatedly invoke all or the topically relevant concepts of that set?
Of course, the problem is when these labels are overburdened and/or so multifaceted that you could be talking about subtly different things and not get anywhere. This is why philosophy should be based not in the fuzzy verbal, but in the concisely mathematical, but that is another topic.
I can't point to any letters to showcase the method, but I'd point to political science as it is a place where verbal philosophy and practicality do coincide.
Or, more likely, if you are well versed in the vagaries of obscure vocabulary, chances are you'll be better at putting together the less complex words.
Me too. Somehow I aced the verbal section, with a moderate amount of study, starting ~6 weeks before the test. I think it might be because I was raised without a TV and so read a lot as a kid. The questions at the end of the test (it's adaptive, computer administered) seemed to focus on the exact nuance of similar words.
Agreeing with both replies to me, I think the secret of my success on the GRE verbal section (twice) was reading a lot for fun. And agreeing with them about correlations between GRE success and life success, I still pursue a lot of personal intellectual interests but have not become notably wealthy, although any middle-class American is wealthy in worldwide terms.
Yes, and let's not forget that a generalized test is still useful at the graduate level, for a variety of reasons. The one that comes to mind when you mention subject tests is that people sometimes switch disciplines. I have several friends who went from math to physics and vice versa. They intended to research problems which are closely related to what they've done in their own department but that just happen to be worked on by professors in the other. Does it make sense to hold a math major up to the standard of a physics major taking the physics subject test? No way---he couldn't possibly compare, even though he may be more ably suited to tackling a problem that's being worked on in the physics department. So having a generalized quantitative/analytical section is helpful in at least this case. If the physics professor looking at your application knows nothing about what his colleague is doing (your intended advisor), at least he has a reasonable indication you aren't a dunce.
Airline recap: entirely focused on operations, always on the brink of collapse. Operations consist largely of optimizations problems, so lots of attention is paid to these problems (peanuts vs. pretzels). For whatever reason customers are not insulated from the volatility (pretzels, bag fees, route duration, availability, etc., in addition to price fluctuation).
Typically you see finely-tuned optimization in old and evolved markets, e.g., cola, where it makes sense, and where customers are insulated from changes in the product or service. Here though it reeks of over-optimization and misapplied attention. Nobody makes a fuss about boarding the bus. When the price of corn goes up I don't have to use a can-opener on my soda.
What's wrong with airplanes? Why don't they work like buses? Let's try to figure this out. Investors have long recognized airlines as a valuable service but a terrible business.
1.) We really like to fly but our technology is behind the curve?
2.) Irrationality of consumers has created government controls which muck too much with an already fragile system? (security lines, shoe removal, bomb sniffing, personal searches, over-training of pilots, too-expensive pilots, burdensome safety regulations, burdensome inspections, all of these perpetuated by expectation)
3.) The average passenger does not fly enough, and so he is inefficient?
4.) Dependent on fixed-location airports? And their regulation?
5.) There's no clear cause and effect, it's simply a manifestation of the system?
6.) ?
7.) Demand for flight is very volatile but the capital which supports it is very expensive and illiquid?
(one red-herring: fuel efficiency, planes appear to be more fuel efficient than driving alone)
(another red-herring: this google hit http://www.brookings.edu/testimony/2005/0928business_morriso... states the obvious but does little to explain what makes the airline industry any different from anybody else dependent on large capital investments. sure they have to buy planes. and cola bottlers have to build plants.)
It's bad scholarship. A political ideal is an extremely complex object. All he's done is cherry-picked five filters through which to view it. He's taken a very big n-dimensional object and inspected a handful of the shadows it casts.
Does he think he's pinned it down with these five criteria? This is why people make fun of the humanities. Sloppy, runny thinking. You could select just about any value and the two political ideologies would fall somewhere on either side of it. Those on which they aren't opposed aren't worthy of mention, and so aren't. You could play the same game all day. In fact, you might even argue that it is a defining property of a two-party system.
Sloppy science makes people feel good when it plays into their preconceived ideas. I fully await the day that the left starts defining other ptolitical views as forms of mental illness. Who knows, maybe Pfizer could find some meds for it.
Kuhn and Popper should really be taught in schools more. There's this incredible propaganda people are taught in regards to science which has very little to do with how actual science is done. People get this warm and fuzzy around the general idea of "science" without the hard knuckle reality that skepticism, falsifiability, the inductive problem, and the difference between correlation and causation, just to name a few problems.
So it's easy for a soft scientist to do all sorts of amazing and miraculous things in the name of science. And heck, it sounds dead right too! Let's just not poke around behind the curtain too much, okay?
It's the ultimate in laziness. Instead of learning political theory, philosophy, economics, and history, we've got internet video! From TED! Can't get cooler than that.
Ya know, I get really frustrated whenever I see a bunch of armchair scientists work themselves into a lather criticizing the "sloppiness" of published research, based on nothing but a short blurb on a website.
Contrary to the belief of most indignant internet geeks, there's a lot more to scientific analysis than parroting "correlation vs. cause!" whenever data are presented. The fact of the matter is that, while correlation doesn't imply cause (that's the actual expression; it is rampantly mis-stated), a strong correlation is usually evidence that an underlying cause exists, whether direct or indirect in nature. Furthermore, there's not an accepted result in the history of science that doesn't depend on the analysis of correlations in observed data. Even falsifiability (that sexy buzzword of Popper-idolaters) depends on the collection of observations, and correlation of those observations with previous data. Thus, in a very real way, science is the study of correlations, and you can take the amateur correlation/cause pot-shot at any scientific result.
So, when a scientist points out that correlation does not imply cause, what she means is not that the observed relationship doesn't exist, but that the correlation could be caused by latent, indirect factors. This is a very different thing than suggesting that the result is invalid -- which is what most armchair, Popper-loving internet-scientist types are trying to do (including the parent posts).
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. My lather was starting to dry and I needed a good rinse.
One thing and I'll let you go. "a strong correlation is usually evidence that an underlying cause exists, whether direct or indirect in nature"
Oh really now? Well that explains my theory as to how carrots are deadly poisonous. You see, I've found a 100% correlation between the consumption of carrots and death, usually within 80 years. I'm also working on a theory that sunlight is a cause of all cancer, seeing as how there is another 100% relationship between all people with cancer and exposure to sunlight.
Science is the creation and study of models, abduction, based on the use of deduction and induction. Correlation is simply a tool used to create the model. When we forget we're comparing models, then it's easy to simply fall back on simple correlation-based arguments. That's like forgetting geometry and simply observing the circumference of a circle is usually about 3 times the diameter. It's true, but it's not creating an abstract calculus that can then be extended.
I find your continued use of "armchair scientist" to be an ad hominem, as if by using that name my argument would carry less weight. Last I checked we weren't providing credentials to express opinions.
I'm done playing. timr -- you can follow me around to another comment on the board and continue your picking. I have to go get my armchair adjusted for physics.
Your examples bely either a fundamental misunderstanding of the mathematics of correlation, or a willingness to ignore them to fake an argument.
First, you can't "correlate" with incidence of death -- it's not even a binary variable, since everyone dies. Of course, you can correlate with onset of death, but that would make your example silly; if there were an observed acceleration in onset of death due to carrot consumption, it would only serve to illustrate the value of correlative studies in science.
Likewise with sunlight exposure -- you've just flipped the constant to the predictor (everyone has experienced sunlight exposure), and attempted to correlate with a variable output (cancer occurrence). Again, mathematical nonsense.
That said, I don't dispute anything you've said about models, abductive, deductive or inductive reasoning. But you can reason all day long, and without empirical data, you've got nothing but a castle on a cloud. Ultimately, you're always going to come back to correlating at least one observed variable with another -- the predictor, and the response. This is basic science.
Why do I refer to "armchair scientists"? Because I couldn't think of a better term to describe those people who want science to be just like math, but conveniently forget that mathematics rests entirely upon a set of fundamental axioms that are simply asserted to be true. The people who learned about one logical fallacy some time in high school, and latched on for dear life, conveniently forgetting that every scientist in the world knows about the same fallacy.
Moreover, these folks aren't familiar with the details, so they don't see that the places where mathematics most closely touch science -- quantum theory, string theory, etc. -- tend to be extraordinarily messy. The math frequently depends on assumptions and approximations that are accepted based on their similarity to observed data. For example, right now, thousands of scientists are banging subatomic particles together in a subterranean tube in France, in order to observe something that the mathematicians think might be there. If it isn't, the mathematicians get to start over.
Again: it all comes back to observing things. And as long as we're observing things that are difficult to observe, I have a feeling that cranky internet scientists will be there to argue from the comfort of an easy chair that empiricism has it all wrong.
The study, published in the September 19 [2008] issue of the journal Science, involved 46 Nebraska residents with strong political convictions. Researchers examined the link between each participant's stated political views and his or her physiological response to a perceived threat in the lab. People with stronger measurable threat responses, the study found, tended to adhere to "socially protective" political policies, or those that suggest more concern for preserving the social unit — for example, supporting the Iraq war and the death penalty, but opposing abortion rights and gay marriage.
Researchers shied away from using labels such as conservative and liberal in their study, but they concede that volunteers who registered a heightened sense of threat also tended to subscribe to conservative attitudes.
Best I can see, we're heading for a place where the quality of your ideas don't matter -- instead, we'll simply place you in an easy-to-digest psychological stereotype. The only reason I see for this is to decrease debate among the public at large -- why argue with somebody who obviously is afflicted with some malady?
I wonder why we aren't seeing the same studies being done on empiricists versus rationalists? Or terrorist versus non-terrorist? Or baseball fans versus football fans? Or religious versus non-religious?
Wait -- we are seeing religious versus non-religious. And we're seeing politics. But unless I'm mistaken, there's not a lot of research on other potentially interesting areas. (aside from the normal marketing stuff) I'll leave it to the reader to speculate as to why this is.
rationalization / post-hoc. If you were setting out to make the next MySpace or Craigslist, would you consciously decide to make it ugly as a competitive advantage? Ugly designs happen by accident [re: neglect] and in spite of the underlying site's success. By the time the site is successful it's too late/unnecessary to change it.
I disagree. As other's are pointing out, a site's design says a message, and having an ugly design might send the right message.
Dove is using this idea in their "Campaign for Natural Beauty" (http://www.dove.us/#/cfrb/) . The models aren't ugly, but they also aren't the usual perfect-looking models.
When I was in grade school, I remember there were anti-smoking and tobacco posters on the wall of severely aged, sick looking people along with some text about how "chewing cost me my mandible". Those were examples of actual human ugliness, and they worked.
So that's all to say, ugly could be part of your message. Which isn't really a novel idea.
What's more interesting, in my opinion, is when something seems bad from a usability standpoint and still succeeds. plentyoffish.com fits under this category.
Having just learned Cocoa, I can tell you that you are not stupid, the design of Cocoa is stupid.
Design patterns are stupid, hence baking them into a language is stupid. And Interface Builder is very stupid.
Fortunately Objective-C isn't as stupid as C++, so once you've covered most of what makes Apple's design stupid, you can trowel over the gaps in logic with cement and forget about them.
Most platform and language designs are stupid. Sometimes I think it's an emergent case of a desire to ensure job security. Other times I just think the designers were stupid.
Programmers, who supposedly like to question authority, have a really hard time questioning the sanctity of the platforms they work on. I think many would be surprised to learn that their platforms have serious design flaws. Of course you should initialize Function A first using unrelated Function B. How else would you do it?
Part of the reason designers make bad designs is because they have to respect a history of bad designs. People are used to XML. Consequently, it's used in plists.
The antidote for worrying about whether you are stupid is to identify and express why the design of something you're working with is stupid. The next step is to realize that, whatever it is, it's there, and you have to deal with it. That's work, and that's programming as it is today.
Can you tell me why the design of Cocoa is stupid? I'm not disagreeing with you - going through the hoops required to play more than 5s of sound on the iPhone is a pretty crap way to spend an evening.
Interface Builder is flawed - but perhaps I haven't used it enough to appreciate its strengths.
Sure. Here's the execution tree necessary to "Hello World" in Cocoa---at least as given in the Apple tutorial I followed. It's possible to cut it down, but only after you've digested all of the material Apple lays in front of you.
Ok, that was easy. Now, why design patterns in general are stupid? Do you mean that all|some|few of them are stupid, or that the very idea of having design patterns is stupid?
In the clip of the Vice Presidential oath the first phrase is "I [name] do solemnly swear..." Both the Justice and the Vice President get it right. In the clip of the Presidential oath, the Chief Justice attempts to speak the full first phrase, but is interrupted in the middle by the President.
The President is the one who starts the deviation. The Chief Justice then goes on to mangle an important line.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5VB4LgOH58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EHOHe-_uQg