Anacharsis
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Posts posted by Anacharsis
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I think a good comparison might be with an automobile.
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I know some people who treat theirs as an extension of their feet; if they plan to visit two stores across the street from one another, they will get in their car and drive from one parking lot to the next. There are places near their homes that they have never visited, because they are not auto accessible. While I might wonder if they are missing out or neglecting their health by not getting out of the car every once in a while, they are perfectly nice people who seem to lead meaningful lives; their cars allow them to take jobs that would otherwise be unavailable, and to live in places that would otherwise be inaccessible. To me the only real concern would be if this widespread attitude encouraged places that used to be available and accessible through multiple ways to atrophy -- like maybe so few people bothered to cross the street on foot to get between the two stores that they no longer bothered with sidewalks or crosswalks.
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​I see it the same way with smartphones. Smartphones open up a lot of opportunities; the risk is simply if widespread adoption closes off access to things which had been previously accessible in other ways. Hiring a ride through a smartphone is convenient; no longer being able to do so without one is less so. Being able to make plans with a friend using a smartphone is helpful; being unable to do so without one is less so.
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The risk with mixing politics and depression is that it's easy to become a "True Believer", as Eric Hoffer called it, a state where chasing the high of feeling like you are part of something greater than yourself leads you to make bad political decisions and makes it easy to fall in with an extreme crowd. (The True Believer might be a good book recommendation if she is looking for something new to read.)
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You might try giving The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius a look. While his ideas have their drawbacks, they served people well in the era before psychiatry, and used to be a core part of a classical education. The book is a little disjointed -- it was basically his diary during a stressful period of his life. I think it gives the writing a nice human touch.
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Black people I know call themselves black. I know white people from Africa and Black people from Europe. It seems just wrong to call anyone African-American unless they have dual citizenship.
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I think maybe that you lose some important information this way.
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​ As pointed out above, the distinction is made because the history, upbringing, and shared cultural experiences of someone who is African-American are very different than those of a recent immigrant with dual Nigerian and American citizenship.
An African-American is a unique type of American, who is called African because it is a kind way to acknowledge a hard past. This shared historical struggle created an identifiable culture that is distinct; things that are distinct deserve the chance to be named. :)
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Although oddly I do not want to be referred to by my state citizenship. Probably because I don't identify with. I lived elsewhere far longer for one thing. But I hardly think it matters. No biggie if someone says I'm from NY, but why call me a New Yorker? Weird stuff.
I suspect this might be a regional difference. I once read that people in some states in some parts of the country see themselves as citizens of their state first and their country second. I see it the other way around, as do others.
Respecting a person's self-identity is of course very important, especially in the U.S., where identity is seen primarily as a choice rather than as a consequence of where you grew up, unlike in many traditional regions. If they left England because they were tired of always being seen as a product of their environment, then naturally they would resent having it follow them to the U.S. Context is always important. :)
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I think it would depend on your audience, also. To someone familiar with England, referring to him by the region he is from might be helpful (sort of like referring to someone who is from New York as a New Yorker might be helpful in the U.S.), but not helpful to someone who is a little hazy on regional distinctions.
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​It's just like how Nigerian-American and African-American give different information to someone who is familiar with the history of Africans in America, but is likely to provide no useful information to someone who is not.
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Snake oil salesmen have been a problem since the invention of medicine, remember. Not to condone it, but to remind that this is part of a complicated problem without an easy solution.
*Edit:
Comparing the ups and downs of the old patented medicine industry to today's might be an interesting study topic; is there a fundamental difference between a "Dr. Hooper's Female Pills" and a "Tarceva" or is it simply a difference of timeline?
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Sorry to sidetrack here.
I'm in Virginia. I was not aware that people have generalized the term Public Ivy. While that is incorrect, I think it is also incorrect to say there is really only one public ivy. When I said my state had 2 public ivies, I was referring to this:
Original Public Ivies[edit]The original Public Ivies as they were listed by Moll in 1985:[2]
- College of William & Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia)
- Miami University (Oxford, Ohio)
- University of California (campuses as of 1985)[6]
- University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- University of Texas at Austin
- University of Vermont (Burlington)
- University of Virginia (Charlottesville)
No worries! You are correct that those are the schools that Moll discussed. I guess the distinction is in the meaning of Ivy. My understanding is that Ivy is not just a synonym for good school; it specifies that it is a school that is within the educational orbit of the Eastern upper class, which traditionally has been quite narrow.
After the Civil War, almost all of these institutions were in New England; the South's upper class was decimated by the war, and what was left of it frequently sent its children to Princeton if it was able. The University of Virginia seemed to avoid this fate, though, due to reciprocal interest from New Englanders.
In early reports, class notes, essays, etc. targeting an Ivy League demographic, the University of Virginia was often mentioned in the same breath as the Ivies in a way that others public schools were not, usually in the context of its Law School, which became a popular source of additional education for Ivy League graduates on their way to public service positions in D.C. (The other big alternatives being time spent abroad at Oxford or Cambridge.) Why UVA in particular of all the Southern schools, I'm not sure, though.
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The ROI at many colleges is U-shaped; if you get into one of the universities that have traditionally been supported by the upper classes (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or a local Ivy favorite) or one of the "egghead" schools that they hire from to keep their capital operating (the California tech schools like Caltech and Harvey Mudd, the maritime academies, the mining schools), ROI is very good. It is also not bad at the cheapest schools; career salaries are lower due to lack of access to influential social networks, but the cost of attending is also low.
However, there is also a large middle ground of schools that cost almost as much as a Harvey Mudd, but provide the social network and career returns of a state school; some of these schools can actually provide a negative ROI if one isn't careful.
Every public school claims to be a "Public Ivy" (although really historically there has only ever been one with any real connections to the Eastern Establishment, the University of Virginia), every small college claims to be a "Little Ivy" and if all else fails, there's always "Hidden Ivy". On the other hand, all colleges have a strict no refunds policy on granted diplomas, so the consequences of a mistake are all on the student. This can lead some folks to have what seems like a very wide gap between the reputation of their reach school and their safety school.
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I have some understanding of the fields.
One important thing to note is that while Business Analysis and Business Analytics have similar names, they are unrelated disciples. Business Analysis grew out of Systems Analysis (which in turn grew out of Weapons Systems Analysis either during WWII or during the Cold War). Its main focus is in coaxing out appropriate requirements, as in large initiatives oftentimes people will realize in the middle (after spending millions) that while they are on target to make what they were planning to make, what they were planning to make isn't actually what they need, or is incompatible with the other things it must work with.
Business Analytics is a cousin of Business Intelligence. Some argue it is actually a new term for the same thing, the difference being that Business Intelligence as a discipline predates the IT tools that dominate today, while Business Analytics is not really possible without them. Others argue that Business Analytics is more exploratory (We have data, what could it mean?), while Business Intelligence is more applied (We have a problem, how can our data help us?)
Data Analytics is a child of statistics and programming. It takes statistical techniques and figures out how to translate them into tasks a computer can perform on large datasets, in a way that allows their translation to be used as part of a larger whole (in programming, the informal term for this is code that lacks "code smell"). It is not strictly business-centric, since there are many large datasets with no obvious commercial purpose.
I suppose where Business Analytics and Data Analytics meet would be in the tools. Data Analytics seems to veer a bit more into "let's build a better calculator first" territory.
Also worth noting is that all of the named fields currently have something growing on them, an opportunistic organism called "management faddism". :) On the one hand, this has helped tremendously in raising the visibility and demand of the fields. On the other hand, fields that allow themselves to be overwhelmed generally don't do very well in the long-run, as it tends to eat away at their educational integrity.
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Social disadvantage is my concern. However, DD is an extremely social extrovert, and not someone who would just bury her head in a book and be okay with being "outside" the social circle. She needs people and much of her general happiness depends on her social circle.
Maybe an equivalent question would help you order your thoughts. Let's say that your daughter wanted to go to an engineering college where over 90% of the student body was male, but your spouse was against it. Asking them why, they mentioned concerns over the ability to fit in and have healthy friendships in a very masculine culture. Would you consider that sexist?
To me it sounds like your concerns are genuine, but that they are colored by an unfamiliarity with the diversity of cultures within the African-American community. I would examine the culture of the specific college more carefully before making up your mind. :)
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Not much opportunity with traditional libraries, sadly.
Things are a little better with special libraries, especially when catalogers and archives folks are willing to bridge the digital divide, meeting database administrators and digital forensics folks in the middle.
Cheap digital storage has encouraged a "save everything" mentality, which in turn is presenting many businesses with an "unstructured data problem" as they find themselves with millions of PDFs, emails, videos, and other "business intelligence" but with no real way to categorize them other than plugging them blindly into an off-the-shelf EDRMS (sort of the private-sector equivalent of having a computerized catalog but no classification system).
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One possibility might be talking about the two competing pressures the media struggles against, over reporting the news vs. creating the news, maybe going from "Dewey Defeats Truman" to the recent controversy over the Associated Press reporting on the Democratic nomination before it had officially happened.
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Definitely tricky.
If someone came to me and said, "I learned in Sunday school that the world was created in six days, but I learned in regular school that the universe was created billions of years ago; which one is right?" I would do my best to treat it as a learning opportunity.
I'd say, "Let's look at the primary sources." Pull up a copy of Genesis 1 in classical Hebrew ("I can't read that!") and maybe L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif by George Lemaître, the Belgian priest who first developed the Big Bang theory ("I can't read this either!").
The idea being that both points of view, the one taught in Sunday school and the one taught in regular school are not the real sources, but translations and simplifications; in order to understand whether or not the question is a real one or one caused by this distillation process requires looking at the originals.
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If I understand correctly, traditionally there have been three styles of college in the Western world, sometimes nicknamed the Oxbridge, Napoleonic, and Humboldtian models.
In the Oxbridge model, named after Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, the main purpose of college was moral education and preparing the upper classes of a country to assume and maintain their traditional roles. The focus was on the liberal arts because it was assumed that everyone who would be going to college in the first place was already "liber"; the sons and daughters of the landed gentry, who did not really need to worry about food, shelter, or money like the working classes. It was not seen as a pathway to social mobility so much as a way to encourage social stability by teaching the landed gentry how to be responsible citizens.
In the Humboldtian model, named after Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the main purpose of college was the comprehensive cataloging of all human knowledge, through search and research. This is the "graduate school" model, where a person will select a relatively narrow slice of human life and, along with a similar group, devote their time to making understanding of it as deep as possible even if the cost is an education without much interdisciplinary breadth. The idea being that having a comprehensive body of knowledge benefits the society as a whole, even if each individual contributor is simply trained as a narrow specialist. This isn't limited to fields whose benefits are immediately obvious -- having contributed a deep knowledge of 16th century Italian poetry or the mating habits of the tsetse fly was seen as being just as valid as contributing deep knowledge of polymer chemistry or military tactics. (Wikipedia is a very Humboldtian website.)
In the Napoleonic model, named after Napoleon's École Polytechnique, the goal was to train specialists not as part of a general deepening of human knowledge, but with a particular eye towards the needs of the State and its ruling classes. In a Humboldtian model, the end product is the body of knowledge itself, while under a Napoleonic model the end product is the specialists. If a nation's businesses need electrical engineers, then the schools concentrate on electrical engineering. If it needs urban planners, the schools concentrate on urban planning. This style of schools is the most obviously connected to upward mobility, as it is assumed that the upper classes will protect those willing to serve their interests.
There are also schools that don't seem to follow any of these models -- for instance, schools whose main purpose seems to be maximizing the process of turning tuition money into college administration jobs, without providing any meaningful benefit to either graduates or any particular body of knowledge. (The "University of Phoenix" model? :) )
In reality, many universities seem to take a hybrid approach -- maybe their engineering college is Napoleonic on the undergraduate level while their college of arts is Oxbridge, with both colleges being Humboldtian on a graduate level.
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Not a book, but you might find Voices of the Manhattan Project interesting -- http://manhattanprojectvoices.org/
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If an item is necessary to human life, such as food, water, or shelter, the price can go up quite dramatically without the demand going down -- you can't eat money when you are starving, even if you have millions of dollars worth. I think in economics these are called "inelastic" demands (is that right?) Compare this to demand for a unicycle -- if the price is low, most people might buy a unicycle for fun. If the price is too high, though, and the manufacturers of unicycles refuse to lower it, a consumer can simply decide to grow old and die having never owned or ridden a unicycle -- a unicycle isn't essential for human life or (arguably) human happiness.
Another issue that tends to control prices is the availability of workable alternatives. Can an individual produce the item themselves, for instance? With land in the U.S., at least, the answer is usually no -- the last Homestead Act ended in the 70s. More or less all land in the country belongs under law to somebody already. Demand for public housing exceeds supply. Appealing to extended family is still an option for some, but there are many families where even grandma and grandpa don't own their own home. So for the average person there are not many available alternatives to either purchasing a home or renting.
I guess the related question would be why prices for unoccupied houses with high rents don't fall, since in theory at least landlords are supposed to compete with one another for tenants when a house is unoccupied... Admittedly, people often make irrational economic choices, including landlords, but I wonder if maybe there's something else going on...
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Scrabble is a lot of fun, requires enough mental wattage to keep most adults engaged, and has the advantage that almost everyone (in the U.S., at least) already knows how to play it, regardless of their age. Bridge can be enjoyable, but is pretty old-fashioned now. (I think Mah-Jongg also falls into this category.) The King of the new-wave German games is definitely Settlers of Catan -- there's an endless amount of strategy, game play does not have to run long, and the mechanics of the game are such that even if you are in a position where you are unlikely to win, the game remains enjoyable. (It's also very popular with college students.) The standard game is for 3-4, and with the player expansion it works well with 5-6.
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Since many popular alcoholic drinks are at least somewhat acidic, you'll want mugs with a lining -- otherwise the acid will react with the copper, potentially leading to a night on the toilet. :-)
As described in a famous 1957 case study, "Copper Poisoning at a Cocktail Party":
An outbreak of food poisoning occurred following a cocktail party in the nurses’ quarters of a Military Hospital on August 12, 1954. The occasion was a private party given in honor of one of the nursing sisters who was leaving the unit. A cocktail consisted of: rye whisky—10 oz; fresh lemon juice—4 oz; egg white—1 teaspoonful; sugar melted—5 oz; water—6 oz; chipped ice to make—1 qt. It was prepared at 3 p.m. and placed in a refrigerator. Two cocktail shakers, each containing a quart, were removed at 5 p.m. and taken to the nurses’ lounge where about one quart was consumed. Within one-half to one hour following the consumption of the cocktails, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea ensued. Of the 15 nursing sisters, only five were without symptoms and fit for duty next day; the others felt weak, experienced abdominal cramps, dizziness, and headache. In one cocktail shaker there still remained about a half fluid ounce of a pale green solution which gave positive chemical tests for copper. The interior of the shaker had a brown coating which contrasted sharply with the silvery coating of the cap. The evidence was suggestive of the original inner plating having become worn off through frequent use and cleaning during several years. A repeat trial of the cocktail was used to carry out extensive chemical tests for other metals and to determine quantitatively the copper content in one fluid ounce of the cocktail. Three of the participants consumed one-half glass of the cocktail, or three-quarters fluid ounces containing 5.3 milligrams of copper; five drank one glass, thus ingesting 10.65 milligrams of copper; four had two glasses or 21.3 milligrams of copper; and one had three glasses or 32 milligrams of copper. These amounts of copper are believed to have given rise to the symptoms of chemical food poisoning precipitated by the ingestion of alcohol on an empty stomach.
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Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar might be worth a look. Maybe also something by Philip K. Dick...
Also maybe helpful to go along with 1984 would be Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language".
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How can the student change the contents if the transcript is sent electronically from the school to the college???
One way that springs to mind is to fake the sender. This would be the electronic equivalent of putting someone else's return address on a letter you send -- the postmark provides some security, much like examining the full header info on an email will often expose a fake address, but a busy admin may not be trained to look for such things.
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Two essays that I found helpful for adding additional context were Tom Wolfe's "Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" and Shelby Steele's more serious "The age of white guilt and the disappearance of the black individual". I would recommend both to anyone interested in the subject.
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This might be a good chance to add Daniel Clowes' "Art School Confidential" comic to the curriculum. :-) If by "worth it" you mean that the education will pay for itself, chances are the answer is "no". After post-modernism, the art world does not seem to place a premium on classically trained artists over others. There are a few schools that are trade schools masquerading as art schools -- for instance, the California Institute of the Arts was created to train Disney animators, and its animation program is still a big feeder for Disney. However, it's important to be cautious here -- every art school will claim to be a feeder school for some industry or another, but in reality if such a school exists, there will be only one (maybe two) per field.
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L.L. Bean no longer uses the same manufacturer they used to use -- they switched to an overseas manufacturer to lower the price. I don't know if that has changed the quality, but the original manufacturer, Caribou Mountaineering, is still in business and still making packs in the U.S.A.
Advice for my daughter who is dating an "older man"?
in The Chat Board
Posted · Edited by Anacharsis
One risk might be some level of immaturity. A common reason for dating younger is feeling more at ease psychologically with someone younger -- they may be physically in their 30s, but mentally and emotionally they're still 20somethings. If she shares a similar attitude, this isn't necessarily a problem, as they can be "young at heart" together. If she doesn't, one day she might find herself also in her 30s, and wondering why he never grew up.