Weird News Stories

[Hurlshort]

It really is the job of the parents to teach their kids how to lose with some dignity.  But yeah, schools should be preparing students for the real world, not pampering and coddling them.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Really should focus on making one's self-esteem more resilient rather than preventing it from taking a hit in the first place

Schools should chastise any child who doesn't score perfectly on tests. "Almost perfect doesn't cut it in the real world, Johnny."

[Walsingham]

 

Really should focus on making one's self-esteem more resilient rather than preventing it from taking a hit in the first place

Schools should chastise any child who doesn't score perfectly on tests. "Almost perfect doesn't cut it in the real world, Johnny."

 

 

LOL. You may think yourself lucky you've never heard the 80/20 rule, the Pareto rule.

 

Thinking about it, we should be chastising any child for exerting maximum effort just to get one place ahead of their fellows who exert 80% of their maximum. Because THAT is the rule evident in big business and government over here.

[Amentep]

My daughter just made the honor roll. As a feat that her father never accomplished I was very proud of her. Plus I pony up cash for every "A" so she made out well this semester.

 

My parents paid money out for our grades when I was in elementary/high school.  I didn't get a "C" or "D" until I was a senior in High School ("Senioritis" and AP Calculus and Advanced Chemestry II don't mix.  Just say no kids.)

 

And I had so many certificates that my mom ran out of places to put them (she joked in my junior year I needed to be dumber because she had no place to put my certificates and awards).  And while I might not have appreciated everyone its because I came to expect that I should have one and worked to make sure I did.  The alternative - not achieving good grads, good scores, etc. - was a motivation for me to always do my best and get those awards and certificates.

 

I would have been gutted if they took that way to benchmark myself away from me.

[Malcador]

 

Really should focus on making one's self-esteem more resilient rather than preventing it from taking a hit in the first place

Schools should chastise any child who doesn't score perfectly on tests. "Almost perfect doesn't cut it in the real world, Johnny."

 

University is probably the best for that. Most of the time if you didn't do well, you didn't put the effort in, I found.

[Hurlshort]

My wife, who teaches PE, was called into the principal's office once for yelling at a group of students who were not doing what they were supposed to do.  One of them recorded it.  The principal, who has no children, asked my wife if she would talk to her daughter like that.  She couldn't help but laugh.  Of course we yell at our kids!

[AGX-17]

And the nerfing of kids and childhood continues...

They didn't have honor rolls 150 years ago when kids worked in coal mines as pack animals because donkeys couldn't fit in mineshafts. They didn't have honor rolls when daughters were a liability that you traded for an item of value, like a goat (or in the cultures where that's still true today.) They didn't have honor rolls when infant mortality was 50% or higher. Living to puberty was achievement enough, nobody gave out special recognition for the people who managed to not die of smallpox by the age of 15.

 

My parents paid money out for our grades when I was in elementary/high school.  I didn't get a "C" or "D" until I was a senior in High School ("Senioritis" and AP Calculus and Advanced Chemestry II don't mix.  Just say no kids.)

 

And I had so many certificates that my mom ran out of places to put them (she joked in my junior year I needed to be dumber because she had no place to put my certificates and awards).  And while I might not have appreciated everyone its because I came to expect that I should have one and worked to make sure I did.  The alternative - not achieving good grads, good scores, etc. - was a motivation for me to always do my best and get those awards and certificates.

 

I would have been gutted if they took that way to benchmark myself away from me.

Then it was the private financial reward that motivated you, not the public recognition as a NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD. Also you just told kids not to aim for the top (i.e. AP calculus and chemistry.) Isn't that a little antithetical to your rage about abolishment of honor rolls? Isn't it just that you weren't good enough?

Edited November 6, 2013 by AGX-17

[Malcador]

A bit much to interpret his advice as to not aim for the top, well unless pursuing risky course loads is unambitious.

[Walsingham]

I am genuinely entertained by how no-one 'got' my rage at the pareto curve. God bless you, and all your jobs.

[Amentep]

 

And the nerfing of kids and childhood continues...

They didn't have honor rolls 150 years ago when kids worked in coal mines as pack animals because donkeys couldn't fit in mineshafts. They didn't have honor rolls when daughters were a liability that you traded for an item of value, like a goat (or in the cultures where that's still true today.) They didn't have honor rolls when infant mortality was 50% or higher. Living to puberty was achievement enough, nobody gave out special recognition for the people who managed to not die of smallpox by the age of 15.

 

And those kids didn't go to school or weren't required to go to school to get jobs, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

 

Me: "wow they're doing a disservice to education by taking this motivator away, IMO."

 

You: "These kids who led miserable lives and died early and never got educated never had that motivator."

 

I don't get it. Right now, our experience is that kids are terribly motivated in classes. Partially this may be that education is always slow to change delivery message and technology is sweepingly altering the ways in which we communicate (even think about communicating) but I'm not convinced that removing any motivation to achieve is a good idea.

 

 

My parents paid money out for our grades when I was in elementary/high school.  I didn't get a "C" or "D" until I was a senior in High School ("Senioritis" and AP Calculus and Advanced Chemestry II don't mix.  Just say no kids.)

 

And I had so many certificates that my mom ran out of places to put them (she joked in my junior year I needed to be dumber because she had no place to put my certificates and awards).  And while I might not have appreciated everyone its because I came to expect that I should have one and worked to make sure I did.  The alternative - not achieving good grads, good scores, etc. - was a motivation for me to always do my best and get those awards and certificates.

 

I would have been gutted if they took that way to benchmark myself away from me.

Then it was the private financial reward that motivated you, not the public recognition as a NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD. Also you just told kids not to aim for the top (i.e. AP calculus and chemistry.) Isn't that a little antithetical to your rage about abolishment of honor rolls? Isn't it just that you weren't good enough?

 

The Valedictorian of our class didn't take college prep classes, was the only student with a 4.0 GPA, so I'm not sure how advising students - even with tongue in cheek - to not pair AP Calculus and Advanced Chemistry in their Senior Year (as opposed to not taking them as you suggest) translates to being "antithetical" to suggesting the abolishing of honor rolls is a bad thing.

 

And I was motivated by financial gain and awards and public recognition as I got positive encouragement from all as each tied into positive feedback from siblings, parents, peers and teachers. So....

 

At the end of the day, I didn't see myself as "raging" against anything. As someone who works in higher education, I do see a large number of students - growing with each new class of freshmen - who feel that the college must adjust to them to allow them to succeed. And while I can gripe about the problems in both societies mistaken weighting of a college education to be things that its not as well as our own inability to achieve the outcomes we say we're trying for (in short that higher education has their own flaws as does elementary and secondary education), I'm not convinced that taking away recognitions of high achievement is going to amount to anything other than continue to encourage students that all they need is the minimum effort applied to jump the current hurdle they face.

 

I am genuinely entertained by how no-one 'got' my rage at the pareto curve. God bless you, and all your jobs.

80% of the understanding of your rage came from 20% of the people reading the thread.

Edited November 8, 2013 by Amentep

[Malcador]

I am genuinely entertained by how no-one 'got' my rage at the pareto curve. God bless you, and all your jobs.

Well I am part of the 80% so... :D

[Raithe]

Hans Zimmer Feels Horrible Over the Braaaaahms!

 

 

When composer Hans Zimmer first dropped the BRAAAAAHMs in the Inception trailer, he couldn’t have realized it at the time, but the world had changed forever. The devastation it wrought was unprecedented, and soon it seemed like every movie had BRAAAAAAHMs and they were threatening to fire them off at each other willy nilly. Even worse, what would happen should the BRAAAAAAHMs fall into the wrong hands? Like Robert Oppenheimer before him, Zimmer now says he “feels horrible” when his BRAAAAHMs are used in movie trailers. Forgive him, father, he knew not what he BRAAAAAAAHM.

 

From Vulture:

So how does Zimmer feel when he sees a new commercial that apes his bold

Inception

score? “Oh, it’s horrible!” he moans. “This is a perfect example of where it all goes wrong. That music became the blueprint for all action movies, really. And if you get too many imitations, even I get confused!” He’s even witnessed the phenomenon firsthand: “By the time we got to

The Dark Knight Rises

, the studio sent over a trailer with that temp track, and they actually apologized for it. They said, ‘We put the

Inception

music in there because we didn’t know what else to do, so could you guys maybe come up with something else?’ So we came up with a trailer that was just a few lonely notes — it couldn’t have been more opposite.”

 

So where did all those BRAMMS

[i think she means BRAAAAAHM -Ed.]

originally come from? “That sound was in the script,” says Zimmer. “I remember before we made the movie, Chris and I were in London at the

Sherlock Holmes

premiere, and of course it ends up with the two of us in the corner somewhere talking about the movie we’re about to make while everyone else is around us at the premiere going wild. We’re such party animals. And I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, let’s just go and book a studio and get a couple of brass players.’ The sound, really, is that I put a piano in the middle of a church and I put a book on the pedal, and these brass players would basically play into the resonance of the piano. And then I added a bit of electronic nonsense. But really, it just came from saying, ‘Let’s experiment.’”

 

I like to imagine Christopher Nolan having to type “BRAAAAAAAAAHM” in the set directions. Let this be a lesson to you, aspiring screenwriters, when a sound effect is that important to the film, nothing can be left to chance. I’ve heard the writer of the last Kevin James vehicle sent out his scripts with actual whoopee cushions.

Edited November 9, 2013 by Raithe

[Oerwinde]

If anyone else has been following, the Mayor of Toronto admitted to smoking crack.

[Guest Slinky]

If anyone else has been following, the Mayor of Toronto admitted to smoking crack.

Probably a shocking surprise for many

[Walsingham]

In protest at political apathy, artist nails his own scrotum to Red Square.

 

I remember being told about a vory who nailed his own scrotum to his bed as a prison protest, and always wrote that off as guards chancing their luck on excuses. Guess I underestimated Russians, for once.

[Raithe]

For those funeral times..

 

Hundreds of Strangers turn up for Funeral of Dambuster veteran who had no close family

 

 

An RAF veteran with no close friends or relatives was given a hero’s send-off by hundreds of strangers today after an online campaign urged people to pay their respects.

Harold Jellicoe Percival, a pilot who served as part of RAF Bomber Command during the Dambusters raid, died last month aged 99. There were no close friends or relatives at hand at the nursing home, where staff worried no one would be at his funeral to mark his passing.

 

He was said to have lived a “nomadic” life, and had no wife and children, so funeral directors put out a plea for veterans to attend the service in Lytham St Anne’s, Lancashire.

The call for attendees then made its way into Harold’s local paper, the Blackpool Gazette, and received a lot of coverage on Twitter.

Following the campaign, the veteran’s service is thought to have been attended by more than 300 people, young and old. Roads were blocked with traffic and the crematorium unable to hold the numbers of mourners, which poignantly began at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

 

The Dambusters theme was played as his casket was taken into the chapel.

"It's just staggering," his nephew, Andre Collyer-Worsell, said after attending the service.

"It just shows how great the British public are."

"He was not a hero, he was just someone who did his duty in World War Two, just as his brother and sister did and his father before him in World War One.

"We were expecting a few people, a few local veterans but suddenly it snowballed.

"It's the sort of send-off you would want to give any loved one. It's very emotional."

[Malcador]

If anyone else has been following, the Mayor of Toronto admitted to smoking crack.

 

At the Remembrance Day stuff today some people booed him and called him a crackhead, was brilliant.  Naturally some people are upset as it was not the time or place - which is a bit silly. If you dislike someone, do so 24/7,  don't take breaks.

[Malcador]

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/521246/20131111/international-space-station-infected-malware-russian-astronaut.htm

 

ISS has malware, apparently.

[Raithe]

Business Week - You can't hide from Facebook Graph Search

 

 

 

It often seems as though Facebook’s main purpose is to remind us continually of how much we have chosen to share with the world about our online behavior—whether we realize it or not. The latest lesson along those lines comes from the social network’s new “graph search," which sounds at first like a fairly boring feature of interest only to marketers. Like much of what Facebook (FB) does, however, it is also a warning sign: If you were counting on certain things about yourself staying not so much private as obscure or hidden from view, those days are effectively over.

 

For an example of what this means in practice, look no further than a new Tumblr blog started by London-based programmer Tom Scott, entitled “Actual Facebook Graph Searches.” This also sounds somewhat dry and academic, until you take a closer look at some of the things that Facebook makes it trivially easy to search for—things like “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran” (where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death) or “family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong,” the latter being a religious group whose members are routinely persecuted.

 

Many of these searches may be figments of Tom Scott’s overactive imagination (at least for now), but the fact is that Facebook’s graph search makes them relatively easy to conduct. Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive who left to start the mobile social network Path, has pointed out that the company has had this kind of interest-graph powered search for some time—and this kind of targeting based on “likes” and interests, friends and followed pages, etc. has been available in a different form for advertisers. But it is far more robust and more public now.

 

In a FAQ on the blog, Scott says he’s not trying to make any deep arguments about privacy, and his Tumblr blog is subtitled: “Don’t worry, we’ll all be used to this in a few weeks’ time.” But it’s still worth thinking about the implications of Facebook’s graph search, especially given the fact that many people don’t seem to appreciate the nuances of the network’s privacy settings—something that Facebook doesn’t really make simple or easy to figure out. Even Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi was recently blindsided by them, so what chance do the rest of us have?

 

In a recent piece in the Atlantic, philosophy professor Evan Selinger and his co-author, Woodrow Hartzog, argued that in many ways it’s not really helpful to talk about privacy, which is a vague concept in a world of real-time information, “frictionless sharing,” and “data exhaust” (the information we give off as we move around the Internet, often without realizing it). Instead, they argue that what we are really losing is the protection of obscurity—in the sense that information that was technically public before but difficult to find provided a form of privacy through obscurity:

 

“Obscurity is created through a combination of factors. Being invisible to search engines increases obscurity. So does using privacy settings and pseudonyms. Disclosing information in coded ways that only a limited audience will grasp enhances obscurity, too. Since few online disclosures are truly confidential or highly publicized, the lion’s share of communication on the social web falls along the expansive continuum of obscurity: a range that runs from completely hidden to totally obvious.”

 

As Selinger notes, the recent publication of a map of New York State’s registered gun owners made much the same point as Scott’s examples of disturbing Facebook graph searches. The information about who has a gun permit was public by default in New York when the map was published (although a new law has been proposed that would make it private), but it was difficult to collect and so hardly anyone bothered. Other kinds of information are also technically public—government databases and so on—but difficult or impossible to extract useful data from.

 

Of course, the same thing was the case with much of the world’s information before Google (GOOG) came along, and we had to learn to adjust to the fact that “the Internet never forgets”—that the information you posted online years ago (or information that was posted about you by others) without really thinking of the consequences can come back to haunt you. But Facebook has taken that to a whole new level of intimacy, because much of what occurs there seems so ephemeral: a “like,” a follow, a click—things you might not even remember doing.

 

While they may seem ephemeral, each of these can be as permanent as anything else on the Internet, and just as public, unless you can master the intricacies of what Facebook lets you hide and what it doesn’t (and as Scott notes in his FAQ, you probably shouldn’t rely on that, anyway). As Megan Garber of the Atlantic points out in a post, the social network is essentially constructing a virtual version of you from all those signals—a version that is categorized by all your activities and interests, some of which may be harmless and some of which may not.

 

It may seem absurd that someone might say they “like” racism or that anyone would actually search for that behavior and make use of it somehow. But if we have learned anything from the era of big data, it is that if the information is available—as dirty or questionable as it might be—someone is going to make use of it, and not always in the way you would like them to.

 

 

[ShadySands]

Kidnapped woman rescued by her family

 A family determined to save their kidnapped relative tracked her down to an abandoned Louisiana house, saving her life and killing her captor after she went missing for almost three full days, according to multiple sources.

[Malcador]

 

Kidnapped woman rescued by her family

 A family determined to save their kidnapped relative tracked her down to an abandoned Louisiana house, saving her life and killing her captor after she went missing for almost three full days, according to multiple sources.

 

 

Good on them! 

 

 

Do Squats, ride free on subway

 

Neat idea

Edited November 12, 2013 by Malcador

[Walsingham]

 

If anyone else has been following, the Mayor of Toronto admitted to smoking crack.

 

At the Remembrance Day stuff today some people booed him and called him a crackhead, was brilliant.  Naturally some people are upset as it was not the time or place - which is a bit silly. If you dislike someone, do so 24/7,  don't take breaks.

 

 

I disagree. I would point out that if a crack smoking drunkard can show some dignity on Remembrance Sunday then everyone should be able to.

Edited November 12, 2013 by Walsingham

[Malcador]

He's not really, it's his job to show up and stand there and pretend to be solemn and reflecting over the war dead like the rest of the politicians doing it yesterday.  If he just takes the day off to go play football or sleep in his office imagine the outrage over that - the offense to the veterans and that's no vote winner.

[ShadySands]

Sex and alcohol make you happier than kids and religion

 

Kids are said to fill our lives with poignancy and inexplicable joy, yet it appears many parents would rather be tossing back some bourbon and rolling around in their skivvies than taking care of their beloved offspring. A new study by Carsten Grimm from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand has found people rate sex as the top activity that brings them happiness, followed by drinking alcohol or "partying." Caring for kids (yawn) fell down the list at number five. God also got the cold shoulder, with people rating meditating and religion at number four

[Walsingham]

He's not really, it's his job to show up and stand there and pretend to be solemn and reflecting over the war dead like the rest of the politicians doing it yesterday.  If he just takes the day off to go play football or sleep in his office imagine the outrage over that - the offense to the veterans and that's no vote winner.

 

I think you're being a bit OTT. Just because the guy is a bit wild doesn't mean he doesn't appreciate the war dead.

 

Some of the most monstrous drinkers and ... scratch that ... ALL the monstrous drinkers and drug takers I know are either military or ex military.