Good Articles That Don't Deserve Their Own Threads

Fwiffo said:
People can’t take an SAT online?
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how would you prevent against cheating?

Fwiffo said:
So universities will just let in any Tom, Dick or Harry because it adds to the diversity.
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no universities will let anyone in who wants to expand their knowledge and strive to educate themselves in a world of stupid people and misinformation, not create a status symbol that further stratifies the populace for no good reason and creates a nation of debtors all in the service of a useless piece of paper.
 
Never liked tests when I was a student. Don't see any point in tests now that I'm an adult. Anybody who scores well on those tests probably had good grades at school (because guess what, school is about tests) so not sure why they were that necessary in the first place.

Maybe they help standardize students across the thousands of schools out there, but a team of 50 year old application readers was never going to accurately be able to fully differentiate among the applications of thousands of 18 year old teenagers with just GPAs, test scores, and the ever so easily manipulated resumes and essays they make them write (wasn't there a big scandal about how celebrity parents were buying their children into schools - the illegal way, not the legal donation way which is essentially the same, just on a larger scale with more paperwork and the exclusivity of having a connections at the highest levels).

Hell I never liked school. It gives kids the idea for the first 2 decades of their lives that following this beaten path is the route to whatever they want. When in reality school provides a false structure that quickly vaporizes once you leave and you have young adults who have no idea what the hell to do with their lives so they turn to the workplace to provide the structure of school - working one year at a time for promotions and raises until they're at retirement age or lost their jobs and presto - same issue. They have no idea what to do with their lives. (Insert having kids as another milestone because they're bored and having kids provides additional structure they can build their lives around). And any kid who understands this before they graduate and attempts to do something outside this path is doomed if he or she is not Bill Gates, LeBron James, or Brad Pitt.

Better to have all kids start 'real life' even sooner. Imagine if you knew what you knew about the world at age 30 at age 20. You'd be 10 years ahead of the game.

Now back to the topic, didn't your workplace decide your future based on a test result rather than a track record of proven results in said workplace? Why do you want these institutions to support the SAT?
 
I didn't say I was in favour of standard admittance tests. I posted it as an interesting business story that someone cornered a market with a near monopoly and now in a year or two is facing extinction.

For full disclosure, I took the SAT too but never applied to an American university.
 
ballmouse said:
Never liked tests when I was a student. Don't see any point in tests now that I'm an adult. Anybody who scores well on those tests probably had good grades at school (because guess what, school is about tests) so not sure why they were that necessary in the first place.

Maybe they help standardize students across the thousands of schools out there, but a team of 50 year old application readers was never going to accurately be able to fully differentiate among the applications of thousands of 18 year old teenagers with just GPAs, test scores, and the ever so easily manipulated resumes and essays they make them write (wasn't there a big scandal about how celebrity parents were buying their children into schools - the illegal way, not the legal donation way which is essentially the same, just on a larger scale with more paperwork and the exclusivity of having a connections at the highest levels).

Hell I never liked school. It gives kids the idea for the first 2 decades of their lives that following this beaten path is the route to whatever they want. When in reality school provides a false structure that quickly vaporizes once you leave and you have young adults who have no idea what the hell to do with their lives so they turn to the workplace to provide the structure of school - working one year at a time for promotions and raises until they're at retirement age or lost their jobs and presto - same issue. They have no idea what to do with their lives. (Insert having kids as another milestone because they're bored and having kids provides additional structure they can build their lives around). And any kid who understands this before they graduate and attempts to do something outside this path is doomed if he or she is not Bill Gates, LeBron James, or Brad Pitt.

Better to have all kids start 'real life' even sooner. Imagine if you knew what you knew about the world at age 30 at age 20. You'd be 10 years ahead of the game.

Now back to the topic, didn't your workplace decide your future based on a test result rather than a track record of proven results in said workplace? Why do you want these institutions to support the SAT?
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I find the artificial environment of an examination rather tedious. Which it shouldn't as in lots of cases your future career may depend on it. In the absence of anything better, qualifications particularly vocational ones are are a reasonable benchmark at the starting gate. It weeds out dross and gobshites giving a modicum management of risk of being fooled by those with the gift of the gab, false CV's and glowing references because they wanted to get rid.
 
I found this article really interesting - it's about languages, and one man's rather Quixotic quest to create a new language that is both the most concise, and the most precise, language ever created. I really enjoyed it.

www.newyorker.com

Utopian for Beginners

An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
 
Hovering ship caught off the coast of Falmouth, England.

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It's an optical illusion, known as a superior mirage which is common in the Arctic.

en.wikipedia.org

Mirage - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
www.spectator.co.uk

The mystery and romance of the cassette tape

May the gods of Hiss and Compression bless Lou Ottens. As head of new product development at Phillips, the Dutch engineer invented the compact cassette in 1963 and changed music for ever. Ottens died last week at 94. A good age, and a good number. You could get a full album on each side. For
www.spectator.co.uk www.spectator.co.uk
 
formby002 said:
www.spectator.co.uk

The mystery and romance of the cassette tape

May the gods of Hiss and Compression bless Lou Ottens. As head of new product development at Phillips, the Dutch engineer invented the compact cassette in 1963 and changed music for ever. Ottens died last week at 94. A good age, and a good number. You could get a full album on each side. For
www.spectator.co.uk www.spectator.co.uk
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There's a lot of revisionism on cassette tapes. People say they never had any tapes and the sound was ultra low-fi and crap.

On the best decks i.e. the Nakamichi's and Alpine's the sound was superb. Aiwa walkmans were the best too.

I set-up an Alpine deck with my hi-fi in the early 2010's and with pristine and metal cassettes the sound was very direct and not low-fi in any way.

The Alpine deck is in one of my kid's room now as a bit of retro-antique-chic. The Clash tapes are next to it. There's some 80s set horror series they watch were tape decks are prominent as the musical delivery system of the era.
 
Pimpernel Smith said:
There's a lot of revisionism on cassette tapes. People say they never had any tapes and the sound was ultra low-fi and crap.

On the best decks i.e. the Nakamichi's and Alpine's the sound was superb. Aiwa walkmans were the best too.

I set-up an Alpine deck with my hi-fi in the early 2010's and with pristine and metal cassettes the sound was very direct and not low-fi in any way.

The Alpine deck is in one of my kid's room now as a bit of retro-antique-chic. The Clash tapes are next to it. There's some 80s set horror series they watch were tape decks are prominent as the musical delivery system of the era.
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Very true. A high-quality tape deck, properly set up and maintained (heads cleaned and demagnetised regularly, or in my case every time I recorded) sounded fantastic.

My own preference was for BASF Chrome tapes as they were quiet enough not to require Dolby NR. But you had to be careful with the recording levels as they didn't have a lot of headroom. Anything much above 0dB was a bit iffy. With Metal and some ferric's like TDK's AR you could take them up to +6dB but most tape deck's heads were uncomfortable at that level anyway. Top of the range Naks and Revox's had no problems but they were seriously expensive pieces of kit.

However, I liked his point about curation which is true. You could spend all afternoon at least recording a compilation tape if you cared about quality.
 
www.spectator.co.uk

Why are the Oscars such a lousy guide to great cinema?

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, predicted to win big at this year’s Oscars, is not a terrible film. It’s a slight, sentimental Grapes of Wrath-ish journey through the Discourse, with essential Discourse stop-offs at an Amazon warehouse and the rust belt. It belongs in the New Yorker, not on screen. As...
www.spectator.co.uk www.spectator.co.uk
 
Kingstonian said:
BBC chosen voice for a national emergency. Not exactly Alvar Liddell or the bloke who read the government statements during the Falklands War.

West Country humorous poems is the plan. I suppose Benny Hill’s narratives were also a bit ‘Ampshire.

www.telegraph.co.uk

Secret BBC plan to broadcast Pam Ayres' poems in the event of a national emergency

Jane Garvey revealed rumours of the BBC's special 'emergency voices' plans
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk

)
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I suppose John Cooper Clarke would be out of the question.
 
Kingstonian said:
BBC chosen voice for a national emergency. Not exactly Alvar Liddell or the bloke who read the government statements during the Falklands War.

West Country humorous poems is the plan. I suppose Benny Hill’s narratives were also a bit ‘Ampshire.
Click to expand...

We had a couple of (slender) volumes of Pam Ayres' poetry when I was growing up. Generally doggerel, but amusing at times.

One in particular sticks in my memory, for some reason:

I am a dry stone waller.
All day I dry stone wall.
Of all appalling callings,
Dry stone walling's worst of all.
 
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