It is not like western channels were truthful all the time. Keeping America, compare fox news information with msnbc. No way both are telling truth about cornavirus.
You would be surprised, but fox news is what is coming out of America. And currently American president is taking facts from there and disseminated them in press conferences.
And half the population dislike Trump. And they can criticise him freely. And do.
But as you ignored the last question (Answer: China is a big country, not Fox News), here's a new one for you. Which Chinese guy named Li Wenliang tried to warn people the shit was hitting the fan and then got seriously slapped down for it because reality wasn't what president Xi wanted to hear? And then died of exactly what he was trying to warn about?
American doctor was fired for talking about lack of materials for doctors and nurses.
I understand what you are talking about, but there was enough data public about China having trouble in January. And there was that report from secret service that was known by goverment and became public later. The situation being bad in China was not opaque or unknown. They dis not actually managed to make it much of secret.
And right now, "Chinese are lying" is used as propaganda to make Americans think that situation is quite good and defensive measures are unnecessary. It just can't possibly be that America has taken lead in infected. America ia the greatest always and in everything. It just can't be, it would be just fine to open economy and it is all hoax.
Well, as you seem to struggle with that one too, the clue's in the question - the guy's name was Li Wenliang!
Anyway
> American doctor was fired for talking about lack of materials for doctors and nurses
Link please. Then we'll see if it's so, and if so, if there's any comparison.
> but there was enough data public about China having trouble in January
Indeed there was. I used that info to prepare BTW. And it only got out because the CCP could not suppress it totally. So "the CCP failed to suppress..." is not the same as "the CCP published...". Indeed, you said it better than I did: "They di[d] not actually managed to make it much of secret"
Wenliang had more balls and brains than the entire CCP put together. I salute the gent.
> And right now, "Chinese are lying"
Not The Chinese. Not Wenliang and those like him. The CCP and their mouthpieces.
> It just can't possibly be that America has taken lead in infected
The US fucked up monumentally and will pay the price. That much the US recognises, and all of it will do in just a very few weeks.
Unlike news companies, commentators do not gain monetary value from sensationalism.
Authors of articles are generally more informed than their pieces suggest, but their editors step in and make the story "pop" for readers in order to generate clicks. This often involves removing nuance. I believe that most major news organizations make an honest effort to be factual, but there's a lot of room within the facts to be misleading.
A commentator that is an expert in the field is not constrained by an editor, and can in a few paragraphs give a more realistic and accurate assessment of the phenomenon.
When I read articles about things in which I'm not knowledgeable, I don't trust the conclusions until I see high quality comments(or tweets) that confirm the thesis of the article.
The modern Chinese psyche has been sculpted in large part due to the Cultural Revolution.
People who have grown up in comfort do not fully comprehend the effect of widespread hunger on a large population. Natural selection rewarded those that put their families above everything. The families that did not died. Parents that did not do everything in their power to feed their children watched them starve to death in their hands.
Many things about modern China can be directly linked to this shared national pain.
The absolute, obsessive drive of Chinese parents to have their children study and reach a higher station of life is a direct result of the culture of hustle instilled by their parents and grandparents. Devotion to families, incredible work ethic, creativity and innovation can all be traced back to the skills necessary to survive the Cultural Revolution.
However, many of the problems in modern China can be linked to this phenomenon. Bribery, open piracy, corruption are common in every walk of Chinese life. Chinese people put themselves, and their families, first and they've never had a compelling argument against it. People in the West believe in their institutions in a way that doesn't exist in China.
But, time will change this. There is clear precedent in the West that each successive generation that grows up outside of poverty will be less and less cutthroat compared to the generation prior.
I'm completely in your camp. I don't know if I would blow my brains out. But the guilt of saving my dog over a child, would, at least for a while, completely consume me, and forever haunt me.
The letter is a massive mistake. The most ardent feminists that I know aren't willing to defend it. It's absolutely and clearly hypocritical, and maps directly into every shitty, awful defense of a male sexual harasser, just with the pronouns switched. It's a shocking lapse of judgement that the co-signees were not able to understand that.
I find it frustrating that this letter gives cover to the kneejerk victim blaming defenses over the last year of male sexual harassers. It's a straightforward argument for those writers to point out that a group of world renown feminists, who have studied power dynamics in-depth, fell into the exact same trap. This is exactly the wrong conclusion to reach, and stalls the momentum of a movement that was doing genuine good. I disagree with the trend of dismissing due process in the #MeToo movement, but it is absolutely undeniable that it has brought justice to victims of horrible abuse, in a way that simply would not have been possible 2 or 3 years ago, and should be applauded for that.
"It's absolutely and clearly hypocritical, and maps directly into every shitty, awful defense of a male sexual harasser.."
I haven't seen any such similar defense of a male harasser. Some individuals dared to say something about someone here or there, but a letter by a group of leaders in the field that the accused works in... No, nothing of the sort.
From a purely Orwellian standpoint, I think the Russian model of government/media interaction is more effective.
There is "freedom of press" in Russia, and there are opposition media groups, but they are toothless. Journalists that publish scoops on high-level Russian government figure are in serious danger. Therefore, the opposition media produces watered down, safer takes. This allows state media to refute the opposition points step by step, so that the next time the argument is made, the viewer feels that it has already been addressed.
Contrast this with media blackouts like in North Korea. While NK's propaganda is extremely effective at training their population not to believe foreign accounts, they have a serious problem when it comes to South Korean movies/TV/music. NK citizens are fed the narrative about dire conditions in SK their entire lives. When they begin watching smuggled SK media, they realize that SK is in a much better economic place than them. This results in a serious erosion of trust towards the NK government, which is evident in the number of NK refugees who point at SK entertainment as being the impetus for their escape. This seems ridiculous on the face of it, but makes sense in light of how it results in a breakdown of belief towards the NK government.
If, instead, the NK government accurately portrayed what life looks like in SK, but provided reasons and justifications for the difference, they would not have this problem. There would not be the cold water shock when citizens saw a SK movie for the first time and realized that their world was a lie.
You also see this type of thing with $POLITICAL_PARTY's big social media personalities. They take a watered-down, strawman version of the other side's argument and refute it. When their followers see the real version of the argument elsewhere, they are primed to disregard it, and they roll their eyes and laugh and move on. Whereas, if they saw the argument and it was novel to them, they would be much more inclined to read and consider it on merit.
I've worked with Chinese students who are studying abroad who slowly begin to lose belief in their government when living outside of China. It is not the hardcore, biting Western anti-Chinese propaganda that makes them lose their trust, but the day-to-day life of living in a place where there is substantially less corruption, genuine freedom of the press, and information is much more open.
> If, instead, the NK government accurately portrayed what life looks like in SK, but provided reasons and justifications for the difference, they would not have this problem.
I think they still would. People (at least some) would look at the difference, look at the alleged justification for the difference, and think that the justification was bunk.
Russia has had much more time to hone their information warfare and propaganda abilities. And now that they're led by a KGB officer with extensive experience in political manipulation, they're effectively a Chekist state and can synchronize narratives in very politically savvy ways, like you stated.
By cutting exams short, we are losing information about the student's knowledge in return for information about how well students work under pressure.
As an employer, "working under pressure" is not very high on my list of
considerations. I would much rather have a complete picture of the candidate's ability to learn and retain information. Well-designed systems take months and months to build, I would prefer information about the candidate's general aptitude than their ability to work in crunch time.
If I was looking for employees for a job in which "working under pressure" was a central component, I would rather test for that in the interview process and have their university scores be uncompromised by pressure.
As an employer you can easily test anything you want during the interview, tailored to the job's needs and expectation: technical knowledge, working under pressure, soft skills, etc. Then why would you care about school marks when the candidate proves able on the interview?
It's because academic performance is by design an average of skills displayed over multiple years. You can't fulfill the expectations of all employers at once with a standardized test. The degree (and the marks attached to it) just show the average performance per topic over the years. How fast you can finish your assignment is an integral part of any academic program. That's why you get tight(ish) deadlines for any assignment, and exam times.
By extending that time you can no longer make the difference between 2 people with good knowledge but different working under pressure skills. That's the difference between good and best.
I'm not saying the exams become irrelevant, just that this kind of thing does more to discredit the image of women in STEM than a slightly lower exam mark. This just strengthens preconceptions that some groups need help to be equal. And it's backed up by universities and whatever science they used to reach this conclusion.
Knowledge tests that introduce time pressure become lossy. An employer can test performance under pressure and extrapolate that against historical data, but they cannot do it in the reverse order as the information is lost.
> By extending that time you can no longer make the difference between 2 people with good knowledge but different working under pressure skills. That's the difference between good and best.
This is true, but if two students have the same score from elongated tests and one does not test well under pressure, it's straightforward to understand that one of the students would have performed better on a time pressure exam. However, consider:
Student A achieves 92% on a 1.75 hour exam but would have achieved 90% on a 1.5 hour exam. Student B achieves 94% on a 1.75 hour exam but would have achieved 88% on a 1.5 hour exam.
In a 1.5 hour exam, the clear conclusion is that student A is the better student. But is student A truly the better student in this scenario? The exam length is a rough estimate made by a university, and it seems like an arbitrary line to draw.
Allowing every student to have enough time to show the breadth of their knowledge on the subject material is not "helping" women. The same principle is applied to both men and women. It is an attempt to provide a level playing field and work towards meritocracy.[1]
Consider an exam on a technical subject that contains questions that are difficult to parse in English. Non-native English speakers have trouble parsing the questions which results in lower test scores. If I suggest that we simplify the language in order to accurately gauge the students knowledge of the subject, you may suggest that this is discrimination against native English speakers. This is undoubtedly true in the context, but it is an attempt to move towards a level playing field which tests knowledge of the subject, which is the entire point of the exercise. You can test for English proficiency separately, that is not the point of the exam.
[1] Contrast this with link 2 in the GP which is straightforward discrimination against men and was roundly rejected for that reason.
Yes, #1 "is different" than the OP. It would only be equivalent if women were allowed more time than men to complete the exam.*
#2 is a completely misleading headline. It ... never happened. An article in which the 2nd paragraph contradicts the headline isn't written in good faith.
[*] I would also argue that extending exams so that each student has a reasonable amount of time to finish is not a bad practice. A student that gives a correct answer in the extra 15 minutes is no less knowledgeable than a student that gives the correct answer in the original allocated time. We are selecting for breadth and depth of knowledge, not speed of recitation or ability to perform under pressure. In a CS exam, you either know the answer or you do not. Extra time is not going to allow you to falsify your level of knowledge. It will, however, give slower workers the ability to fully complete the exam.
Students that work quickly but are less knowledgeable than their peers are the only ones that would be penalized by this change. Those students have inflated scores relative to their knowledge, therefore this penalization should be encouraged. In an untimed test, the most knowledgeable student will always get the highest test score, therefore knowledgeable students should not be opposed to increasing test times, they should encourage them.
You believe that a student that derives a proof from scratch is less knowledgeable than a student that rote memorizes it out of a textbook?
My argument comes from the perspective of the real world. It is, in effect, the same type of argument that drives the "interview questions on a whiteboard" discussion -- which qualities are actually important in an employee? As someone involved with hiring for a company that consistently produces high quality, critical code used in important systems, my experience is that "working under pressure" is pretty far down the list of important qualities.
I'm not saying the person that came to the proof with 30 mins extra is not smart, but they were not able to meet the same expectation as the other students.
If everyone gets a 50, the grades will scale, and your final grade will depend on how you performed compared to the rest
I've brute forced a few proofs, and if i had done so in overtime, i would 100% stand by my viewpoint that i deserve less points than the student next to me who met the expectation.
In an interview it's different too, because you have not been preparing for a clearly defined expectation for 3 months.
Now on the other hand, if you were to argue for completely untimed exams, i can get behind that. I really enjoyed some of my take home CS finals, and it really let me perfect my solution to the best of my ability.
It really depends on what expectation is set (imo)
What does it matter if students meet the expectation that is set if the expectation has no bearing on anything useful? Surely the university's goal should be to produce capable graduates, not to simply have a contest of who is better at taking pointless exams. If they want to adjust the expectations set for students to put less emphasis on rapid recitation of rote memorization, that is a good thing.
So first: most jobs require you to do a lot of stuff that you may not agree with or feel is useful. I don't want to work with the person who is going to only do what they want when they want. At the end of the day the work needs to get done.
Secondly: any school that has GPA is essentially holding a contest. Many job postings consider GPA and may use it as a tiebreaker between 2 canidates from school X. It's not a perfect metric by any means, but it is relevant in the world today for new hires.
Work in the real world is largely the ability to deliver on expectations.
Okay, but why that particular set of hoops to jump through rather than some other set of hoops to jump through? Why should the university have to stick with one set of hoops to jump through just because it's the one they happened to pick decades ago?
In college, I did well on math exams precisely because I had a strong understanding of what I was doing. I did not mechanically follow a recipe for a solution like some other students did.
The result was that I usually took the entire exam period (right up to the last minute) to finish, but I usually had a perfect score or close to it. I outperformed high scorers who had completed the exam 30 mins before me by almost 10 points.
The only exam that got the best of me was the first linear algebra exam, which was a lot of mechanical matrix multiplying. I only completed 3/4 questions before the time was up.
The reality is that you should be learning how to prove, not memorizing proofs.
The student who was most prepared would be able to derive proofs (by the process that was taught, like knowing to apply a theorom, or being comforatable with induction, etc) in a timely manner.
The exam is there to see how well you grasp the material taught, not how good at winging it you are (which is a very useful skill of course, but not the one being tested)
I had an CS exam where I was familiar with all the topics asked and knew all the answers and even how to apply them, well despite some quirks surely ;P
But some questions in the exam required us to apply some algorithms by hand. I knew how they worked and I could also do them by hand. Did it on whiteboard with toy problems while studying for it. But what I didn't really expected was how fast the time run with manual execution on paper.. Even for modest data sizes.
I thought that the algos really could be improved to be much faster by hand, refactor to optimize for different operation costs when doing by hand given the available tools in the exam, reducing operation costs by speeding up hotspot manual steps by training right into muscle memory and better memory alignment on paper for faster data lookups in the first place.
I probably could have finished that exam in time, but with a baaad score. So I just quit and gave them a blank paper with my name to try again next time.
I knew what the real problem was: time, and I had a plan how to prepare for it.
It worked =)
An exam where you can hand in a blank paper to try again later and not just get a 0 seems like it would be uncommon. I certainly never had that experience.
Interesting. My experience was in the US, and I would have kept that 0 unless my professor was feeling _very_ generous. I don't think it would be completely unheard of to have a professor with a policy like you described, but I never ran into it.
We wouldn't have been forced to drop out (at least not due to that exam in isolation), but the 0 would have been considered as part of our final grade for the course.
My experience is that the exam is at the end of the course, so the 0 would be your grade for the course. And you can't finish your degree without passing grades on every course in the degree, so if there were no second chances then that would mean the end of your study.
At my university the year was divided into three trimesters with exam periods at the end, and a fourth exam period at the end of summer holiday. Each exam period would have the exams of all the courses of the previous trimester and also exams of courses of the trimester before for people who still needed to pass that course. If you fail the exam twice, you have to try again when the exam is given again next year (or try to argue with the prof to get special arrangements, say if it's the only one you still need for your degree).
I would agree with you if Snowden narrowly leaked the details of the PRISM program. I think if he did that he would have been a genuine hero. But he didn't. He downloaded as much secret information as he could, and gave them to organizations that were openly hostile to American interests.
Consider the level of detail of methods and sources in the information leaked by Snowden. I think one would have to be extremely naive to believe that Russia and China did not get their hands on the Snowden leaks very quickly(and that's the most charitable interpretation). Therefore, the leaks weakened the US's geopolitical position and improved the position of their rivals.
For a command-in-chief to reward a person who did that with a Medal of Freedom would be a truly baffling choice.
Isn't it also naive to think China and Russia weren't fully aware of the NSA's capabilities? If anything the only effect it had on intelligence agencies is it accelerated the smaller countries towards this type of mass surveillance, they learned thoroughly what was possible - beyond what you can buy at miltech trade shows. And now we see many awful countries mimicking this type of stuff now, like in Ethiopia.
But otherwise for 99% of it the only one it was new and valuable to was the public.
As good as the FBI/IC is at counter-intelligence if Snowden can do this stuff I'm sure a highly trained spy recruited by any top tier agency could get similar access.
Also notably Snowden did not leak the really sensitive TAO stuff, which was well compartmentalized. He mostly leaked spreadsheets for the 'middle management' in NSA. I'm sure he only revealed a small portion of their top-teir capabilities. And the stuff he did leak was almost always very vague, often just a few bullet points in a spreadsheet was all we had to work with...
> Isn't it also naive to think China and Russia weren't fully aware of the NSA's capabilities?
The latest Mueller indictment suggests no.
I believe that the NSA's domestic surveillance programs were an egregious mistake. However, I do not think that "awful countries" implemented domestic surveillance programs because they read the PRISM documents. Nor does it explain why Snowden leaked details of activities that were not illegal and fully within the mandate of the NSA.
You may correct me if you know better, but I have not seen any information that was leaked that I didn't imagine Russia or China already being very aware of.
Was this information revealed to only Russia/China and kept from journalists? If so how do you know about it?
"They probably already know about it" seems like a weird standard to use for answering the question of if making a particular state secret public harms the National interest.
Skinning is probably a slight misnomer. The skins are applied to the player's weapons and can be seen by all other players as well as spectators. They are, in effect, a status symbol.
This feeds into the supply and demand component quite heavily, as you can imagine. All secondary effects follow this initial relationship.
It's a very simple cause-and-effect.