Reflecting on another lengthy semester that has had little in the way of real, academia-related memories, it has dawned on me that perhaps university-level education is not exactly as rigorous as might be expected. Not that being grilled on four to six chapters per class every four weeks doesn't put me through my intellectual paces, but I can't help feeling that there must be a better way to learn.
We've been trained to read a textbook, then regurgitate the information on an exam, like some twisted mother sparrow. Instead of nourishing a life, though, we're feeding a system that churns out mindless clones who have been conditioned to follow a certain pattern. We're taught complex equations, entire histories for mighty civilizations, and artistic perspectives by the dozen. The most sinister part of that thought is the "we". In one class here at university, we have about one hundred people. One hundred people taught the same equation, the same way of looking at things through the same scope. No wonder people are repetitive and boring. No wonder people are stuck looking for jobs even after college, while employers have a hard time deciding who to hire. It's not that they have too many dedicated and superior applicants... it's that they have a dozen and a half applicants who are all exactly the same. When the next person in line is indistinguishable from the one before or after, what difference does it make who gets hired?
I digress. Final exams are the next link in the monotonous, chain-fence of education. Nothing says "Here, I'm too busy and too under-funded to teach you anything you won't need to re-learn on the job anyway." like being handed a final exam covering seventeen weeks worth of trivial bullshit. We're discouraging intuition, creativity, and empathy by cramming warm bodies into a lecture hall. Each of us is equipped with the latest in cutting-edge, mundane textbooks written by professors so far out of touch with the working world that they no longer have any relevant experience worth sharing. Then, at the end of the semester, we're told to memorize information that will be readily available to us in any job we might find that is related to that field. For five or more (or less) different classes.
Hold on, it gets better. The moment they're done with said final, students immediately purge from their memory the majority of the information they've just spent two weeks mercilessly hammering into their brain. Some students have realized that the information is useless once the required grade is procured; others simply do not care. As if willpower and indifference alone were not enough to wipe our etch-a-sketch brains clean, eighty percent of college students immediately go out and drink enough alcohol over the weekend to kill and preserve an elephant. In the end, a student is lucky to retain maybe ten percent of what they learned - yet the working world carries on, much as it always has. To all you "but the economy is in recession!" idiots, the economy recedes and rebounds because of government intervention - either too much of it, or too little.
On a side note, the fact that we as a society have come to accept that college students will drink themselves stupid is alarming. More to come during a later post.
In the end, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that what students are learning at the university is not really critical for the most part. Of course there are exceptions, but the majority of majors result in superfluous degrees in fields that require little to no formal training, or training that will be offered immediately upon hiring anyway.
Sorry studio art majors. Your subject is fascinating, but a degree really is not necessary if you choose to be an artist. Once you learn to create art like everyone else, you are in fact having your creative edge blunted. So much for higher education.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Of course this line is secure.. it's just you, me, and the omniscient telecom industry
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/19/AR2008061901545.html?hpid=topnews
You know that beautiful system of government we have? The one designed to uphold the laws defending the rights of the people? Maybe "the system of government we had" is more fitting. On June twenty-fifth (25th), there was a scheduled cloture vote in the Senate. For those unaware, a cloture vote is a vote designed to bring a discussion to a speedy conclusion. When the security of a nation's people is at stake, one might think that time for debate would be at the top of the priority list. The issue at hand? A bill offering complete amnesty to the telecommunications industry for all the wiretapping they enacted at the behest of the Bush administration. The disturbing part, of course, is that they need amnesty at all. Warrantless wiretapping.. all in the name of security, of course. Who needs to follow laws, when they can be retroactively modified? Surely the privacy of our nations inhabitants is unnecessary. If we have nothing to hide, then why be worried? Even the name of the bill bears a chilling title: "Protection of Persons Assisting the Government." This sounds vaguely familiar. Not to fear, 1984 has already passed.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/19/telecom/index.html
The basic idea behind the bill is this: all lawsuits against the telecommunications industry, of which there are over 40 already, will be immediately thrown out once the Attorney General says "they did it for the nation's security". The amnesty is total and unquestionable. Warrantless? Irrelevant. Invasive? Who cares. Illegal? Today, sure. Tomorrow.. well, laws were made to be broken, right? Speaker Pelosi refers to the bill as "balanced". "Balanced" in the sense that both Republicans and Democrats are equally at fault for allowing the government to access our private communications at will.
Of course, it's appalling to think that our government isn't trying to protect us from the terrorists. All it needs is the unconditional power to read all of our emails and telephone calls, with aid from a now-legalized yet discomfortingly Orwellian telecom industry. This will make the difference, I'm telling you. All those terrorists that have been hiding under our noses, using their U.S.-based e-mail addresses/servers? All those discreet, deadly phone calls by extremists using AT&T, Sprint, and other American-based corporations? A thing of the past. Sleep soundly, my dears, Big Brother is here to scare away those big bad terrorists.
Now I'm no history expert, but wasn't the government here put in place to protect the rights of the people? I thought the government was beholden to the citizens, not the other way around. After all, the Constitution was deeply affected by ideals from the Enlightenment. Not that the Constitution carries much weight around here any more. It was only written hundreds of years ago; obviously it is no longer applicable today.
Applause to Senators Russ Feingold and Christopher Dodd for attempting to filibuster the bill.
You know that beautiful system of government we have? The one designed to uphold the laws defending the rights of the people? Maybe "the system of government we had" is more fitting. On June twenty-fifth (25th), there was a scheduled cloture vote in the Senate. For those unaware, a cloture vote is a vote designed to bring a discussion to a speedy conclusion. When the security of a nation's people is at stake, one might think that time for debate would be at the top of the priority list. The issue at hand? A bill offering complete amnesty to the telecommunications industry for all the wiretapping they enacted at the behest of the Bush administration. The disturbing part, of course, is that they need amnesty at all. Warrantless wiretapping.. all in the name of security, of course. Who needs to follow laws, when they can be retroactively modified? Surely the privacy of our nations inhabitants is unnecessary. If we have nothing to hide, then why be worried? Even the name of the bill bears a chilling title: "Protection of Persons Assisting the Government." This sounds vaguely familiar. Not to fear, 1984 has already passed.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/19/telecom/index.html
The basic idea behind the bill is this: all lawsuits against the telecommunications industry, of which there are over 40 already, will be immediately thrown out once the Attorney General says "they did it for the nation's security". The amnesty is total and unquestionable. Warrantless? Irrelevant. Invasive? Who cares. Illegal? Today, sure. Tomorrow.. well, laws were made to be broken, right? Speaker Pelosi refers to the bill as "balanced". "Balanced" in the sense that both Republicans and Democrats are equally at fault for allowing the government to access our private communications at will.
Of course, it's appalling to think that our government isn't trying to protect us from the terrorists. All it needs is the unconditional power to read all of our emails and telephone calls, with aid from a now-legalized yet discomfortingly Orwellian telecom industry. This will make the difference, I'm telling you. All those terrorists that have been hiding under our noses, using their U.S.-based e-mail addresses/servers? All those discreet, deadly phone calls by extremists using AT&T, Sprint, and other American-based corporations? A thing of the past. Sleep soundly, my dears, Big Brother is here to scare away those big bad terrorists.
Now I'm no history expert, but wasn't the government here put in place to protect the rights of the people? I thought the government was beholden to the citizens, not the other way around. After all, the Constitution was deeply affected by ideals from the Enlightenment. Not that the Constitution carries much weight around here any more. It was only written hundreds of years ago; obviously it is no longer applicable today.
Applause to Senators Russ Feingold and Christopher Dodd for attempting to filibuster the bill.
"Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity," Feingold said.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/19/AR2008061901545_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2008061903766)
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Too much money, and not enough to do with it? Wait... I might have gotten it wrong.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9920665-7.html
Apparently the esteemed Senator Biden has started a push to use custom software to monitor P2P networks across the nation, in an effort to stem the transfer of child pornography, and violent scenes of a sexual nature. Now I hate to rain on our idealistic parade here, but I think certain logistics are not being accounted for. Discounting the ludicrous amount of time and effort it would take to centralize any such observational effort, it still would cost in excess of one billion dollars to carry out. Unless I'm much mistaken, and the magical loan fairy does in fact exist, that would mean one billion of our tax dollars are being funneled into a nearly impossible attempt to control what sort of pornography we look at.
I'm also mildly disturbed that this is the man who is reviving a push to "sanitize" the internet. I quote, "(it is) pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation, simply by looking at file names." That right-click - rename function (for us PC users) is a doozy to be sure, but I'd figure that with our tech-savvy generation, most people would have figured out how to rename files. As innocent as "15yearold gangbang anal orgy" sounds, I still think that renaming would be among the priorities here.
At least he's not blaming the internet. "Blaming this problem on peer-to-peer innovation is like blaming the interstate highway system when someone uses it to transport drugs," he says. An astute observation, but naive, I feel. P2P is exactly what the name says - Peer-to-Peer. Direct connection, as much as is possible via the internet. In such circumstances, it is obvious that certain liberties will be taken. There is a lot of freedom on the internet, and such a direct connection makes it even harder to keep tabs on who is trading what sort of file. Plus, it is supposedly difficult to actually pin any crimes on such e-lawbreakers, if you will, because of inconsistencies in things like IP addresses. Tapping an individual computer is a legitimate plan, but then we run into those pesky privacy laws that have been the source of so much controversy. Even ignoring such laws, we run into the issue of logistics again. There is no way the U.S. Government has enough money or time to finance such a wide-spread culling of "uncleans". Honestly, don't we have better things to do with our time and money? I'm not suggesting we ignore child/violent pornography, but I don't see how stopping people from looking at pictures of it is going to solve the issue. We're grasping at the edges of the problem, while ignoring the source.
The definition of child pornography has gotten alarmingly vague recently, as well. Back in 2006, there was the intriguing case of Jeff Pierson (check end of entry for link), the photographer who took pictures of aspiring, under-18 models. To my unending amusement, the prosecutors actually acknowledged that at no point did Pierson actually take any photos of an unclothed, or even mostly-unclothed, minor. Instead, they suggested that the poses of his minors were "illegally provocative". One article in the New York Times went so far as to suggest that what Pierson was doing was the next stage of child exploitation. Never mind the nude movie scenes of Brooke Shields at 12, or nearly-naked Jodie Foster at 14. I'm trying to find the difference in the above scenarios. As sinful as those still-photos of fully-clothed children are, I'm still leaning towards the fully nude minor in movies as being the greater of two evils. Evidently I missed out on the "judging pornography" lessons somewhere along the line, but I digress. With the ruling in that case, the floodgates have been opened on the fine line between sexy and pornographic. Admittedly, the ruling occurred in Alabama, so there is no indication that other states would follow suit. With no nation-wide standard, I would imagine it falls upon individual districts, or maybe state governments, to decide. (That is how it sounds from the article) At that point, there would be no way to universally apply Senator Biden's "Fairplay" software to catch child pornographers.
Of course, all this fails to take into account the overseas child pornography. I'm sure France, Germany, and every other nation will be kind enough to respect our ill-planned crusade against child pornography, and restrict their ability to share files with us accordingly.
http://www.news.com/Federal-case-may-redefine-child-porn/2100-1030_3-6139524.html
Apparently the esteemed Senator Biden has started a push to use custom software to monitor P2P networks across the nation, in an effort to stem the transfer of child pornography, and violent scenes of a sexual nature. Now I hate to rain on our idealistic parade here, but I think certain logistics are not being accounted for. Discounting the ludicrous amount of time and effort it would take to centralize any such observational effort, it still would cost in excess of one billion dollars to carry out. Unless I'm much mistaken, and the magical loan fairy does in fact exist, that would mean one billion of our tax dollars are being funneled into a nearly impossible attempt to control what sort of pornography we look at.
I'm also mildly disturbed that this is the man who is reviving a push to "sanitize" the internet. I quote, "(it is) pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation, simply by looking at file names." That right-click - rename function (for us PC users) is a doozy to be sure, but I'd figure that with our tech-savvy generation, most people would have figured out how to rename files. As innocent as "15yearold gangbang anal orgy" sounds, I still think that renaming would be among the priorities here.
At least he's not blaming the internet. "Blaming this problem on peer-to-peer innovation is like blaming the interstate highway system when someone uses it to transport drugs," he says. An astute observation, but naive, I feel. P2P is exactly what the name says - Peer-to-Peer. Direct connection, as much as is possible via the internet. In such circumstances, it is obvious that certain liberties will be taken. There is a lot of freedom on the internet, and such a direct connection makes it even harder to keep tabs on who is trading what sort of file. Plus, it is supposedly difficult to actually pin any crimes on such e-lawbreakers, if you will, because of inconsistencies in things like IP addresses. Tapping an individual computer is a legitimate plan, but then we run into those pesky privacy laws that have been the source of so much controversy. Even ignoring such laws, we run into the issue of logistics again. There is no way the U.S. Government has enough money or time to finance such a wide-spread culling of "uncleans". Honestly, don't we have better things to do with our time and money? I'm not suggesting we ignore child/violent pornography, but I don't see how stopping people from looking at pictures of it is going to solve the issue. We're grasping at the edges of the problem, while ignoring the source.
The definition of child pornography has gotten alarmingly vague recently, as well. Back in 2006, there was the intriguing case of Jeff Pierson (check end of entry for link), the photographer who took pictures of aspiring, under-18 models. To my unending amusement, the prosecutors actually acknowledged that at no point did Pierson actually take any photos of an unclothed, or even mostly-unclothed, minor. Instead, they suggested that the poses of his minors were "illegally provocative". One article in the New York Times went so far as to suggest that what Pierson was doing was the next stage of child exploitation. Never mind the nude movie scenes of Brooke Shields at 12, or nearly-naked Jodie Foster at 14. I'm trying to find the difference in the above scenarios. As sinful as those still-photos of fully-clothed children are, I'm still leaning towards the fully nude minor in movies as being the greater of two evils. Evidently I missed out on the "judging pornography" lessons somewhere along the line, but I digress. With the ruling in that case, the floodgates have been opened on the fine line between sexy and pornographic. Admittedly, the ruling occurred in Alabama, so there is no indication that other states would follow suit. With no nation-wide standard, I would imagine it falls upon individual districts, or maybe state governments, to decide. (That is how it sounds from the article) At that point, there would be no way to universally apply Senator Biden's "Fairplay" software to catch child pornographers.
Of course, all this fails to take into account the overseas child pornography. I'm sure France, Germany, and every other nation will be kind enough to respect our ill-planned crusade against child pornography, and restrict their ability to share files with us accordingly.
http://www.news.com/Federal-case-may-redefine-child-porn/2100-1030_3-6139524.html
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