This doesn’t surprise me in the least.
LAST week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan acknowledged standardized tests are flawed measures of student progress. But the problem is not so much the tests themselves — it’s the people scoring them…
All of the 100 or so scorers in the room soon became embroiled in the debate. Eventually we came to the “consensus” that the essay deserved a 6 (“genius”), or 4 (well-written but “naughty”), or a zero (“filth”). The essay was ultimately given a zero.
This kind of arbitrary decision is the rule, not the exception. The years I spent assessing open-ended questions convinced me that large-scale assessment was mostly a mad scramble to score tests, meet deadlines and rake in cash.
I’ve always found the Mac’s application install process to be stupid. It’s very simple if you know what you’re doing — certainly a step up from those painful multi-step Windows installers — but given that most people have no idea what a Disk image even is it’s far more complicated than it needs to be.
Alexander Limi has a thoughtful piece regarding the problems Mozilla has identified with the current installation process for Firefox on the Mac. As it stands, they’re following the common pattern of delivering the Firefox app on a disk image, which, when mounted, uses a background image and alias to the /Applications/ folder to encourage users to copy the app from the mounted image to their startup drive. Limi writes:
Some common errors that we have seen repeatedly among informal testing with friends and family are:
They drag the application to their dock directly.
This creates a link to the file inside the disk image, which means that every time they try starting Firefox, the disk image is unpacked and mounted, and starting of Firefox becomes very slow, which makes it a bad experience.They think that starting Firefox is done by opening the disk image every time.
This is very common, and the logic is that the first time they started Firefox, they had to do this, so they continue doing it. This makes starting Firefox a chore, since it takes a lot of clicks to accomplish.
Classic song. And I’m always incredibly impressed by people who can play drums like this and sing at the same time.
I know Twitter has its uses, but looking at the Top Trends these days (which are often just celebrity names or stupid shit) I can’t help but agree with Lyons on many of these points.
The comedian Dane Cook apparently believes he is building his brand by pumping out a steady stream of comments on Twitter, the microblogging site that lets you broadcast 140-character messages to anyone who chooses to become your “follower.” Cook’s followers receive a regular series of bons mots: “Just got my hair cut. When finished she asked me, ‘Do u want any product in your hair?’ I said sure—how about dairy?” Or this: “The future is wide open. What a slut.” Not laughing yet? How about: “I hollowed out the pages of a bible today & hid a smaller bible inside.”
Cook’s comments are so lame and unfunny that what he’s actually doing is revealing, multiple times a day, how little talent he has. It’s morbidly fascinating, kind of like the forbidden thrill you get watching Maury Povich’s show or professional wrestling. You know it’s awful. You know you shouldn’t enjoy it, yet you can’t look away. That, I’m afraid to say, is why I’ve come to believe that, of all the hellish things that have been spawned in the fever swamp that is the Internet, Twitter may turn out to be the most successful of them all—not in spite of its stupidity, but because of it.
Is it just me or does this thing look ridiculously dangerous?
Only $24.95
