Skwid, 25,
Example discussion fodder: the one page resume is, according to some, a relic of by-gone days. Do you agree? Why, or why not? Is this an artifact of the Tech Industry, or more broadly applicable?
Disagree. If I* meet you outside of a tech environment, and I'm interested in you, how do we exchange data? A one page advertisement for you that tells me what you do and how to get a hold of you is going to be way more useful than...pretty much anything I can fit into long term memory.
If I'm interviewing you, and I decide I want to hire you, but I have to convince the rest of the commitee, then having that sheet of paper I can photocopy and pass out at our next meeting is great. If you didn't bring that sheet of paper with you to your interview, then you have to count on me remembering to find it on the company's (buggy) HR webapp.
Arguably, if you can fit the essentials of what you know how to do, and where you did it, onto a single sheet of paper, that's awesome, because nobody is ever going to want to read more than that.
I'm thinking the question isn't "are resumes still useful" but "what are resumes actually used for?" As far as I can tell, all of the scenarios mentioned above, plus the data in them is useful for sorting out who not to call back. That step may or may not be taken over by crappy HR webapps.
*I = hypothetical hiring person
Diatryma, 546,
I've used both digital and film, and if I was going to use a camera to get better at doing photography, I'd use a digital one, even a bad digital one. I used to worry about dropping the camera. I used to carry around the case. I used to wonder if I was going to run out of film. I used to run out of film! I used to run out of money to develop the film, or to buy more. I used to have half a roll of 100 speed in the camera when I knew I was going to need to switch to 800 speed, and agonize over switching it.
My digital camera fits in my pocket, so I take it everywhere. Now I take a lot of pictures, and I get feedback immediately about whether I nailed the composition or flubbed it.
Film cameras are really really good for high quality, low grain pictures compared to digital cameras of the same price*. I try to make sure I have a loaded film camera for those special (but predictable) moments (stuff with kids) that only come around once in a lifetime).
But I depend on my cheap digital camera to teach me how to make better pictures.
*blah blah blah technical stuff blah blah blah it depends on x blah blah blah
Mmm.
More thoughts on academia andartpoetry. If Sturgeon's Law applies inside the walls of academia, then whenever an artform lives both inside and outside the protected zone, the popular version is going to seem to be "better", due to the law of large numbers.
So we end up with people griping about how there's all this great genre stuff versus all this boring literary junk*, but really, it's that there are so many more genre books printed. So in a given year, there may be 100-150 ripping yarns you can't put down, and perhaps 30 that are mindbogglinly awesome. Meanwhile, there may be only 30 really compelling literary novels in a given year, with perhaps 1 to 3 that are mindbogglingly awesome.
I pulled these figures out of the air, and I'm not thinking purely of numbers of books defined as "different titles", nor as "total quantity printed", but both weighted together, to represent the chance that I, as a purchaser, will stumble across a given book.
*I actually think this has more to do with being forced to read the most depressing possible bits of good modern literature in Middle & High school. I mean, come on, 1984, the Outsiders, the Pearl, Glass Menagerie, Lord of the Flies, etc. That's supposed to get people excited about reading? Pshaw!
Interesting.
I used to discuss the problems with capital punishment with some of my more conservative friends. To them, I phrased the objection to capital punishment differently: even if a person thinks capital punishment could be, theoretically, moral*, the real-world application of it is too morally risky** and practically flawed†to be worth the attempt.
Interestingly, they accepted this argument.
*they believe this.
**false positives, or type I errors, for starters, before you get to issues of equity
†for example, the cost to society required to eliminate false positives, before you get to issues of mitigating harm due to false positives.
fidelio, 2,
The Wreck of the Old 97.
ObOffTopic:
I wonder how modern day casemodders and pimp-my-ride types would build steam engines, were they in use today?
Keir, 483,
re: poetry and the fall of Western Civilization
Great is the insight on academia as multiple castles, not one ivory tower.
That said, why does the doing of poetry, the performing of poetry, and the reading of poetry (mostly) live only in academia? (see above comment for caveats) How did it get professionalized to the point of being academicized?
Diatryma, 477,
(perhaps connected) belief that if you can do something well, you do it professionally
That's another interesting concept. I've noticed a certain amount of all or nothing thinking about expertise in the United States*. For example: either you are "talented" and math is easy, or you suck and "math is hard". It doesn't seem like there is a middle ground.
*I'm mostly from the Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes region of the U.S., and I assume that this attitude is local to the U.S. I wonder what abi or Charlie Stross think?
Terry Karney, 472,
Jonathan: Re "modern veres" I could go into a long disquisition on what I think the Romantics, Walt Whitman and the change in "voice" from generic; and nonce, to Inner, has done to the world of poetry.
Well, I'd be interested in finding out what happened to the world of poetry. It's looks like it went from being a common art to being an exclusive one, but it's not clear to me why.
Maybe I assume too much, but I have the feeling that in the time of Poe*, there wasn't nearly as much structural difference between pop-culture poetry and high-art poetry. Did the notion of "pop-culture" exist then, or is that a post WWII idea itself? Am I even talking about something that people here recognize?
It seems as though the technical characteristics of poetry that are really outwardly obvious (rhyme, meter, alliteration) enjoy an active retirement in rock, rap, and hymnody, but that people writing poetry for one another, casually, has disappeared.
*for example.
Lee, 427,
On the other hand, I also notice that for a lot of men, masculinity seems to be a very fragile thing indeed -- easily punctured by any hint of difference from the prevailing male norm
If you are interested in this, some of the group-behavior primate studies are pretty interesting. The "lies-for-engineers" version goes like this: Alpha males, natural leaders run the group. Beta males, wanna-be leaders, try to run the group, fail, and die of stress related diseases. Gamma males pretty much don't give damn about being in control and just do their own thing. Any similarity between this and the Internet Entrepreneur / Middle-Micro-Manager / Code Guru is purely coincidental.*
Anyway, in this model, the fragile masculinity men are the Betas.
*paging Bruce Cohen! What do you think of this?
R. M. Koske, 627,
I have no understanding of what you are asking.
TexAnne, 151,
And Midori--having thought about it some more, I think that what happened was that you posted a shiny piece of research, and I misunderstood it as a reply to my comment about "my family and I? really?" Please don't stop sharing nifty finds like that; on any other day, I would have been as interested as you.
Thank you, that's very kind. I was pretty embarrassed when I re-read the context and figured out how much I'd made an ass of myself.
I'm sorry TexAnne, I wasn't intending a personal insult. (I wasn't intending an insult towards the Scots-Irish, either, I just thought the research interesting.)
TexAnne,127,
Try
Insult, Aggression, and the Southern Culture of Honor: An "Experimental Ethnography" by Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle and Schwarz.
Highlights include:
Compared with northerners-who were relatively unaffected by the insult-southerners were (a) more likely to think their masculine reputation was threatened, (b) more upset (as shown by a rise in cortisol levels), (c) more physiologically primed for aggression (as shown by a rise in testosterone levels), (d) more cognitively primed for aggression, and (e) more likely to engage in aggressive and dominant behavior. Findings highlight the insult-aggression cycle in cultures of honor, in which insults diminish a man's reputation and he tries to restore his status by aggressive or violent behavior.
Short version: controlling for all other factors, white people in small towns in the South kill each other more often than in other regions, probably due to a "culture of honor."
Frickin' awesome!
PW says that Tor and Seven Seas (boutique U.S. manga publisher*) are teaming up! Bonus includes:Not only will the new venture release a combination of original and licensed manga, but also YA prose fiction and “light novels,†a Japanese format featuring illustrated prose novels at small trim size that are generally based on popular manga series.Yay! Maybe I'll finally get access to cool stuff like the Full Metal Panic light novels!
*in other words, original manga products by non Japanese artists plus nifty licensed translations.
Bruce Cohen, 192,
That was really beautiful; I was crying by the time I finished reading it. It has a special resonance for me; as I think I've mentioned here before, I watched from ten miles away as a town in California was destroyed by about 500 tons of Navy bombs in a train that caught fire. In that case we were very lucky, because a) no one was killed or even seriously injured and b) that train was scheduled to go by about 15 feet from my kitchen window a few hours later. So I have some idea what that looked and felt like. I admire Vince Coleman immensely for what he did.
Thanks Bruce.
Do you have a link to an account of that? I'm really quite curious.
Soon Lee, 282
re: LJ kerfuffle.
See also:
they've given users a tool that will easily identify minors without telling them they've been spotted. Minors can't join or be invited to "explicit" communities... so all someone has to do is send out invites to anyone they suspect is underage; if the invite comes back with "can't invite that person," they've got a target.
further advice for Susan
Domain names: Psychic Whois is a fun tool. Great cat-vacuummer that one. It autocompletes/autopredicts domain names and lets you know which ones are already taken. Handy for identifying some one-character typo sites.
Clark E. Myers, in 129, mentioned taking common typos for a domain name as well as the .net, .org, etcs. I'm more of the school of thought that you only really need the .com. (Unless you really are an "organization", in which case you really need the .com and the .org, because everyone uses .com even when they know better. The python programming language site is .org, but sadly the .com equivalent is porn, so, well, you can fill in the blanks.
Typos are much less significant than they used to be, since "less experienced" internet users often just type the domain name into google. That's how most people who aren't directly linked to you will find you anyway.
Hosting/blogging platforms:
I forgot to mention the distinction between wordpress.com vs. wordpress.org. The dot-com offers free (and paid) blogs using Wordpress software. Robert Scoble uses the free dot-com version - it's robust enough. The main downside to the freely hosted version is the lack of customization. I'd pick free wordpress over Google's Blogger anyday, if for no other reason than the default templates for Blogger make it hard for users to click back to the beginning of the blog and read from there.
The dot-org Wordpress site is where you can get support, themes, plugins, etc for the free, open source Wordpress software. You can also download it there, but really, any webhost worth its salt has a one-click installer for your account.
I mentioned Moveable Type in my other post; I didn't mention that I think it has a cooler name, and that our hosts use it.
Oh, and why am I so excited? Well, because I'm a geek for all kinds of knowledge, the more rare and obscure the better. The idea of having someone I know, however peripherally, write intelligently about something technical that they love, is awesome!
I'm related to a fellow who signed the Declaration of Independence*. I don't know if I think that's important - back that far I have an awful lot of relatives that I am equally closely related to. I mean, if I don't know him, and he's only, at most, responsible for 1/64th of my genetic code...?
*from Britain, not one of the other ones.
Oh, I just found a wonderful bit of writing on the...well, I won't spoil it, but it's very much in the vein of what Jim MacDonald wrote on November 14, 2007, (Of Fire, Fire, Fire I Sing… ), it's regarding a historical anniversary for those who hail from Canada, and it's short.
Please take a look.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 123 |
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