Just yesterday, I saw on the news that Bush has a new strategy for Iraq: he'll be giving a series of (ridiculous) speeches aimed at justifying his invasion of Iraq. He still believes his poll numbers are in the tank because Americans have a perception problem. That's perhaps why he…
To optimize next-generation action-items, it is important to enable leading-edge models to enable one-to-one solutions thereby facilitating aggregate robust portals. Of course, to benchmark front-end paradigms and thereby embrace user-centric architectures is probably a better way to engineer leading-edge metrics.
If you’re wincing at the above paragraph, please forgive me. I’m just having a bit of fun, thanks to a site called “Web economy bullshit generator.” Whenever you press the “make bullshit” button, the site gives you an impressive sounding phrase. This site has many “uses.” For instance, see the comments to the site:
The Web Bullshit Generator is phenomenal…my resume never looked so good!
—Cory L.This is a great job interview prep tool and provides fodder to use on chicks at the bar. I’m also going to use this in preparation for my high school reunion.
—Ryan F.
No one could ever fall for such stilted, meaningless and concocted gibberish, right? Not so fast! Using big words and proper syntax goes a long way to making something appear meaningful. For example, the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, a leading journal of cultural studies contained an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The author was Alan Sokal, a real life physicist at New York University. As indicated here, in an article by the Skeptical Inquirer’s Martin Gardner:
…[Sokal’s] paper included thirteen pages of impressive endnotes and nine pages of references.” But Sokal had actually submitted these 13 pages
If you want to know what our government approving as sex-ed these days, go ahead and take this simple 10-question test published by Naral. It only takes a couple of minutes. Your answers will be scored and explained and you'll probably be shaking your head even if you've been keeping…
Check out the map below. It is a map of the Linguistic Geography of the Mainland United States (a higher resolution version is available here): Imagine that there is some loony person who would argue that the dialect he speaks is the one true, objectively superior dialect and that all other dialects are inferior…
If someone asked you how deeply you subscribe to biases- based on race, age, sex, sexual orientation, or religion- what would you say? The more open-minded of us usually try to avoid prejudice at all costs, to the extent that we reject our natural tendency to generalize. But even if we don’t accept it, society exposes us to a barrage of prejudiced perspectives on a daily basis.
How many times do you see a black criminal at large on the local news? How often do household cleaning product commercials center on women? How does the teenage character behave on prime-time sitcoms? These small, frequent examples spread a variety of stereotypes, and impact the way we perceive others, even if we feel loath to recognize such bias.
Since most people don’t want to admit upholding prejudice, Harvard psychologists devised the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT tests whether an individual has a preference for certain ideals of gender, race, and other categories, all of which indicate bias. The test works like this:
Below I’ve provided a list of words, and four categories. The IAT asks you to group the words provided into one of two columns. Each column represents two categories- in this case, Male & Career, and Women & Family. Go down the list and tap the appropriate column on your screen for each word as quickly as you can without making any mistakes:
You probably found that test fairly simple. Now try it with two of the …