Socialism -v- Communism Was: A Rant: David Weber's Politicians.
Thomas
There seems to be a bit of a difficulty among certain members of this
group when it comes to distingishing Socialism from Marxist-Leninist
Communism.
The difficulty being that they don't. At all. They then proceed to
label the whole of socialist thought as Evil and reject it.
The facts are that social democracy, which is the cornerstone of most
existant welfare states* is pretty much the only ideology that does
not have massacres to its name (yet!) and that some of policies they
pursue must be more economically effective than the largely
laize-faire policies of the US.
This last point followes logically from the fact that a lot of the
policies they pursue are manifestly a good deal less than optimal
while their economic growth rates are about as high as the U.S. over
long periods of time.
This has been largely obscured by the recent lengthy boom in the US
economy but is nonetheless true.
Per capitam The US is richer than Sweden or Denmark, but not by a
great deal and most of the difference stems from the fact that
americans work longer hours and have shorter vacations.
So what are the european welfare states doing right? In my wiev some
of the main things are:
1. State sponsored education at all levels, including universities,
for everyone.
This is both a huge competitive advantage and a really neat piece of
social engineering. When students don't have to cough up the dough to
get a masters it means a number of things. 1. You get a lot more
people with masters degrees. 2. They don't have huge student loans 3.
1&2 means they are a comparatively cheap labor 4. Social mobility. The
ability to climb the educational ladder fairly easily defuses a good
number of social tensions. 5. You can go to college even if your
parents dissapprove.
This policy is also self financing. College graduates make more money,
and thus pay more taxes.
2. State sponsored medical treatment for everyone. America pays more
than anybody else for health care, by a wide margin, but it doesn't
get better care than western europe. I also suspect that private
healthcare is a large part of the cause of the american tendency to
sue corporations for large damages amounts of money. A jury sees
someone who broke their spine and they know they are looking at far
more medical bills than most insurers will cover and this could easily
produce a strong desire to find someone, preferably with deep pockets,
to hold resposible..
*A few places with vast amounts of oil are welfare states without
being social democracies
Paul Austin
"Thomas" wrote
>
> There seems to be a bit of a difficulty among certain members of this
> group when it comes to distingishing Socialism from Marxist-Leninist
> Communism.
> The difficulty being that they don't. At all. They then proceed to
> label the whole of socialist thought as Evil and reject it.
>
> The facts are that social democracy, which is the cornerstone of most
> existant welfare states* is pretty much the only ideology that does
> not have massacres to its name (yet!) and that some of policies they
> pursue must be more economically effective than the largely
> laize-faire policies of the US.
The issues you cite below as characteristic of social-democrat states (as
opposed to the *cruel, heartless Capitalist US*) are the areas where there's
considerable overlap _with_ the US. The US provides considerable
state-furnished medical and education services. The difference is in
universality (on the one hand) and duration (on the other).
The area of overlap between social-democrat states and socialist ones (state
ownership and direction of industry) are real enough and are the real
distinguishing characteristic between US and the EC
>
> This last point followes logically from the fact that a lot of the
> policies they pursue are manifestly a good deal less than optimal
> while their economic growth rates are about as high as the U.S. over
> long periods of time.
> This has been largely obscured by the recent lengthy boom in the US
> economy but is nonetheless true.
> Per capitam The US is richer than Sweden or Denmark, but not by a
> great deal and most of the difference stems from the fact that
> americans work longer hours and have shorter vacations.
One thing that the US, Sweden, Denmark (and Norway) have in common is
largely escaping devastation during WWII. That's a hint.
As far as employment is concerned, try getting a job as a school-leaver in
France. Or Germany. The labo(u)r markets in Europe have been managed to the
benefit of incumbents and the detriment of entrants for decades. Hence those
shorter hours and longer vacations. The productivity of e.g. French workers
is comparable with USian workers but it's hell gaining _entry_ into that
work force.
>
> So what are the european welfare states doing right? In my wiev some
> of the main things are:
>
> 1. State sponsored education at all levels, including universities,
> for everyone.
> This is both a huge competitive advantage and a really neat piece of
> social engineering. When students don't have to cough up the dough to
> get a masters it means a number of things. 1. You get a lot more
> people with masters degrees. 2. They don't have huge student loans 3.
> 1&2 means they are a comparatively cheap labor 4. Social mobility. The
> ability to climb the educational ladder fairly easily defuses a good
> number of social tensions. 5. You can go to college even if your
> parents dissapprove.
> This policy is also self financing. College graduates make more money,
> and thus pay more taxes.
Higher education is a good, no doubt of it. As far as student loans are
concerned, they're small on the scale starting income of the more lucrative
fields like engineering, sciences and medicine. They're _huge_ on the scale
of starting income at graduation of a Modern Language Association member...
You might say that those student loans provide market feedback into choice
of major curriculum.
Out of curiousity, what's the mean time to graduation. If _I_ could have, I
would have stayed at University. And stayed and stayed.
--
"I don't wonder that so many men are wicked.
I do wonder that so many are unashamed"
Paul F Austin
pau...@digital.net
Andrew Lannon
news:eWQQ7.127137$tf5.6...@bin5.nnrp.aus1.giganews.com...
> Higher education is a good, no doubt of it. As far as student loans are
> concerned, they're small on the scale starting income of the more
lucrative
> fields like engineering, sciences and medicine. They're _huge_ on the
scale
> of starting income at graduation of a Modern Language Association
member...
> You might say that those student loans provide market feedback into choice
> of major curriculum.
Student loans are considerable to _any_ graduate, unless they get a "plum"
job. If I'd've stayed a computer science major (well, if I'd've ever
managed to pass CalII), I would've been making ~$60,000 a year, but would've
paid out at least that much during college. Usually takes 5-6 years to
graduate for most people at A&M (or more, for higher-end engineers, premed,
etc), $8,000-$10,000 a semester after tuition, books, material (discounting
living expenses), for a grand graduating total of $80,000 (5 years=10
semesters times $8k) -$120,000 (6 years=12 semesters times $10,000). I'm
paying for my own college, which makes for a hellish schedule (R&D for a
computer company and a full-time student), but after college I'll be in the
black. Most graduate students (informally known as "gradslaves") have it
even worse.
The thing to remember is that while an engineer may make half again (or even
twice) as much as a Languages or Education major, they also have more
classes, and a higher percentage of those classes require lab fees,
expensive materials, and craploads of studying.
(And A&M's a relatively inexpensive school...I'm almost glad I didn't decide
to go to MIT instead. Ouch!)
> Out of curiousity, what's the mean time to graduation. If _I_ could have,
I
> would have stayed at University. And stayed and stayed.
Depends. As a ComSci major, it would've taken me probably 10 semesters; 14
hours average per semester, 128 credit-hours to graduate. All assuming I
didn't have to take _any_ classes over again. As it stands, I'm
transferring to Archeology...which means I'll have to take pretty much
everything over again. :-p
Andrew Lannon
--
One ping to rule them all,
One ping to find them,
One ping to bring them all,
And in the darkness bind them.
Ed Reppert
"Andrew Lannon" <ALL_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Depends. As a ComSci major, it would've taken me probably 10 semesters; 14
> hours average per semester, 128 credit-hours to graduate. All assuming I
> didn't have to take _any_ classes over again. As it stands, I'm
> transferring to Archeology...which means I'll have to take pretty much
> everything over again. :-p
Somebody - Roger Zelazny, I think - wrote a science fiction story some
years ago in which the protagonist was a young man whose rich uncle had
died and left him a considerable income - so long as he was in school.
So the guy had become an artist at *almost* completing the requirements
for a degree - and then switching majors. He'd been an undergrad for
something like ten years when the story opened up. :-)
Andrew Lannon
news:ereppert-75B118...@typhoon4-0.nyroc.rr.com...
> Somebody - Roger Zelazny, I think - wrote a science fiction story some
> years ago in which the protagonist was a young man whose rich uncle had
> died and left him a considerable income - so long as he was in school.
> So the guy had become an artist at *almost* completing the requirements
> for a degree - and then switching majors. He'd been an undergrad for
> something like ten years when the story opened up. :-)
There're people that do that, jokingly called "professional students". Most
grants and what-not have time limits, now, but used to be the only
limitation would be maintaining a certain GPR or higher. :-)
Mark Atwood
> for everyone.
> This is both a huge competitive advantage and a really neat piece of
> social engineering. When students don't have to cough up the dough to
> get a masters it means a number of things. 1. You get a lot more
> people with masters degrees. 2. They don't have huge student loans 3.
> 1&2 means they are a comparatively cheap labor 4. Social mobility. The
> ability to climb the educational ladder fairly easily defuses a good
> number of social tensions. 5. You can go to college even if your
> parents dissapprove.
> This policy is also self financing. College graduates make more money,
> and thus pay more taxes.
Or instead you get what the Saudi's have ended up with, where their
state sponsored free higher education system has given them a huge
glut of people with Masters and PostDocs in "Islamic Studies", and not
enough doctors and engineers.
If you don't have market forces dictating what people will major in,
then you have to substitute *something*. What do they/you do in DE?
It is my understanding that the DE school system is very strongly into
"tracking", and that it is very very hard for a student to break off
the tracks that the school administrations have set for him.
I welcome the opportunity to be better informed on this issue.
(Over in rasf.c, I think it was, someone just made the observation
that she had read in several SF classics about people easily switching
their own majors and picking their own course selection and class
schedule in the context of their major. They thought that this was
SFnal, until they learned that the USian higher education system (my
high school (age 15-18) was somewhat like that as well, as was my
JrHigh (age 12-15)), at which point she exclaimed something like "its
not fair and i want one too!". Is DE's free "higher education" that
flexable).
Stallman's "free as in beer vs free as in choice" springs to mind.
Your degree was free in the first sense. Mine was free in the second.
--
Mark Atwood | Well done is better than well said.
m...@pobox.com |
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Mike Bruner
Oh God, they couldn't pay me enough to take classes for that long; I'm taking my
finals in the last classes I will ever take for grades Wednesday, and I am
extremely happy about that fact. I can handle doing research for the doctorate,
I'm just sick of having to run out during the day in the middle of experiments to
fall nearly asleep in a classroom for an hour and then get ridiculous tests on
things I will never use in my professional career (not to mention the trick some
of my teachers have of giving questions that have absolutely nothing to do with
what was discussed in class because they think they're "basic knowledge"; exactly
how many biology types here can draw a complete nucleotide from memory without
warning? I hadn't given a damn about those chemical formulas since basic
Biochemistry four years ago... *grumble*).
--
Mike Bruner-m...@NOSPAMhome.com
"Yes, I am a servant of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial".
Now back to your regularly scheduled off-topic thread.
Dave Cook
> This has been largely obscured by the recent lengthy boom in the US
> economy but is nonetheless true.
Actually there hasn't been a recent lengthy boom. See
http://www.cepr.net/new_economy_goes_bust.htm
Dave Cook
Dave Parker
Ananda Gupta
<f538b1be.01120...@posting.google.com>:
> This posting is a general response to the whole thread.
Your posting is not actually a troll, but it will have the same effect as a
troll. Still, I suppose the cat is out of the bag.
"Socialism is communism without the firing squads." -- Milton Friedman
Reverend Sean O'Hara
>
> This posting is a general response to the whole thread.
>
> There seems to be a bit of a difficulty among certain members of this
> group when it comes to distingishing Socialism from Marxist-Leninist
> Communism.
>
hear. And they believe that Hitler was a great man.
Die, thread, die!
--
Reverend Sean O'Hara
You too can be an ordained minister: http://www.ulc.org
Culture Editor for Expulsion: http://www.expulsion.org
"Not many living people are on stamps *and* Burger King cups."
--Sir Ian McKellen
John C. Watson
Yes, Zelazny. _Doorways in the Sand_. IIRC, the protagonist was 32, and
therefore had been in the college for 14 years, though I also remember the
figure twelve years. It's been a while since I read it, though.
Ciao,
John
--
John C. Watson
World Otakunization Project, Amherst Division
Nancy Lebovitz
Thomas <ized...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>This posting is a general response to the whole thread.
>
>There seems to be a bit of a difficulty among certain members of this
>group when it comes to distingishing Socialism from Marxist-Leninist
>Communism.
>The difficulty being that they don't. At all. They then proceed to
>label the whole of socialist thought as Evil and reject it.
>
>The facts are that social democracy, which is the cornerstone of most
>existant welfare states* is pretty much the only ideology that does
>not have massacres to its name (yet!) and that some of policies they
The social democratic states were started *after* the locals had
been subjugated or killed. This makes it much easier to avoid
massacres.
_Smila's Sense of Snow_ has it that Denmark (?) treats its tribespeople
quite badly. I have no idea whether this is true, semi-true but exaggerated
for the sake of fiction, or just plain false. (The book is marginally
sf, but I'm declaring this thread OT anyway.)
>pursue must be more economically effective than the largely
>laize-faire policies of the US.
>
>This last point followes logically from the fact that a lot of the
>policies they pursue are manifestly a good deal less than optimal
>while their economic growth rates are about as high as the U.S. over
>long periods of time.
>This has been largely obscured by the recent lengthy boom in the US
>economy but is nonetheless true.
>Per capitam The US is richer than Sweden or Denmark, but not by a
>great deal and most of the difference stems from the fact that
>americans work longer hours and have shorter vacations.
>
What kind of deal do the "guest workers" in Europe get? Do they
pay the same taxes and get the same services that citizens do?
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Thomas
<snip>
> > 1. State sponsored education at all levels, including universities,
> > for everyone.
> > This is both a huge competitive advantage and a really neat piece of
> > social engineering. When students don't have to cough up the dough to
> > get a masters it means a number of things. 1. You get a lot more
> > people with masters degrees. 2. They don't have huge student loans 3.
> > 1&2 means they are a comparatively cheap labor 4. Social mobility. The
> > ability to climb the educational ladder fairly easily defuses a good
> > number of social tensions. 5. You can go to college even if your
> > parents dissapprove.
> > This policy is also self financing. College graduates make more money,
> > and thus pay more taxes.
>
> Higher education is a good, no doubt of it. As far as student loans are
> concerned, they're small on the scale starting income of the more lucrative
> fields like engineering, sciences and medicine. They're _huge_ on the scale
> of starting income at graduation of a Modern Language Association member...
> You might say that those student loans provide market feedback into choice
> of major curriculum.
>
> Out of curiousity, what's the mean time to graduation. If _I_ could have, I
> would have stayed at University. And stayed and stayed.
Here?
It depends on the study, but as a rule of thumb: The mean time to
graduation is two semesters longer than the nominated time.
The nominated length is the time it takes to graduate working a full
course load (5 subjects per semester) and flunking nothing.
If you fall behind this schedule by more than (big surprise) 2
semesters you loose the student stipend. The student stipend is a
government grant to all students (about 450 $/month) which will
basically support you at "poor student" levels without having to take
work along with your studies.
Most students try to get some work during the summervacation, because
it makes you solvent for another year.
It is possible if rather difficult to complete a degree less than the
nominated time, and some people do.
If you care to, you can also take more than one degree.* However you
can only get that grant for six years total regardless of how you do
academically, so you either need to work pretty damm fast or find a
good student job.
I have however met people with dual degrees in medicine and
engineering....
*Within limits. If you wish to pursue a third or higher degree you can
basically only get into programs which have more spaces than
students..
Per C. Jorgensen
> The social democratic states were started *after* the locals had
> been subjugated or killed. This makes it much easier to avoid
> massacres.
>
> _Smila's Sense of Snow_ has it that Denmark (?) treats its tribespeople
> quite badly. I have no idea whether this is true, semi-true but exaggerated
> for the sake of fiction, or just plain false. (The book is marginally
> sf, but I'm declaring this thread OT anyway.)
It is certainly true that minorities in the Scandinavian countries
quite often were treated harshly (mostly before social democracy came
into vogue, but also a bit afterwards, especially when it comes to
assimilation procedures). The goals were assimilation and
subjugation to the state, not racial extermination. Individuals who
conformed could in principle have have careers like those
who belonged to the majority group.
The tribespeople of _Smilla..._ are Greenlanders. Greenland
is now semi-independent with the flow of money going from
Demark to Greenland (well, after all, Danes - and Norwegians -
probably made money off Greenland in the olden days). As
I understand modernizing efforts and culture clash brought a lot of
social misery: bewildered ex-fishermen sitting on the dole in
concrete housing projects, nothing to do but drink... the crime
rate is horrible.
All is, of course, not horrible in Greenland, either. Cultural
renaissance has brought new hope.
A bit of a Indians on reservations problem, I guess.
I have also heard that Greenlanders living in Denmark are
sometimes discriminated against: thought of as drunks and
backwards...
One should remember that the title character in "Smilla..."
is a former radical and Greenlander activist. In US terms
she would have been an Alcatraz occupant, I guess.
-- Per
Nancy Lebovitz
Per C. Jorgensen <p.c.jo...@east-stud.uio.no> wrote:
>Nancy Lebovitz wrote:
>
>> The social democratic states were started *after* the locals had
>> been subjugated or killed. This makes it much easier to avoid
>> massacres.
>>
>> _Smila's Sense of Snow_ has it that Denmark (?) treats its tribespeople
>> quite badly. I have no idea whether this is true, semi-true but exaggerated
>> for the sake of fiction, or just plain false. (The book is marginally
>> sf, but I'm declaring this thread OT anyway.)
Thanks for the info. I'd been wondering ever since I'd read the book.
>
>It is certainly true that minorities in the Scandinavian countries
>quite often were treated harshly (mostly before social democracy came
>into vogue, but also a bit afterwards, especially when it comes to
>assimilation procedures). The goals were assimilation and
>subjugation to the state, not racial extermination. Individuals who
>conformed could in principle have have careers like those
>who belonged to the majority group.
And in practice?
>The tribespeople of _Smilla..._ are Greenlanders. Greenland
>is now semi-independent with the flow of money going from
>Demark to Greenland (well, after all, Danes - and Norwegians -
>probably made money off Greenland in the olden days). As
>I understand modernizing efforts and culture clash brought a lot of
>social misery: bewildered ex-fishermen sitting on the dole in
>concrete housing projects, nothing to do but drink... the crime
>rate is horrible.
>
>All is, of course, not horrible in Greenland, either. Cultural
>renaissance has brought new hope.
>
I don't think it was implied that everything was horrible in
Greenland--just that it was a bad place for people who wanted
to live the old way.
>A bit of a Indians on reservations problem, I guess.
>
>I have also heard that Greenlanders living in Denmark are
>sometimes discriminated against: thought of as drunks and
>backwards...
>
>One should remember that the title character in "Smilla..."
>is a former radical and Greenlander activist. In US terms
>she would have been an Alcatraz occupant, I guess.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Leif Magnar Kj|nn|y
Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix1.netaxs.com> wrote:
>In article <3C14E01A...@east-stud.uio.no>,
>Per C. Jorgensen <p.c.jo...@east-stud.uio.no> wrote:
>>
>>It is certainly true that minorities in the Scandinavian countries
>>quite often were treated harshly (mostly before social democracy came
>>into vogue, but also a bit afterwards, especially when it comes to
>>assimilation procedures). The goals were assimilation and
>>subjugation to the state, not racial extermination. Individuals who
>>conformed could in principle have have careers like those
>>who belonged to the majority group.
>
>And in practice?
In practice, most of these minorities lived in economically
disadvantaged areas far away from the policymakers. For
example, the Sami of northern Norway were taxed and preached
at but otherwise mostly ignored (i.e. left to their traditional
ways of life in most respects) until assimilation policy came
into vogue in the late 19th, early 20th century. They had few
opportunities to make anything of themselves other than doing
the same thing their parents had done (farming, fishing or
reindeer herding). In dealings with local authorities or
merchants they faced prejudices both subtle and not. Schools
used the Norwegian language exclusively until long after WW2,
and a national curriculum designed for the majority. This made
it difficult for the kids to do well in school, and those who
did OK were pushed so much further along the road to assimilation
(there were, and still are, a lot of people walking around with
mostly Sami ancestry but little or none of the culture; some even
unaware).
Things are a bit different these days; encouraging assimilation
by policy went out of style thirty or more years ago (it had
progressed far enough anyway) and what remains of their language
and culture is thought worthy of preservation instead. One now
finds Sami with jobs like high-ranking national bureaucrat or
university professor (and some folks are opting back into a
culture that their parents or grandparents opted out of).
Petty prejudices will be with us always in some shape or form,
but now we have other minorities which are more easily identified
by sight.
--
Leif Kj{\o}nn{\o}y | "Its habit of getting up late you'll agree
www.pvv.org/~leifmk| That it carries too far, when I say
Math geek and gamer| That it frequently breakfasts at five-o'clock tea,
GURPS, Harn, CORPS | And dines on the following day." (Carroll)
Reverend Sean O'Hara
>
> _Smila's Sense of Snow_ has it that Denmark (?) treats its tribespeople
> quite badly. I have no idea whether this is true, semi-true but exaggerated
> for the sake of fiction, or just plain false. (The book is marginally
> sf, but I'm declaring this thread OT anyway.)
>
portrayal. I doubt "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" would've been
published if it were completely fictional and the US were excessively
nice to aboriginal peoples, and I doubt Denmark is too different from
the US.
Reverend Sean O'Hara
>
> One should remember that the title character in "Smilla..."
> is a former radical and Greenlander activist. In US terms
> she would have been an Alcatraz occupant, I guess.
>
organization. (And with a rich father.)
Rich Trouton
Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
Mine was free in both senses (sort of, my parents paid for mine.) I had
total freedom to pick the school and what I wanted to be when I grew up.
However, I was told that after four years it stopped being "free" and
that I would have to start picking up the tab for years five and up
unless I had picked a degree program that necessitated five (like
education or engineering.) I was also told by my father that after
college, I was expected to earn my own keep. With that motivation, I got
my degree done in four years (with some summer semesters and internships
thrown in.)
Rich
Steve Holland
> Nancy Lebovitz wrote:
> > _Smila's Sense of Snow_ has it that Denmark (?) treats its tribespeople
> > quite badly. I have no idea whether this is true, semi-true but exaggerated
> > for the sake of fiction, or just plain false. (The book is marginally
> > sf, but I'm declaring this thread OT anyway.)
> Hoeg is a Dane himself, so I'm hoping he was being truthful with the
> portrayal.
It's a fairly honest protrayal.
=====================================================================
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--
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Mark Atwood
> >
> > Stallman's "free as in beer vs free as in choice" springs to mind.
> > Your degree was free in the first sense. Mine was free in the second.
>
> Mine was free in both senses (sort of, my parents paid for mine.)
Mine as well, actually. Mine was paid for by a corporate (pointed,
NON-government and non-taxpayer) engineering scholarship.
I'm not adverse to free-as-in-beer higher ed, it *is* a positive
externality for the population. However, I am adverse to
free-as-in-beer higher ed in things like literary critisism, oppressed
people' studies, art history, etc.
Roy G. Ovrebo
>In article <f538b1be.01120...@posting.google.com>,
>Thomas <ized...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>This posting is a general response to the whole thread.
>>
>>There seems to be a bit of a difficulty among certain members of this
>>group when it comes to distingishing Socialism from Marxist-Leninist
>>Communism.
>>The difficulty being that they don't. At all. They then proceed to
>>label the whole of socialist thought as Evil and reject it.
>>
>>The facts are that social democracy, which is the cornerstone of most
>>existant welfare states* is pretty much the only ideology that does
>>not have massacres to its name (yet!) and that some of policies they
>
>The social democratic states were started *after* the locals had
>been subjugated or killed. This makes it much easier to avoid
>massacres.
>
>_Smila's Sense of Snow_ has it that Denmark (?) treats its tribespeople
>quite badly. I have no idea whether this is true, semi-true but exaggerated
>for the sake of fiction, or just plain false. (The book is marginally
>sf, but I'm declaring this thread OT anyway.)
To clarify, the tribespeople of _Smilla's Sense of Snow_ are the
Inuit people of Greenland, who have probably historically been treated
much like the Sami people of northern Scandinavia, i.e. like shit.
It does look as if you're comparing the Inuit with the American Indians.
That's not quite right, as the Inuit aren't locals in Denmark.
The aboriginal people of Denmark and most of Norway and Sweden
is a Germanic tribe.
As a Norwegian with ancestry tracable back to the 1600s and
possibly earlier (and lots of people claim they're descended from
Harald the Fairhaired, first king of Norway around year 900),
I think I can safely say that none of our ancestors were subjugated
or killed as the social democracy was set up.
>>pursue must be more economically effective than the largely
>>laize-faire policies of the US.
>>
>>This last point followes logically from the fact that a lot of the
>>policies they pursue are manifestly a good deal less than optimal
>>while their economic growth rates are about as high as the U.S. over
>>long periods of time.
>>This has been largely obscured by the recent lengthy boom in the US
>>economy but is nonetheless true.
>>Per capitam The US is richer than Sweden or Denmark, but not by a
>>great deal and most of the difference stems from the fact that
>>americans work longer hours and have shorter vacations.
>>
>What kind of deal do the "guest workers" in Europe get? Do they
>pay the same taxes and get the same services that citizens do?
Yes. At least here in Norway they do. There's no need for e.g. an
American to change citizenship, unless they feel a compelling urge
to vote in parliamentary elections.
--
Roy G. Ovrebo
Avram Grumer
na...@unix1.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> I don't think it was implied that everything was horrible in
> Greenland--just that it was a bad place for people who wanted to live
> the old way.
Things are like that for lots of people. The traditional way of life of
my ancestors -- get a job right out of college working for some large
company with a strong union, work their your whole life, retire with a
good pension -- is increasingly difficult to follow. Many have been
driven from our ancestral homeland, it's nearly impossible to find real
lox anymore, and have you seen what they're calling a bagel these days?
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
In the country of the assless, the half-assed man is king.
Celes Knight
> externality for the population. However, I am adverse to
> free-as-in-beer higher ed in things like literary critisism, oppressed
> people' studies, art history, etc.
Hmmm. It would seem logical for the gov't to offer large grants in areas
that would benefit the country as a whole (engineers, doctors, hard
science), smaller grants in areas that the country needs more of (maybe law
enforcement or teachers), and little to no help in areas that might be
interesting but doesn't really benefit the country (art history). I wonder
why they don't?
Charles R. Tenney
Celes Knight <NOknig...@NOrconnectSP.AMcom> wrote:
>Rich Trouton <rtro...@yahoo.com> is not so hot on education subsidies for:
>> things like literary critisism, oppressed
>> people' studies, art history, etc.
>Hmmm. It would seem logical for the gov't to offer large grants in areas
>that would benefit the country as a whole (engineers, doctors, hard
>science), smaller grants in areas that the country needs more of (maybe law
>enforcement or teachers), and little to no help in areas that might be
>interesting but doesn't really benefit the country (art history). I wonder
>why they don't?
Probably because those in charge recognize--quite possibly with some personal
bias--that this distinction is overblown, if not altogether false. There are
more careers that simply require a college education than there are requiring
any particular training credentials. Advertising copywriters are recruited
not based on their knowledge of the advertising industry, just on their
ability to write. Investment bankers are not required to have majored in
economics, though many have. Applicants to medical school can have any major,
as long as they've taken one year each of physics and calculus, and two years
each of chemistry and biology. Teachers in public schools have to have a
teaching certificate, which can be obtained by majoring in education. In
private schools, there is no such requirement; they simply have to know their
subject and are expected to learn teaching through the application of common
sense. Given the choice between an English teacher with a degree in English
literature, and one with a degree in Education concentrating in teaching
literature, it's not clear that the latter is preferable. (One with a
bachelor's degree in Literature and a Master's in Teaching is better yet, but
that wasn't the choice.) In the case of math teachers, well, I'm biased by
the education majors I knew who aspired to teach fifth grade math, and, as
juniors in college, were still confused by the subject material.
Businesses have traditionally taken college grads and trained them,
given the fact that nobody was giving out degrees geared towards the
company's needs. This has changed somewhat, as a plethora of programs has
sprouted in specific niches of business (and everything else). Even so,
for a job in international business, it may not be best to hire the
mediocre applicant with a degree in international business instead of the
strong applicant with a degree in art history. The art history graduate
will quickly pick up what they need (being, in this excercise, the stronger
applicant) and will already know a lot about foreign language and culture,
learned in the course of art history studies. A great many jobs still
don't correspond to any particular educational program; they just have to
train their new applicants. I remember, and don't disagree with, the advice
of a college fund-raising official with a degree in History who said "what
you do in your job will probably be unrelated to your degree, so study
whatever interests you."
A college graduate should know a subject, but more importantly, should have
used that subject as a vehicle for learning how to learn, how to communicate
clearly, and how to handle projects of increasing complexity, with increasing
independence. In many cases, the subject itself is irrelevant. Official
policy reflects this. This policy also may well be promulgated by
bureaucrats with degrees in English Literature and Art History.
Charles "interested in Physics, Engineering, and Medicine" Tenney
--
Charles R. Tenney ten...@dec3.mc.duke.edu | What would Duke Univ. Medical
| Center want with my opinions?
"My karma ran over my dogma." | What would I want with theirs?
Andrew Lannon
news:FDbR7.143103$tf5.7...@bin5.nnrp.aus1.giganews.com...
> Hmmm. It would seem logical for the gov't to offer large grants in areas
> that would benefit the country as a whole (engineers, doctors, hard
> science), smaller grants in areas that the country needs more of (maybe
law
> enforcement or teachers), and little to no help in areas that might be
> interesting but doesn't really benefit the country (art history). I
wonder
> why they don't?
Because the Art History majors would proceed to violent protest that they
are as necessary as the Engineers, Drs. etc. Trust me...one of my aunt's is
an art teacher, and honestly believes that fine arts should be ranked with
math, science, and foreign language classes for funding and priority.
Oddly, Band isn't a fine art, she says it's too easy. (And gets pissed when
I ask her why it's harder to color in lines than to march in 'em.)
Ties in with the general "political correctness at all costs" atmosphere
these days, I guess.
Adam J. Thornton
Pity she's not a grammarian.
Adam
--
ad...@princeton.edu
"My eyes say their prayers to her / Sailors ring her bell / Like a moth
mistakes a light bulb / For the moon and goes to hell." -- Tom Waits
Nancy Lebovitz
>news:FDbR7.143103$tf5.7...@bin5.nnrp.aus1.giganews.com...
>> Hmmm. It would seem logical for the gov't to offer large grants in areas
>> that would benefit the country as a whole (engineers, doctors, hard
>> science), smaller grants in areas that the country needs more of (maybe
>law
>> enforcement or teachers), and little to no help in areas that might be
>> interesting but doesn't really benefit the country (art history). I
>wonder
>> why they don't?
>
>Because the Art History majors would proceed to violent protest that they
>are as necessary as the Engineers, Drs. etc. Trust me...one of my aunt's is
>an art teacher, and honestly believes that fine arts should be ranked with
>math, science, and foreign language classes for funding and priority.
>Oddly, Band isn't a fine art, she says it's too easy. (And gets pissed when
>I ask her why it's harder to color in lines than to march in 'em.)
>
>Ties in with the general "political correctness at all costs" atmosphere
>these days, I guess.
>
happens to be doing is Extremely Important--this predates political
correctness.
OBSF: Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll".
Andrew Lannon
news:9v3qcj$s3k$1...@cnn.Princeton.EDU...
> >Trust me...one of my aunt's is
> >an art teacher,
>
> Pity she's not a grammarian.
We all make mistakes on occasion. Sheesh.
Andrew Lannon
news:9v3rq0$2...@netaxs.com...
> >Ties in with the general "political correctness at all costs" atmosphere
> >these days, I guess.
> >
> I think it's pretty normal human behavior to believe that whatever one
> happens to be doing is Extremely Important--this predates political
> correctness.
<nod> That's why I said it ties in with the whole PC thing. It's a general
tendancy, and insisting on "political correctness" is the most visible
iteration, being as it's often official policy. For instance, none of our
corporate materials can specify "he" or "she", the pronoun [theoretically]
must be third-person ("the tech" or "the person conducting maintenance"), or
"he or she". (Or the equivalents in the various tenses.)
> OBSF: Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll".
I wish y'all'd stop talking about all of these Heinlein books and
stories...I just _know_ I'm going to find 'em somewhere and spend more money
than I really should on 'em. :-\
:-) (j/k)
Nancy Lebovitz
Andrew Lannon <ALL_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>"Nancy Lebovitz" <na...@unix1.netaxs.com> wrote in message
>news:9v3rq0$2...@netaxs.com...
>> >Ties in with the general "political correctness at all costs" atmosphere
>> >these days, I guess.
>> >
>> I think it's pretty normal human behavior to believe that whatever one
>> happens to be doing is Extremely Important--this predates political
>> correctness.
>
><nod> That's why I said it ties in with the whole PC thing. It's a general
>tendancy, and insisting on "political correctness" is the most visible
>iteration, being as it's often official policy. For instance, none of our
>corporate materials can specify "he" or "she", the pronoun [theoretically]
>must be third-person ("the tech" or "the person conducting maintenance"), or
>"he or she". (Or the equivalents in the various tenses.)
I can't see that you've got an example of people insisting that their
work is uniquely important there.
>
>> OBSF: Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll".
>
>I wish y'all'd stop talking about all of these Heinlein books and
>stories...I just _know_ I'm going to find 'em somewhere and spend more money
>than I really should on 'em. :-\
>
>:-) (j/k)
>
:-)
I don't know whether it makes things better or worse to point out
that "The Roads Must Roll" is minor Heinlein.
Natural Born Cereal Killer
>As a Norwegian with ancestry tracable back to the 1600s and
>possibly earlier (and lots of people claim they're descended from
>Harald the Fairhaired, first king of Norway around year 900),
>I think I can safely say that none of our ancestors were subjugated
>or killed as the social democracy was set up.
I traced mine to 1473, and that's a very safe bet you've
made above. 'Course, all the hard times were pre-1066 and post-1940,
but for the interim it apparently wasn't such a bad place to live.
--
* Dan Sorenson DoD #1066 ASSHOLE #35 BOTY 1997 vik...@svtv.com *
* Vikings? There ain't no vikings here. Just us honest farmers. *
* The town was burning, the villagers were dead. They didn't need *
* those sheep anyway. That's our story and we're sticking to it. *
Andrew Lannon
> ><nod> That's why I said it ties in with the whole PC thing. It's a
general
> >tendancy, and insisting on "political correctness" is the most visible
> >iteration, being as it's often official policy. For instance, none of
our
> >corporate materials can specify "he" or "she", the pronoun
[theoretically]
> >must be third-person ("the tech" or "the person conducting maintenance"),
or
> >"he or she". (Or the equivalents in the various tenses.)
>
> I can't see that you've got an example of people insisting that their
> work is uniquely important there.
Lemme get back to you on that. I think it's lack of sleep, but I absolutely
cannot figure that statement out. (But I've _almost_ finished this
gawd-forsaken history book!)
> :-)
>
> I don't know whether it makes things better or worse to point out
> that "The Roads Must Roll" is minor Heinlein.
I think it's sort of a lateral slide. That just means I'll have to buy
whatever anthology I can find that has TRMR. :-)
Natural Born Cereal Killer
>Because the Art History majors would proceed to violent protest that they
>are as necessary as the Engineers, Drs. etc.
They may be necessary to a civilized society, they may even
be worth some public funding, but if it's the government providing
the funding then ranking should be on one criterion: how much will
that graduate with Degree X put back in the coffers after graduation?
Your average engineer will pay for a squad of Marines, which has
brought more peace and understanding to this world than any number
of Berkeley marchers. Your average English major? They might
pay for a few school lunches and a few bucks to NPR when something
other than Car Talk is running.
Gotta figure the net gain to society, after all.
-- Dan
Andrew Lannon
news:9v478j$1nv$1...@news1.btigate.com...
> >Because the Art History majors would proceed to violent protest that they
> >are as necessary as the Engineers, Drs. etc.
>
>
> Gotta figure the net gain to society, after all.
Did I say I necessarily disagree that FA majors are equally valuable to
engineers and such? No...just that they'd raise a stink.
They are necessary, though...but you'll have to furnish the punchline
yourself.
Seriously, there is a need for such people; the world would be a damned
boring place without artists, and Hollyweird (for all of its faults)
generates a huge amount of $. I would disagree (and often do, with my mom
especially) that they should be ranked in all ways with engineers [1], but
they are of some social value. (Although I wish I could get in into mom's
head that intro-engineering isn't just drawing, like her basic art classes;
it is drawing, math, physics, ethics, and CAD rolled into one nightmarish
package.)
[1] Sorry, art people, but I have trouble believing that anyone who can
graduate in half the time of an engineer, with more than the engineer's GPR,
and still have problems finding a job paying as much as the engineer's is as
socially valuable as the engineer. And remember, I am currently in the
_least_ profitable major in A&M's curriculum...archeology. ;->
Jim Hill
>In alt.peeves Ed Reppert <erep...@rochester.rr.com> wrote:
>
>: Somebody - Roger Zelazny, I think -
Am I the only person for whom Zelazny and Furr are forever linked?
Jim
--
"This place blows." -- David Letterman
John C. Watson
ALL_...@hotmail.com wrote on 12/11/2001 0:52:
>> I don't know whether it makes things better or worse to point out
>> that "The Roads Must Roll" is minor Heinlein.
>
> I think it's sort of a lateral slide. That just means I'll have to buy
> whatever anthology I can find that has TRMR. :-)
_The Past Through Tomorrow_, or _The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume
1_.
Iain J Coleman
Natural Born Cereal Killer wrote:
>
> "Andrew Lannon" <ALL_...@hotmail.com> writes:
>
> >Because the Art History majors would proceed to violent protest that they
> >are as necessary as the Engineers, Drs. etc.
>
> They may be necessary to a civilized society, they may even
> be worth some public funding, but if it's the government providing
> the funding then ranking should be on one criterion: how much will
> that graduate with Degree X put back in the coffers after graduation?
> Your average engineer will pay for a squad of Marines, which has
> brought more peace and understanding to this world than any number
> of Berkeley marchers. Your average English major? They might
> pay for a few school lunches and a few bucks to NPR when something
> other than Car Talk is running.
>
> Gotta figure the net gain to society, after all.
>
I wonder what the average financial gain due to English Language
academics is, when you include the rather lucrative work of Professor
Tolkien?
Nancy Lebovitz
Andrew Lannon <ALL_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>"Natural Born Cereal Killer" <vik...@svtv.com> wrote in message
>news:9v478j$1nv$1...@news1.btigate.com...
>> >Because the Art History majors would proceed to violent protest that they
>> >are as necessary as the Engineers, Drs. etc.
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> Gotta figure the net gain to society, after all.
>
>Did I say I necessarily disagree that FA majors are equally valuable to
>engineers and such? No...just that they'd raise a stink.
>
>They are necessary, though...but you'll have to furnish the punchline
>yourself.
>
>Seriously, there is a need for such people; the world would be a damned
>boring place without artists, and Hollyweird (for all of its faults)
>generates a huge amount of $. I would disagree (and often do, with my mom
>especially) that they should be ranked in all ways with engineers [1], but
>they are of some social value. (Although I wish I could get in into mom's
>head that intro-engineering isn't just drawing, like her basic art classes;
>it is drawing, math, physics, ethics, and CAD rolled into one nightmarish
>package.)
>
>[1] Sorry, art people, but I have trouble believing that anyone who can
>graduate in half the time of an engineer, with more than the engineer's GPR,
>and still have problems finding a job paying as much as the engineer's is as
>socially valuable as the engineer. And remember, I am currently in the
It might be interesting to think of the artists as a crap shoot by that
measure (without getting into the question of whether money really measures
everything important)--a lot of art graduates won't do anything of
significance, but a few will do major work--and sometimes the money
won't start rolling in till they're dead.
>_least_ profitable major in A&M's curriculum...archeology. ;->
>
M Holmes
: Probably because those in charge recognize--quite possibly with some
: personal bias--that this distinction is overblown, if not altogether
: false. There are more careers that simply require a college education
: than there are requiring any particular training credentials.
: Advertising copywriters are recruited not based on their knowledge of
: the advertising industry, just on their ability to write. Investment
: bankers are not required to have majored in economics, though many
: have. Applicants to medical school can have any major, as long as
: they've taken one year each of physics and calculus, and two years
: each of chemistry and biology.
What would be interesting would be to involve some pricing in this. Let
students sell shares in their value added income (over their
non-graduate peers) over their lifetime (I.E a share in 1% of the
difference between my income and the average non-graduate wage of those
of my age). If the student needs money, they sell another 1%. What
people will pay for that 1% would depend on the future earnings stream
and would be directly related to the prospects of a student in that
subject. Of course this would be modified by the student's past scores
in terms of divining a probability that they will in fact graduate. The
better the scores of a student, the more they could raise on issuing
another share. A scheme along these lines would funnel money into those
students in those subjects that were likely to be of economic benefit
and reduce the flow to those who were merely following an interest that
wasn't. Who'd buy? Pension funds like long-term income streams.
Universities might even be able to make money in buying shares of
freshers and selling them at a profit once they'd graduated. The
student could even have first dibs at buying their own shares back at
market value when they could afford to do so.
The complication is of course in setting up a virtual stock exchange and
in establishing a collection system that's reliable. Again the
universities might be able to handle it since each graduate is dependent
on a university to confirm that they do in fact have the qualification.
No payments = no accreditation.
FoFP
Iain J Coleman
M Holmes wrote:
>
> The complication is of course in setting up a virtual stock exchange and
> in establishing a collection system that's reliable. Again the
> universities might be able to handle it since each graduate is dependent
> on a university to confirm that they do in fact have the qualification.
> No payments = no accreditation.
>
Do you think the expense (in time and money) of creating and maintaining
this system would be proportionate to the problem it is intended to
solve?
Iain
M Holmes
Not sure about the US, but student loans are a big problem in the UK. As
for time and expense. The system would be mostly electronic anyway. If
it works for cattle futures then I can't see why it wouldn't work for
educational investment. Agreed that some number crunching would be
required, but I can't see an order of magnitude of difference between a
stockmarket model and a banking one in terms of costs.
: Iain
FoFP
Uncle Gargoyle
wrote:
> The aboriginal people of Denmark and most of Norway and Sweden
> is a Germanic tribe.
That's not even barely correct. The evidence offered in the
Cavalli-Sforzas' "The Great Human Disaporas", in the form of maps
of the first few principal components of European genetic
variation strongly suggests two waves of settlers *before* the
Indo-European speakers (including ancestors of the Germans)
arrived in Europe. These waves can all be identified with various
historical and linguistic changes.
Namely:
1. the agriculturists
2. the speakers of Ural-Altaic tongues, who successfully settled
the arctic
3. the Indo-European speakers themselves
Since the last group was chronologically the most recent, the
other two waves of settlers must have been earlier.
It's impossible to tell if there was yet another, earlier wave of
settlement when modern man emerged from Africa, but it seems
likely.
I suggest you read the book; at the very least you may have the
pleasure of discovering I have garbled or misinterpreted what the
Cavalli-Sforzas have to say, whereupon you can Peeve about it.
After all, didn't someone recently hurl the phrase "fount of
idiocy" at me?
--
Uncle Gargoyle
Mark Atwood
>
> Do you think the expense (in time and money) of creating and maintaining
> this system would be proportionate to the problem it is intended to
> solve?
At present? No.
If/when transaction costs (which in the case of a futures exchange are
directly driven by the cost of computation, IT, a back history
database, telecoms, and regulatory redtape) drop by another two orders
of magnitude?
Yes. Hell, another ROM drop after that, and a system like this would
replace *credit cards*.
(Hmm... Maybe I should invest...)
Offbreed
> In article <f538b1be.01120...@posting.google.com>,
> Thomas <ized...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >This posting is a general response to the whole thread.
> >
> >There seems to be a bit of a difficulty among certain members of this
> >group when it comes to distingishing Socialism from Marxist-Leninist
> >Communism.
> >The difficulty being that they don't. At all. They then proceed to
> >label the whole of socialist thought as Evil and reject it.
No doubt there are enormous differences obvious to people who are part
of the secular millennarian movement, especially the fundamentalists.
These differences are somewhat less obvious to those of us not
members. Those of us who are neither natural peasants searching for a
noble class to protect us from the big, bad world, nor possess the
ambition to rule the peasants as members of an invisible nobility, nor
be the local "priests" maintaining the purity of revolutionary thought
among a local flock do not find anything in the least attractive in
this movement toward a "secular theocracy" (or whatever a government
by priests would be called).
Granted, small countries get away with forms of government that large
countries cannot.
Highly intelligent and educated people like to think they are immune
to fanaticism and superstition (and con games). This makes them easy
targets to anything that tickles their egos. Yes, that is pointed at
some of the posters here.
Regarding the "advantages" of central planning:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/343/oped/The_wit_and_wisdom_of_BastiatP.shtml
(I see the troll team has done it's usual splendid job of disrupting a
news group. )
Celes Knight
have
> used that subject as a vehicle for learning how to learn, how to
communicate
> clearly, and how to handle projects of increasing complexity, with
increasing
> independence. In many cases, the subject itself is irrelevant. Official
> policy reflects this. This policy also may well be promulgated by
> bureaucrats with degrees in English Literature and Art History.
I had never quite thought about it that way; but now that you've said it, I
see the logic in it. I'm not quite certain that I believe it, but I see
what you are saying. That would explain why tech. college degrees are worth
less than university degrees, right? Perhaps tech. colleges teach only the
technical side of the subject, and not how to learn.
Most people I've talked to believe that hard sciences are much harder than
other majors. Do these subjects teach people how to learn and think more
than the softer subjects?
Someone else in the thread said that Saudi Arabia suffers from a glut of
"Islamic Studies" majors. If what you're saying is true, one degree should
generally be just as valuable as another. Is it possible that Saudi Arabia
simply isn't teaching people how to learn and think in those majors?
Thank you for the interesting feedback. I'd love to chat more, but I have
to run to a final exam.
Roy G. Ovrebo
>On 10 Dec 2001 21:36:07 GMT, bur...@c2i.net (Roy G. Ovrebo)
>wrote:
>
>> The aboriginal people of Denmark and most of Norway and Sweden
>> is a Germanic tribe.
>
>That's not even barely correct. The evidence offered in the
>Cavalli-Sforzas' "The Great Human Disaporas", in the form of maps
>of the first few principal components of European genetic
>variation strongly suggests two waves of settlers *before* the
>Indo-European speakers (including ancestors of the Germans)
>arrived in Europe. These waves can all be identified with various
>historical and linguistic changes.
Huh. There's no trace to be found of these settlers, possibly in part
due to this area's inconvenient tendency to go underneath a layer of
ice every few millennia.
I suppose the word "aborigine" was coined for colonization-type events,
rather than wandering tribes settling and mingling with an existing
population in an area. (I'm sure somebody will correct me if my assumption
is wrong.)
>Namely:
>
>1. the agriculturists
>2. the speakers of Ural-Altaic tongues, who successfully settled
>the arctic
>3. the Indo-European speakers themselves
>
>Since the last group was chronologically the most recent, the
>other two waves of settlers must have been earlier.
>
>It's impossible to tell if there was yet another, earlier wave of
>settlement when modern man emerged from Africa, but it seems
>likely.
It's rather academic too, I suppose. Recorded history only goes back
so far anyway.
>I suggest you read the book; at the very least you may have the
>pleasure of discovering I have garbled or misinterpreted what the
>Cavalli-Sforzas have to say, whereupon you can Peeve about it.
>After all, didn't someone recently hurl the phrase "fount of
>idiocy" at me?
I'll have to get hold of that book. It sounds like it's exactly
my sort of thing. I suspect you are right, though. After all, why
should we Germanic types be the first ones to be silly enough to
settle on this cold, windy, rain-drenched mountain chain?
--
Roy G. Ovrebo
Roy G. Ovrebo
>bur...@c2i.net (Roy G. Ovrebo) writes:
>
>>As a Norwegian with ancestry tracable back to the 1600s and
>>possibly earlier (and lots of people claim they're descended from
>>Harald the Fairhaired, first king of Norway around year 900),
>>I think I can safely say that none of our ancestors were subjugated
>>or killed as the social democracy was set up.
>
> I traced mine to 1473, and that's a very safe bet you've
>made above. 'Course, all the hard times were pre-1066 and post-1940,
>but for the interim it apparently wasn't such a bad place to live.
Well, there was the Black Death and various other plagues and the
"four-hundred year night" - union with Denmark then Sweden -
and impoverished people who emigrated to the US in the 1800s,
but I don't think that can be blamed on social democracy.
--
Roy G. Ovrebo
Steinn Sigurdsson
> What would be interesting would be to involve some pricing in this. Let
> students sell shares in their value added income (over their
> non-graduate peers) over their lifetime (I.E a share in 1% of the
> difference between my income and the average non-graduate wage of those
...
> wasn't. Who'd buy? Pension funds like long-term income streams.
> Universities might even be able to make money in buying shares of
> freshers and selling them at a profit once they'd graduated. The
> student could even have first dibs at buying their own shares back at
> market value when they could afford to do so.
I see some perverse incentives there, not to mention
seriously asymmetric information availability.
Be fun gaming such a system though, especially if
someone set up a secondary futures market.
Paul Austin
"Iain J Coleman" wrote >
It wasn't all that lucrative for JRRT. The Ring didn't have wide sales until
Ballentine picked it up in the late sixties. While I don't know what
financial arrangements he had with Ballentin, he died in 1973...
--
"I don't wonder that so many men are wicked.
I do wonder that so many are unashamed"
Paul F Austin
pau...@digital.net
pyotr filipivich
alt.books.david-weber , "Andrew Lannon" <ALL_...@hotmail.com> was inspired to
scribe:
>"Ed Reppert" <erep...@rochester.rr.com> wrote in message
>news:ereppert-75B118...@typhoon4-0.nyroc.rr.com...
>> Somebody - Roger Zelazny, I think - wrote a science fiction story some
>> years ago in which the protagonist was a young man whose rich uncle had
>> died and left him a considerable income - so long as he was in school.
>> So the guy had become an artist at *almost* completing the requirements
>> for a degree - and then switching majors. He'd been an undergrad for
>> something like ten years when the story opened up. :-)
>
>There're people that do that, jokingly called "professional students". Most
>grants and what-not have time limits, now, but used to be the only
>limitation would be maintaining a certain GPR or higher. :-)
If I had the cash flow, eg my rich uncle got out of the poor house, I'd be
a "career student" myself.
OTOH, my grandfather is suppose to have met an old man at Princeton before
The War (The one we joined already in progress in 1917), who had stayed at
Princeton rather than graduate, for similar reasons to Zelany's protagonist.
tschus
pyotr
pyotr filipivich
"What if they gave a war and nobody came?
Why then, the war would come to you."
Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956
Jeffrey C. Dege
>
>Most people I've talked to believe that hard sciences are much harder than
>other majors. Do these subjects teach people how to learn and think more
>than the softer subjects?
Taught or not, the students in the hard sciences and the various
engineering fields know how to learn.
There have been studies, from time to time, that generally find that
the students who succeed in the technical subjects are very likely to
succeed in the liberal arts, while the reverse is not at all true.
Engineers tend to be far better read than the average liberal arts major,
in an amazing range of obscure subjects.
It's far more likely that you'll find a electrical engineer who has made
an in-depth study of Confucian poetry, than an English major.
--
Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat.
Damien Raphael Sullivan
>Hmmm. It would seem logical for the gov't to offer large grants in areas
>that would benefit the country as a whole (engineers, doctors, hard
>science), smaller grants in areas that the country needs more of (maybe law
>enforcement or teachers), and little to no help in areas that might be
>interesting but doesn't really benefit the country (art history). I wonder
>why they don't?
I think they sort of do for science PhDs. My understanding of grad school is:
engineering degrees, or science Master's: you're boosting your employment
prospects, so you take loans.
science doctorate: you're probably headed for research, and thus have social
value, without matching income. You get stipends.
liberal arts: you have no social value. You take loans and suffer.
(Note: I'm not saying liberal arts majors have no social value. But I think
that's how the system ends up working. I could be wrong.)
-xx- Damien X-)
Iain J Coleman
"Jeffrey C. Dege" wrote:
>
> There have been studies, from time to time, that generally find that
> the students who succeed in the technical subjects are very likely to
> succeed in the liberal arts, while the reverse is not at all true.
>
> Engineers tend to be far better read than the average liberal arts major,
> in an amazing range of obscure subjects.
>
> It's far more likely that you'll find a electrical engineer who has made
> an in-depth study of Confucian poetry, than an English major.
>
What you're saying does seem consistent with my own experience. However,
do you happen to have any cites handy, or even pointers to where such
cites may be found? I'd be interested in seeing any hard evidence that
may exist.
Iain
Iain J Coleman
Paul Austin wrote:
>
> "Iain J Coleman" wrote >
> >
> > I wonder what the average financial gain due to English Language
> > academics is, when you include the rather lucrative work of Professor
> > Tolkien?
>
> It wasn't all that lucrative for JRRT. The Ring didn't have wide sales until
> Ballentine picked it up in the late sixties. While I don't know what
> financial arrangements he had with Ballentin, he died in 1973...
>
I didn't say "lucrative for JRRT". I'm sure his economic contribution is
appreciated by HarperCollins, book retail outlets worldwide, and the New
Zealand tourist industry. All of whom, I'm sure, pay taxes.
Iain
Margaret Young
>
>On 11-Dec-2001, jd...@jdege.visi.com (Jeffrey C. Dege) wrote:
>
>> >Most people I've talked to believe that hard sciences are much harder
>> >than
>> >other majors. Do these subjects teach people how to learn and think more
>> >than the softer subjects?
>>
>> Taught or not, the students in the hard sciences and the various
>> engineering fields know how to learn.
>>
>> There have been studies, from time to time, that generally find that
>> the students who succeed in the technical subjects are very likely to
>> succeed in the liberal arts, while the reverse is not at all true.
>>
>> Engineers tend to be far better read than the average liberal arts major,
>> in an amazing range of obscure subjects.
>>
>> It's far more likely that you'll find a electrical engineer who has made
>> an in-depth study of Confucian poetry, than an English major.
>
>Go to a college seminar in a liberal arts subject. Check out the audience
>- it will have liberal arts people and hard science people in it.
>Go to a college seminar in a hard science. Check out the audience - it will
>have hard science people in it.
>
>Then tell me which type of person has a well rounded education.
My experience has been that _neither_ groups show evidence of a
particularly well rounded education. [1]
In a recent interdisciplinary book seminar it became rather obvious
that professors from different branches of the "hard sciences" were
amazingly ignorant about information other "hard science" professors
believed to be vital and important.
And the general inability of many of the hard science professors to
grasp fundamental economic (and psychological) concepts was stunning.
(Real conversation "but why don't they discuss this[2] constantly on
all the talk shows" "Because they would lose money" "But it is
important" "But the American media lives on advertising, and
advertisers tend not to pay for shows with tiny audiences, especially
if those audiences don't have large disposable incomes" "But they
should" "But in general you are happy with the economic system in the
United States--you can't change one part of it without changing other
parts of it" "I think the advertisers should understand that some
things are worth losing money for" "But even if an advertiser thinks
so, no one in the audience will watch the show if almost everyone
thinks it is boring" "Well they SHOULD" [Insert sound of me
screaming])
[1] However I am not making the argument that all branches of learning
are equally lacking in well-roundedness. For example, I am stunned by
the level of not only accepted but lauded innumeracy in the United
States. One cannot explain even the most simple of statistical
concepts to people whose eyes glaze over at the mere mention of
arithmetic (not, please note, higher mathematics). Just the other day
I tried to explain to a student why it was IMPOSSIBLE for him to get A
in a course if he neglected to complete material worth 15% of his
total grade. Nor could he figure out on his own what his grade was if
he got 87/100 in the portion of the course that represent 85% of his
grade. Did not even know where to start. And shall I go on to mention
the student who was impressed that I could figure out what 10% of
something was without a calculator? I don't expect students to be able
to think in terms of log odds but when they can't even work out the
unit price of an item at the store!!!
My general experience (and of course, I can speak only from my own
experience and that of those I have discussed this with), is that
scientists who are not well-rounded _tend_ to lack well-roundedness
due to attitude (they don't look, don't think it is interesting).
Those in the humanities tend not to have the basic knowledge required
to become minimally well-grounded. Thus at interdisciplinary events
one finds a few scientists interested in humanities, but even fewer
professors in the humanities who can even follow a talk in the
sciences.
[2] The _science_ concern central to the book club meetings.
Margaret
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Bill
>
> Most people I've talked to believe that hard sciences are much harder than
> other majors. Do these subjects teach people how to learn and think more
> than the softer subjects?
>
>
Just as a point of view there. In many physics programs you can get pretty good
grades without getting the right answers. Obviously this isn't completely true,
if you never get right answers you haven't figure it out. But one of the things
they try to teach in physics is the process. If you give an answer that shows
you understand the process you can still get partial credit.
I especially remember the mechanics class with Dr. King. There were 5 of us who
suffered through it. As I recall my total agregate score on all the tests was
something like 36 points. I still did quite well in the course.
Bill Gill
Mark Atwood
>
> In a recent interdisciplinary book seminar it became rather obvious
> that professors from different branches of the "hard sciences" were
> amazingly ignorant about information other "hard science" professors
> believed to be vital and important.
professors != students
A professor, BY DEFINITION, focuses on his own field.
A student, by the necessity of his curriculum, has to focus on several,
and expose himself to several more.
If you want to study the bredth of education of "hard science" people,
the group want to study are the range from next to final year
undergrads to just before graduation masters students. *That* cadre of
people will blow the average humanities researcher away with the depth
and bredth of their knowledge.
Margaret Young
>Margaret Young <mmy...@umich.edu> writes:
>>
>> In a recent interdisciplinary book seminar it became rather obvious
>> that professors from different branches of the "hard sciences" were
>> amazingly ignorant about information other "hard science" professors
>> believed to be vital and important.
>
>professors != students
>
>A professor, BY DEFINITION, focuses on his own field.
>
>A student, by the necessity of his curriculum, has to focus on several,
>and expose himself to several more.
>
>If you want to study the bredth of education of "hard science" people,
>the group want to study are the range from next to final year
>undergrads to just before graduation masters students. *That* cadre of
>people will blow the average humanities researcher away with the depth
>and bredth of their knowledge.
Umm, before they get to be professors these men and women actually
spend some time being undergrads and masters students. It is to be
hoped that they do not spend the next few years forgetting all they
knew about every field other than their own.
I was not pointing out that professor knew MORE about their own fields
than those others, but that many knew amazing little about other
fields. And that that many included professor who not only were now
teaching "hard science" but had once been undergrads IN the hard
sciences.
Margaret Young
wrote:
To piggyback on my own post, a clarification and a story
Clarification
Without research I would not be willing to state that "hard science"
students are more well-rounded than are "humanities" students. One is
too likely to extrapolate on the basis on one's own experience and I
would look hard at the questions involved.
However, I would be willing to state that neither group are nearly as
well-rounded as they imagine and claim themselves to be. So if "hard
science" students are indeed more well-rounded (and I suspect they
are), it is only IN COMPARISON to humanities students, not in
relationship to any (in my consideration) reasonable expectation.
Note: in my experience many humanities students disdained simple
mathematics. On the other hand many "hard science" students who
considered themselves to be brilliant could not write a simple
understandable paragraph explaining, for example, how to use the piece
of equipment they had just designed. It usually left me with the
desire to scream "a plague on _both_ your houses".
Story
When I was faculty supervisor of an introductory level computing
course we had large numbers of senior engineerying students who were
required to take this course (or a similar one) to graduate. Most of
these students were in their last semester as undergrads and had
already been accepted at graduate or professional school of landed
jobs. (I could access their GPAs if necessary).
Almost every single male engineering student told the graduate student
teaching the section they were in that they already knew much more
about computers than the course included and wanted to take the waiver
exam (which was available for any student who wished to take it). The
waiver exam was completely objective. It simply asked that student
demonstrated a number of skills (basically a series of yes/no
situations, could they do a? could they do b?).
Historically there had been a rather high rate of failing waiver exams
PLUS the grads teaching the course felt uncomfortable with the
attitude of some of the students. So when I took over I initiated a
simple addition. Before they took the waiver exam they had to have a 5
minute conversation with me. At the end of which they could take the
exam away. Or choose not to take it. In the four semesters I was the
faculty organizer only 2 students decided to take the waiver exam. (By
the way, those students who did take it, passed it). The rest opted to
take the course. Because in conversation with me it would emerge that
they either a) didn't know how to do particular things unless the
set-up was exactly the same as it was at the engineering school or b)
they didn't have all of the computer skills that they might be
required to know out in the 'real world'.
Generally good kids. But not nearly as good as they thought they were.
Because their definition of well-rounded and knowledgeable was
severely limited.
John Schilling
>"Celes Knight" <NOknig...@NOrconnectSP.AMcom> wrote:
>>Hmmm. It would seem logical for the gov't to offer large grants in areas
>>that would benefit the country as a whole (engineers, doctors, hard
>>science), smaller grants in areas that the country needs more of (maybe law
>>enforcement or teachers), and little to no help in areas that might be
>>interesting but doesn't really benefit the country (art history). I wonder
>>why they don't?
>I think they sort of do for science PhDs. My understanding of grad school is:
>engineering degrees, or science Master's: you're boosting your employment
>prospects, so you take loans.
>science doctorate: you're probably headed for research, and thus have social
>value, without matching income. You get stipends.
In particular, note the omnipresent Research Assistant. Universities are
not mere centers of education, they also do extensive original research
in various fields. This is financed not just by the University, but by
government agencies, private foundations, even corporations that want to
see some particular research project carried out. And much of the money
thus obtained, is used to pay graduate students for part-time work as RAs
at starving-student wages plus free tuition.
RA positions are available in almost any field, but for obvious reasons
there are a lot more of them in the hard sciences and engineering than
in the fine and liberal arts.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
mstemper - emis . com
>Somebody - Roger Zelazny, I think - wrote a science fiction story some
>years ago in which the protagonist was a young man whose rich uncle had
>died and left him a considerable income - so long as he was in school.
>So the guy had become an artist at *almost* completing the requirements
>for a degree - and then switching majors. He'd been an undergrad for
>something like ten years when the story opened up. :-)
When my parents attended the University of Wisconsin (c. 1950), there was
a student there, name of Cy Butts, on a similar program. He left (or died)
just a year or two before I started there in 1971.
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
Robert E. McElwaine (UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this
IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED)
Margaret Young
wrote:
>pho...@ugcs.caltech.edu (Damien Raphael Sullivan) writes:
>
>>"Celes Knight" <NOknig...@NOrconnectSP.AMcom> wrote:
>
>>>Hmmm. It would seem logical for the gov't to offer large grants in areas
>>>that would benefit the country as a whole (engineers, doctors, hard
>>>science), smaller grants in areas that the country needs more of (maybe law
>>>enforcement or teachers), and little to no help in areas that might be
>>>interesting but doesn't really benefit the country (art history). I wonder
>>>why they don't?
>
>>I think they sort of do for science PhDs. My understanding of grad school is:
>
>>engineering degrees, or science Master's: you're boosting your employment
>>prospects, so you take loans.
>
>>science doctorate: you're probably headed for research, and thus have social
>>value, without matching income. You get stipends.
>
>
>In particular, note the omnipresent Research Assistant. Universities are
>not mere centers of education, they also do extensive original research
>in various fields. This is financed not just by the University, but by
>government agencies, private foundations, even corporations that want to
>see some particular research project carried out. And much of the money
>thus obtained, is used to pay graduate students for part-time work as RAs
>at starving-student wages plus free tuition.
>
>RA positions are available in almost any field, but for obvious reasons
>there are a lot more of them in the hard sciences and engineering than
>in the fine and liberal arts.
Oh yeah (she intones meaningfully).
This also has a major impact on the nature of the research you are
willing to do. Sometimes grads basically surf on the career of a
researcher who has landed grants (hey, it is not my particular
interest, but hell it pays the bills and almost guarantees my
graduation). In other cases (and I know of this happening to people)
they had to choose between doing work that basically undermined the
theory/work of the cash cows in the department or to soldier on
unfunded.
mstemper - emis . com
> This policy is also self financing. College graduates make more money,
> and thus pay more taxes.
That really depends. You pick an Art History major, I'll pick some guy
pounding nails.
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
Visualize whirled peas!
Keith Morrison
> > Most people I've talked to believe that hard sciences are much harder than
> > other majors. Do these subjects teach people how to learn and think more
> > than the softer subjects?
>
> Just as a point of view there. In many physics programs you can get pretty good
> grades without getting the right answers. Obviously this isn't completely true,
> if you never get right answers you haven't figure it out. But one of the things
> they try to teach in physics is the process. If you give an answer that shows
> you understand the process you can still get partial credit.
I had a calculus test once with one question I hadn't had the vaguest
idea of how to answer. So I worked from the basics, showed my reasoning
and got an answer.
As it turned out, there was a flaw in my reasoning at an early stage
which completely threw off the result. But I still received partial
marks since, as the written comment next to the mark put it, if the
laws of mathematics had been altered to make an initial premise correct,
I would have had the right answer.
--
Keith
Alan Gore
>Go to a college seminar in a liberal arts subject. Check out the audience
>- it will have liberal arts people and hard science people in it.
>Go to a college seminar in a hard science. Check out the audience - it will
>have hard science people in it.
Then why does so much social commentary by liberal arts types bespeak
a total cluelessness about the hard sciences?
ag...@qwest.net | "Giving money and power to the government
Alan Gore | is like giving whiskey and car keys
Software For PC's, Inc. | to teenaged boys" - P. J. O'Rourke
http://www.alangore.com
Keith Morrison
> > There have been studies, from time to time, that generally find that
> > the students who succeed in the technical subjects are very likely to
> > succeed in the liberal arts, while the reverse is not at all true.
> >
> > Engineers tend to be far better read than the average liberal arts major,
> > in an amazing range of obscure subjects.
> >
> > It's far more likely that you'll find a electrical engineer who has made
> > an in-depth study of Confucian poetry, than an English major.
>
> What you're saying does seem consistent with my own experience.
At my old university, engineers and science students were required to
take at least one arts course in order to "round out their experience"
or some such nonsense. Most took a few and generally regarded them
as ways of relaxing or as easy grades, and it was fairly common to
see them in higher-level courses, not just Intro Whatever 101.
When some of us suggested that the converse be true, that arts
students should be required to take some kind of introductory science
course, we were met with either blank stares or looks of pure terror.
--
Keith
Bill Snyder
wrote:
>Story
[mercilessly snipped]
>Historically there had been a rather high rate of failing waiver exams
>PLUS the grads teaching the course felt uncomfortable with the
>attitude of some of the students. So when I took over I initiated a
>simple addition. Before they took the waiver exam they had to have a 5
>minute conversation with me. At the end of which they could take the
>exam away. Or choose not to take it. In the four semesters I was the
>faculty organizer only 2 students decided to take the waiver exam. (By
>the way, those students who did take it, passed it). The rest opted to
>take the course. Because in conversation with me it would emerge that
>they either a) didn't know how to do particular things unless the
>set-up was exactly the same as it was at the engineering school or b)
>they didn't have all of the computer skills that they might be
>required to know out in the 'real world'.
>
>Generally good kids. But not nearly as good as they thought they were.
>Because their definition of well-rounded and knowledgeable was
>severely limited.
Without details, it's hard to know what to make of that. Could you
give a few examples of what they couldn't do? -- based on that bald
account, I can't even differentiate between "Your expectations were
ridiculously high, and you intimidated these students into taking the
course"; and "These kids were shockingly undereducated, and you did
them the favor of their lives."
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
Jonathan W. Hendry
"Keith Morrison" <kei...@polarnet.ca> wrote in message
news:3C17B352...@polarnet.ca...
> Iain J Coleman wrote:
>
> > > There have been studies, from time to time, that generally find that
> > > the students who succeed in the technical subjects are very likely to
> > > succeed in the liberal arts, while the reverse is not at all true.
> > >
> > > Engineers tend to be far better read than the average liberal arts major,
> > > in an amazing range of obscure subjects.
> > >
> > > It's far more likely that you'll find a electrical engineer who has made
> > > an in-depth study of Confucian poetry, than an English major.
> >
> > What you're saying does seem consistent with my own experience.
>
> At my old university, engineers and science students were required to
> take at least one arts course in order to "round out their experience"
> or some such nonsense. Most took a few and generally regarded them
> as ways of relaxing or as easy grades, and it was fairly common to
> see them in higher-level courses, not just Intro Whatever 101.
>
Plus, the arts classes are *full* of girls, which probably isn't
the case with Statics & Dynamics.
Engineering/Science majors should be told this as freshmen.
Brian Trosko
> When some of us suggested that the converse be true, that arts
> students should be required to take some kind of introductory science
> course, we were met with either blank stares or looks of pure terror.
This holds true today. I fulfill graduation requirements, I ended up
taking sundry courses in history, psychology, and sociology. I didn't see
a single psyche major taking circuit theory or digital design.
Captain Button
Various lifeforms are alleged to have written:
>> > It's far more likely that you'll find a electrical engineer who has made
>> > an in-depth study of Confucian poetry, than an English major.
>>
>> What you're saying does seem consistent with my own experience.
> At my old university, engineers and science students were required to
> take at least one arts course in order to "round out their experience"
> or some such nonsense. Most took a few and generally regarded them
> as ways of relaxing or as easy grades, and it was fairly common to
> see them in higher-level courses, not just Intro Whatever 101.
> When some of us suggested that the converse be true, that arts
> students should be required to take some kind of introductory science
> course, we were met with either blank stares or looks of pure terror.
My college had a more involved system called "Liberal Learning" [1].
Courses were catagorized in one of 8 or 10 diffenent catagories [2].
I don't recall the fancy names but they spanned the hard and soft
sciences and the humanities.
To graduate you had to take 2 courses in each catagory [3].
Of course, many people just took the easiest intro courses
available in areas they were not interested in.
Using a 20 year old memory, the catagories I recall are:
Physical Sciences
Math and Computer Science
Engineering
History and other cultures.
Arts & Literature
Social Sciences
[ Those are vague and not all of them. take with a grain of salt. ]
[1] I'm sure various and sundry here will be disappointed it
didn't include material on death camp management.
[2] This was in addition to the usual division in departments.
[3] In addition to the usual requirements for total number of
courses and the requirements for your major.
ObSF: Unseen University in Pratchett, Unknown University in
Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed", and IOU Illuminati
University in the GURPS RPG system.
--
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in
tolerance and free speech," - David Brin
Captain Button - but...@io.com
Margaret Young
wrote:
I thought about this after I posted and yes, it does certainly sound
as if I was intimadating them. Honestly no. I would generally ask them
question about things like moving files from one place to another,
attaching them to email. Amazingly, most could not do these simple
things without the neat interface programs developed by the IT dept.
at the university. For example, many of them were incredibly hazy on
the concept of ftp. At the university there was a nifty little program
that basically did all the work for them. That program was different
than one of the several I had on my computer. So they would tell me
that they had a cool file they had written and I would ask them to get
it for me to look at. They would happily sit down at my computer, look
at the FTP program and freeze. And believe me, it was a simple
program. It just didn't look like the one they had been using. When I
asked if they would prefer to use the ftp at the command prompt they
didn't have the foggiest idea what to do, even when I fired it up and
showed them how to log in. Only two of them had every FTP'd without
using at GUI program. As for attaching files to e-mail they relied
completely on programs developed by the University and provided to
them for free. Many could not do so even from another GUI email
program and none knew of any other way of doing it.
With those who bailed out (that is, the majority), none got past the
questions of how would you send me a file with and without email and
how would you attach a document to an e-mail you were sending to your
boss. On programs other than those developed at the university and
available nowhere else.
And I am really not that intimidating in person. None had met me
before, all were a foot taller than me and most outweighed me by 50
lbs. We always started out with me offering them a chair, having a
general chat and we often had a coffee before getting down to
business. Plus my office is plastered with pictures of cats and (I kid
you not) thousands of newspapers which I am in the process of scanning
and content-analyzing. Most seem to peg me as a slightly crazy female
academic who should be treated kindly as they would treat the more
eccentric of their mother's friends.
Robert Sneddon
(in message <9v86rr$3l8$1...@spock.usc.edu>):
>
> In particular, note the omnipresent Research Assistant. Universities are
> not mere centers of education, they also do extensive original research
> in various fields.
>
> RA positions are available in almost any field, but for obvious reasons
> there are a lot more of them in the hard sciences and engineering than
> in the fine and liberal arts.
In my daydreams of sudden unexpected wealth, I've imagined myself
funding an RA post for an English Lit grad student.
The University of Liverpool's Special Collections is home to the
Foundation Library, Britain's (and probably Europe's) premier research
collection of science fiction and fantasy. It runs on contributions
(both financial and literary) and support from a collection of fans,
plus some occasional grants and bequests. The collection is growing
faster than Andy Sawyer can catalogue it, and he could really use some
help.
--
Robert Sneddon
==============================================================
Posted with Hogwasher. Mac first, Mac only:
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==============================================================
Margaret Young
Ah, we require all arts students to take at least TWO science courses.
It is like pulling teeth, they scream much about it, but most of them
(I hope) get something out of the experience.
In my own area I have often found that science majors do not do
particularly well, but I would not feel comfortable extrapolating my
own experience to the humanities/arts. Have to say that I didn't enjoy
my humanities courses that much as an undergrad and found the main
difficulty in getting good grades was sussing what is was that the
professor wanted from me.
My SO, however, will probably be scarred for life from his experience
taking a women's studies course. And this is a man who gave me a copy
of _The Feminist Dictionary_ because he feld _I_ should know something
about the field and who may well have read more works of feminist
theory than the grad student who was grading him.
Margaret Young
<fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>On Wed, 12 Dec 2001 13:15:23 -0500, John Schilling wrote
>(in message <9v86rr$3l8$1...@spock.usc.edu>):
>
>
>>
>> In particular, note the omnipresent Research Assistant. Universities are
>> not mere centers of education, they also do extensive original research
>> in various fields.
>>
>> RA positions are available in almost any field, but for obvious reasons
>> there are a lot more of them in the hard sciences and engineering than
>> in the fine and liberal arts.
>
> In my daydreams of sudden unexpected wealth, I've imagined myself
>funding an RA post for an English Lit grad student.
And were you to do so you would be (and I am not being sarcastic here)
viewed as a truly wonderful person by the English Lit grad students
who are eternally jealous of the RAs available to the science
students.
>
> The University of Liverpool's Special Collections is home to the
>Foundation Library, Britain's (and probably Europe's) premier research
>collection of science fiction and fantasy. It runs on contributions
>(both financial and literary) and support from a collection of fans,
>plus some occasional grants and bequests. The collection is growing
>faster than Andy Sawyer can catalogue it, and he could really use some
>help.
Wow, that sounds like an institution to remember in my will. I own a
large collection of both SF and F and don't know many other people who
would really care about it. Of course, any donation would be
accompanied by a least some cash to help those who have to catalogue
and maintain it.
Keith Morrison
> > At my old university, engineers and science students were required to
> > take at least one arts course in order to "round out their experience"
> > or some such nonsense. Most took a few and generally regarded them
> > as ways of relaxing or as easy grades, and it was fairly common to
> > see them in higher-level courses, not just Intro Whatever 101.
>
> Plus, the arts classes are *full* of girls, which probably isn't
> the case with Statics & Dynamics.
>
> Engineering/Science majors should be told this as freshmen.
I don't know. There were a fair number of girls in geological
engineering, among other engineering specialities I happened to
be familiar with.
Of course, the attraction for the male college student to female
arts students might not only be the quantity but the quality. Of
their livers. The female engineers were able to keep up with the
boys when it came to the brews. Female arts students were more
pliable.
--
Keith
Keith Morrison
> > When some of us suggested that the converse be true, that arts
> > students should be required to take some kind of introductory science
> > course, we were met with either blank stares or looks of pure terror.
>
> This holds true today. I fulfill graduation requirements, I ended up
> taking sundry courses in history, psychology, and sociology. I didn't see
> a single psyche major taking circuit theory or digital design.
Not even that. A basic course on "this is what science is" or "why
rocks fall down" would do wonders to cut down on the moronic comments
I've seen coming out of arts faculties.
The really useful thing a science or engineering course might do is
teach some arts people that sometimes not everything is a matter of
opinion. If the calculations show that driving a 200 tonne load
over a bridge designed for a maximum load of 1 tonne is a bad idea,
the opinion of the designer that it will stay up really doesn't hold
much weight. (rimshot)
It might also get it through some people that not everything has some
sort of deep symbolic meaning.
I was in a science fiction course one time, the only non-arts type
in it, and the subject of Brown's "Arena" came up. There's a bit in
there where the protagonist wakes up and finds himself lying on blue
sand.
The arts people tried to come up with all sorts of symbolic meanings
for the blue sand. That it represented Earth, that when the hero
bled on to it (they assumed he was white), the white of his skin, red
of the blood and blue of the sand stood for American sacrifice or some
such nonsense.
It occurred to none of them that blue sand might be blue sand. That
it represented something all right, and that it was the protagonist
realizing he was somewhere strange. On Earth there's white sand and
grey sand and black sand and red sand, but no blue sand. So it's
an obvious clue he's not in Kansas anymore.
--
Keith
Andrew Lannon
news:9v8dk3$jh$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net...
> Plus, the arts classes are *full* of girls, which probably isn't
> the case with Statics & Dynamics.
>
> Engineering/Science majors should be told this as freshmen.
Depends on your school, I guess. Texas A&M has just bout 2 girls per guy
(weird, considering that until the 60s or so it was an all-male school
except for faculty daughters), and probably 65-70% of the majors are
engineering or other sciences, followed by Parks&Rec and ag-related, then
business, and no fine-arts to speak of. :-)
My Intro to Engineering class was about 40 people, and there were only about
10 guys.
Andrew Lannon
--
One ping to rule them all,
One ping to find them,
One ping to bring them all,
And in the darkness bind them.
Lee DeRaud
<kei...@polarnet.ca> wrote:
>I had a calculus test once with one question I hadn't had the vaguest
>idea of how to answer. So I worked from the basics, showed my reasoning
>and got an answer.
>
>As it turned out, there was a flaw in my reasoning at an early stage
>which completely threw off the result. But I still received partial
>marks since, as the written comment next to the mark put it, if the
>laws of mathematics had been altered to make an initial premise correct,
>I would have had the right answer.
Heh, pesky bits, those laws. OTOH, I'm still convinced that, on the
flow diagram for obtaining a math PhD, there's a box labeled "Invent
Obscure Notation". :-)
Lee
Uncle Gargoyle
<pau...@digital.net> wrote:
> It wasn't all that lucrative for JRRT. The Ring didn't have wide sales until
> Ballentine picked it up in the late sixties. While I don't know what
> financial arrangements he had with Ballentin, he died in 1973...
You have slightly garbled history. The initial editions of LotR
were hardback, published in the US by Houghton-Mifflin and in
England by Unwin. (H-M used signatures printed in England.)
But somehow, H-M forgot to copyright the work in the US. US
copyright law at that time required that foreign works be
formally entered for copyright, and if you forgot, you lost your
rights.
Ace Books, an SF/Western/etc p.b. house, noticed that LotR wasn't
copyright, so they issued a pirated edition in the US about 1964,
quite legally. Memory says that they didn't pay JRRT any
royalties. Horror ensued among the cognoscenti, Tolkien was
forced to make a number of minor textual changes to create a
"second edition", which *was* copyrighted in the US. The
Ballantine issue was of this second edition. I think they had it
out by mid 1965.
IIRC, Ace was so excorciated for their action that they withdrew
(or at least never reprinted) their edition even though it was
entirely legal.
I'd say that it was the Ace pirated edition that really started
the tidal wave of Tolkien enthusiasm -- it was cheap and
affordable -- but the Ballantine edition fueled its major growth.
One regularly sees second hand copies of the Ballantine edition,
but the Ace edition seems to be fairly uncommon.
--
Uncle Gargoyle
Jonathan W. Hendry
> Not even that. A basic course on "this is what science is" or "why
> rocks fall down" would do wonders to cut down on the moronic comments
> I've seen coming out of arts faculties.
>
> The really useful thing a science or engineering course might do is
> teach some arts people that sometimes not everything is a matter of
> opinion. If the calculations show that driving a 200 tonne load
> over a bridge designed for a maximum load of 1 tonne is a bad idea,
> the opinion of the designer that it will stay up really doesn't hold
> much weight. (rimshot)
Probably a good way to do this would be to use art forms that involve
science in some way. Color, complicated or active sculpture, mobiles,
etc. The work of Eduardo Kac could be used as cover for a section on
genetics.
A bridge might not be of much interest. A sculpture which needs to
support its own weight might be of more interest, because it might
be useful information later on.
Jonathan W. Hendry
"Andrew Lannon" <ALL_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:u1fk5es...@corp.supernews.com...
> "Jonathan W. Hendry" <j_he...@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
> news:9v8dk3$jh$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net...
> > Plus, the arts classes are *full* of girls, which probably isn't
> > the case with Statics & Dynamics.
> >
> > Engineering/Science majors should be told this as freshmen.
>
> Depends on your school, I guess. Texas A&M has just bout 2 girls per guy
> (weird, considering that until the 60s or so it was an all-male school
> except for faculty daughters), and probably 65-70% of the majors are
> engineering or other sciences, followed by Parks&Rec and ag-related, then
> business, and no fine-arts to speak of. :-)
>
> My Intro to Engineering class was about 40 people, and there were only about
> 10 guys.
>
Nice. I went to Drexel in Philly. Started in Mech E. and switched to
Info Sys. Info Sys had more women, but nothing compared to the art
history classes I took as a senior. 80% of the other students were
freshman girls. In a big lecture hall.
Drexel is probably much smaller than A&M, so may not offer as many
female-friendly majors. It's mostly an engineering school, with
business and design supplying most of the women.
Jonathan W. Hendry
"Paul Austin" <pau...@digital.net> wrote in message
news:u1d9id6...@corp.supernews.com...
>
> It wasn't all that lucrative for JRRT. The Ring didn't have wide sales until
> Ballentine picked it up in the late sixties. While I don't know what
> financial arrangements he had with Ballentin, he died in 1973...
The Hobbit was also popular, I think, and was published earlier. It might
not have been the mega-hit of LOTR in the 60's, but probably sold enough
to provide a decent income much earlier.
- J
Mark Atwood
>
> What you're saying does seem consistent with my own experience. However,
> do you happen to have any cites handy, or even pointers to where such
> cites may be found? I'd be interested in seeing any hard evidence that
> may exist.
Hmm. Such research would probably be done by a sociology dept. Which
probably would not be comfortable with greenlighting the research
project.
--
Mark Atwood | Well done is better than well said.
m...@pobox.com |
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Andrew Lannon
> Drexel is probably much smaller than A&M, so may not offer as many
> female-friendly majors. It's mostly an engineering school, with
> business and design supplying most of the women.
Sounds about like A&M, just smaller; I think we're around 50k students. 3rd
or 4th largest in the nation, IIRC.
Jonathan W. Hendry
> "Jonathan W. Hendry" <j_he...@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
> news:9v8mj3$v50$1...@slb2.atl.mindspring.net...
> > Drexel is probably much smaller than A&M, so may not offer as many
> > female-friendly majors. It's mostly an engineering school, with
> > business and design supplying most of the women.
>
> Sounds about like A&M, just smaller; I think we're around 50k students. 3rd
> or 4th largest in the nation, IIRC.
Drexel was, like 7500 tops. Freshman math and science classes had a better
ratio
than later engineering classes. Info Sys classes had a pretty decent ratio,
though
of course it's the same people year after year.
- J
Bill Snyder
wrote:
>On Wed, 12 Dec 2001 13:59:32 -0600, Bill Snyder <bsn...@iadfw.net>
>wrote:
>>Without details, it's hard to know what to make of that. Could you
>>give a few examples of what they couldn't do? -- based on that bald
>>account, I can't even differentiate between "Your expectations were
>>ridiculously high, and you intimidated these students into taking the
>>course"; and "These kids were shockingly undereducated, and you did
>>them the favor of their lives."
>
>I thought about this after I posted and yes, it does certainly sound
>as if I was intimadating them. Honestly no.
Um. Apparently I came across as accusing; that was _not_ my
intention. I meant simply "insufficient data" -- not that I believed,
or had any reason to believe, that you were doing a Bad Thing, just
that I had too little information to even guess where on the Good/Bad
Thing spectrum I'd put it.
> I would generally ask them
>question about things like moving files from one place to another,
>attaching them to email. Amazingly, most could not do these simple
>things without the neat interface programs developed by the IT dept.
>at the university. For example, many of them were incredibly hazy on
>the concept of ftp. At the university there was a nifty little program
>that basically did all the work for them. That program was different
>than one of the several I had on my computer. So they would tell me
>that they had a cool file they had written and I would ask them to get
>it for me to look at. They would happily sit down at my computer, look
>at the FTP program and freeze. And believe me, it was a simple
>program. It just didn't look like the one they had been using. When I
>asked if they would prefer to use the ftp at the command prompt they
>didn't have the foggiest idea what to do, even when I fired it up and
>showed them how to log in. Only two of them had every FTP'd without
>using at GUI program. As for attaching files to e-mail they relied
>completely on programs developed by the University and provided to
>them for free. Many could not do so even from another GUI email
>program and none knew of any other way of doing it.
>
>With those who bailed out (that is, the majority), none got past the
>questions of how would you send me a file with and without email and
>how would you attach a document to an e-mail you were sending to your
>boss. On programs other than those developed at the university and
>available nowhere else.
OK, I'll agree that those hardly sound like unreasonable expectations.
(But with a guilty look on my face. My own experience with a
command-line ftp program lasted just long enough to d/l a copy of
Netscape 1.something, and I've never used a non-GUI email program at
all. The scary part from your POV is that I've been making a large
part of my living writing control-system software for the last couple
of decades.)
Ross TenEyck
>But somehow, H-M forgot to copyright the work in the US. US
>copyright law at that time required that foreign works be
>formally entered for copyright, and if you forgot, you lost your
>rights.
>Ace Books, an SF/Western/etc p.b. house, noticed that LotR wasn't
>copyright, so they issued a pirated edition in the US about 1964,
>quite legally. Memory says that they didn't pay JRRT any
>royalties. Horror ensued among the cognoscenti, Tolkien was
>forced to make a number of minor textual changes to create a
>"second edition", which *was* copyrighted in the US. The
>Ballantine issue was of this second edition. I think they had it
>out by mid 1965.
I have no independent corroboration for this, but this is the
version that *I* heard. Tolkien's English publishers didn't just
forget to copyright LOTR in the U.S., they simply weren't interested
in the U.S. market at all. Ace contacted them about doing a U.S.
printing -- even though they legally didn't have to -- and H-M
ignored them. Ace tried to contact Tolkien directly, but didn't
know how to except through H-M, who weren't forwarding the letters.
Meanwhile, Ballantine had had the same experience with H-M, but
someone at Ballantine happened to know that Tolkien was a well-
known academic linguist, and was able to track down his contact
info via some kind of _Who's Who in Linguistics._ They were
negotiating with Tolkien for the U.S. printing while, unbeknownst
to them, Ace had finally thrown up its hands and decided to
just go ahead and print their edition.
Ace did, according to this version of events, actually write
royalty checks to Tolkien, although they weren't able to
deliver them until after everything had hit the fan. They
were in fact excoriated for their "piracy," with middling
justice, and retired from the field bloodied and somewhat
aggrieved.
The changes Tolkien made for the second edition were not,
so far as I know, for copyright purposes -- they were legitimate
corrections to numerous errors in the text. The foreword to
the latest H-M (I think) three-volume hardcover has a detailed
description of the textual history of LOTR; it's surprisingly
complex.
--
================== http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~teneyck ==================
Ross TenEyck Seattle, WA \ Light, kindled in the furnace of hydrogen;
ten...@alumni.caltech.edu \ like smoke, sunlight carries the hot-metal
Are wa yume? Soretomo maboroshi? \ tang of Creation's forge.
Charles R. Tenney
Uncle Gargoyle <toto...@mail.pacificcoast.net> wrote:
>On Tue, 11 Dec 2001 19:39:15 -0500, "Paul Austin"
><pau...@digital.net> wrote:
>
>> It wasn't all that lucrative for JRRT. The Ring didn't have wide sales until
>> Ballentine picked it up in the late sixties. While I don't know what
>> financial arrangements he had with Ballentin, he died in 1973...
>
>You have slightly garbled history. The initial editions of LotR
>were hardback, published in the US by Houghton-Mifflin and in
>England by Unwin. (H-M used signatures printed in England.)
>
>But somehow, H-M forgot to copyright the work in the US. US
>copyright law at that time required that foreign works be
>formally entered for copyright, and if you forgot, you lost your
>rights.
I'm 400 miles from my copy of a Tolkien bibliography (_J.R.R.
Tolkien, Architect of Middle Earth_, by Daniel Grotta). Any
inaccuracies in the following are due to errors in the above-named
book, or, more likely, my faulty memory.
"Somehow" involved the requirement that foreign works be entered
for a US copyright before selling some set number of copies. (I
seem to remember 50,000, but I could be off by more than an order
of magnitude.) A publisher couldn't just send an accomplice
to London to pick up a dozen copies of the hottest new release, have
said accomplice sell them to a dozen sub-accomplices, and then claim
that it had been sold in the US without copyright, and was therefore
fair game.
Anyway. H-M had no idea how well the book was going to sell. They,
and Unwin, had every intention of filing for copyright, but their
exploding sales quickly outran their plans for filing. It still
betrays a certain lack of planning, but that, as I read, is how it
happened--they were victims of their own unexpected success.
>Ace Books, an SF/Western/etc p.b. house, noticed that LotR wasn't
>copyright, so they issued a pirated edition in the US about 1964,
>quite legally. Memory says that they didn't pay JRRT any
>royalties. Horror ensued among the cognoscenti,
and at Ace, when they saw the reaction they'd gotten. They contacted
Tolkien and offered to set aside the royalties they would have paid him
under standard royalty agreements, to establish a prize for creative
writing students (or some sort of literary prize). Tolkien said he'd
rather just to have the money, so Ace gave it to him.
>Tolkien was
>forced to make a number of minor textual changes to create a
>"second edition", which *was* copyrighted in the US. The
>Ballantine issue was of this second edition. I think they had it
>out by mid 1965.
This one had the notation on the back, "This edition, and no other,"
has been approved by the author, blah, blah, blah, and readers "who
approve of courtesy, at least, to a living author, will purchase this
edition and no other."
Complicating this was the fact that Unwin was a partner in all
the agreements--they were supposed to get the royalties from other
editions (e.g., a US paperback edition) and share most of these with
Tolkien. This was a standard publishing contract of the time. Just
how much the Ace edition upset Tolkien in the end, and what he had to
say about it, may have been two different issues, complicated by the
fact that he ended up getting all the Ace royalties, and managed to
cut his partner (Unwin) out of the deal. This wasn't exactly Tolkien's
fault, and was very much the fault of Unwin and H-M. But if JRRT
ever secretly believed that he'd been screwed by the original deal,
and just ended up by getting his own back, he couldn't exactly say so,
especially since he planned to continue working with Unwin. It was
decidedly in best interest to come up with the Ballentine edition,
adding the comments on the back, and letting Unwin take their cut.
Unwin did well by the whole deal. They also did well by Tolkien, for
whom they provided a full-time secretary for pretty much the rest of
his life, to help him write _The Silmarillion_. He hadn't needed a
secretary before, but he hadn't been that old before either, and had
done his writing pretty slowly. He didn't finish _The Silmarillion_.
Aside from getting on in years (he would have been 85 in 1965) he was
devastated by the death of his wife, and ended up mostly just puttering
around on the book. His son finished it up, and the difference shows; _The
Silmarillion_ doesn't have the livliness, the wit, and the deftness
with language that Tolkien fans had learned to expect, even though
the stories themselves are unmistakably those of JRRT.
>IIRC, Ace was so excorciated for their action that they withdrew
>(or at least never reprinted) their edition even though it was
>entirely legal.
Under the circumstances, they weren't going to do so without Tolkien's
approval, which was something he was contractually bound not to give.
It bad press for Ace, and some, at least, have seen Ace as a fundamentally
ethical publisher who acted on the assumption (backed up by law) that the
copyright had been abandoned. On finding that this wasn't so, or at least
was not intentionally so, they went with the author's intent rather than
what they could back up in court.
Charles "grew up on the Unwin editions" Tenney
--
Charles R. Tenney ten...@dec3.mc.duke.edu | What would Duke Univ. Medical
| Center want with my opinions?
"My karma ran over my dogma." | What would I want with theirs?
Margaret Young
wrote:
>On Wed, 12 Dec 2001 15:28:54 -0500, Margaret Young <mmy...@umich.edu>
>wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 12 Dec 2001 13:59:32 -0600, Bill Snyder <bsn...@iadfw.net>
>>wrote:
>
>>>Without details, it's hard to know what to make of that. Could you
>>>give a few examples of what they couldn't do? -- based on that bald
>>>account, I can't even differentiate between "Your expectations were
>>>ridiculously high, and you intimidated these students into taking the
>>>course"; and "These kids were shockingly undereducated, and you did
>>>them the favor of their lives."
>>
>>I thought about this after I posted and yes, it does certainly sound
>>as if I was intimadating them. Honestly no.
>
>Um. Apparently I came across as accusing; that was _not_ my
>intention. I meant simply "insufficient data" -- not that I believed,
>or had any reason to believe, that you were doing a Bad Thing, just
>that I had too little information to even guess where on the Good/Bad
>Thing spectrum I'd put it.
Oh, my apologies. I didn't mean to suggest you came across as
accusatory. You were asking very reasonable questions.
It didn't'surprise me that they didn't know how to do the things I
asked about, after all we thought that people needed to take a course
in order to learn how to do it. It was just interesting to me that
they assumed that as engineering students they must already have
learned all that was necessary to take any computer course in any
department (other than, I hope, the Computer Science department).
By the way, they seldom were able to handle command-line ftp programs
even after taking the course. They _were_ able to navigate their way
through GUI programs that didn't look exactly like the ones at the
engineering school.
Although there was the cool day when there was a server glitch in the
building and none of the GUI programs worked. A number of students
were working on their projects and one enterprising soul came to my
office and asked if I could help. The command-line programs were still
working - so I fired them up and now, armed with a clear REASON for
learning how to master them, a number of these students happily wrote
programs in raw html code and transferred the results to their web
space via ftp. Some even figured out how to write html pages at the
unix prompt using a unix text editor. And the diehards thought it was
really cool that they were able to complete their term projects even
when the GUI programs had gone down.
As I hope I said earlier, these were smart students. They just needed
to be motivated to use their brains.
Rich Trouton
All the students in the College of Arts and Sciences at the school I
went to (CAS was the largest grouping of disciplines, others were the
College of Law and the College of Medicine) were required to take some
arts and sciences, regardless of what major you were pursuing. My
gen-ed requirements said I had to have at least 12 credits (most
classes were three credits) of both life and natural sciences. I took
two astronomy courses, three physics courses ("The Physics of Science
Fiction" was by far my favorite) and a bio course. It was the same for
the engineers and scientists with regards to liberal arts courses.
Rich
Dave O'Neill
"Nancy Lebovitz" <na...@unix1.netaxs.com> wrote in message
news:9v2ce3$h...@netaxs.com...
> In article <f538b1be.01120...@posting.google.com>,
> Thomas <ized...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >pursue must be more economically effective than the largely
> >laize-faire policies of the US.
> >
> >This last point followes logically from the fact that a lot of the
> >policies they pursue are manifestly a good deal less than optimal
> >while their economic growth rates are about as high as the U.S. over
> >long periods of time.
> >This has been largely obscured by the recent lengthy boom in the US
> >economy but is nonetheless true.
> >Per capitam The US is richer than Sweden or Denmark, but not by a
> >great deal and most of the difference stems from the fact that
> >americans work longer hours and have shorter vacations.
> >
> What kind of deal do the "guest workers" in Europe get? Do they
> pay the same taxes and get the same services that citizens do?
Within certain boundaries and it varies from state to state. Generally
speaking, for what its worth they get healthcare and of course all the usual
local services.
With regard to unemployment benefits that is different in the UK as you
loose the right to stay if you stop working, and non-citizens can't now
collect unemployment benefits or income support. Until historically quite
recently visiting students and others were able to sign on for benefits when
visiting - which must have been nice.
--
Dave O'Neill
Principle Word Wraggler - Atomicrazor
The lowest editorial standards on the web!
Margaret Young
wrote:
Of course there is. And not only for math PhDs. That is half the fun
of the process (she says cynically).
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Andrew Lannon <ALL_...@hotmail.com> spake:> news:9v423b$m...@netaxs.com...
>> I don't know whether it makes things better or worse to point out
>> that "The Roads Must Roll" is minor Heinlein.
> I think it's sort of a lateral slide. That just means I'll have to buy
> whatever anthology I can find that has TRMR. :-)
_The Past Through Tomorrow_. I've been rereading it as part of my
"read all the good Heinlein books" plan (i.e. everything except his late
"adult novels"). Very good stuff.
Seriously, all SF fans should read at least a fair amount of
Heinlein's works, and probably all of 'em... SF fans who don't read
Heinlein is like studying English but not reading Shakespeare.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"No one is safe. We will print no letters to the editor. We will give no
space to opposing points of view. They are wrong. The Underground Grammarian
is at war and will give the enemy nothing but battle." -TUG, v1n1
Paul Austin
"Uncle Gargoyle" wrote ...
> "Paul Austin" wrote:
>
> > It wasn't all that lucrative for JRRT. The Ring didn't have wide sales
until
> > Ballentine picked it up in the late sixties. While I don't know what
> > financial arrangements he had with Ballentin, he died in 1973...
>
> You have slightly garbled history. The initial editions of LotR
> were hardback, published in the US by Houghton-Mifflin and in
> England by Unwin. (H-M used signatures printed in England.)
You're quite right about Houghton-Mifflin's edition but it didn't sell very
well, being hardback before boomers got rich enough to buy them.
>
> But somehow, H-M forgot to copyright the work in the US. US
> copyright law at that time required that foreign works be
> formally entered for copyright, and if you forgot, you lost your
> rights.
>
> Ace Books, an SF/Western/etc p.b. house, noticed that LotR wasn't
> copyright, so they issued a pirated edition in the US about 1964,
> quite legally. Memory says that they didn't pay JRRT any
> royalties. Horror ensued among the cognoscenti, Tolkien was
> forced to make a number of minor textual changes to create a
> "second edition", which *was* copyrighted in the US. The
> Ballantine issue was of this second edition. I think they had it
> out by mid 1965.
>
I bought the Ace edition in 1965 but I don't remember the Ballantine edition
until 1968, after I joined the Navy. In any case, JRRT didn't profit much
from the Hobbitized US market. Like a lot of successful representational
art, the Rings were a gold mine for his heirs and assigns.
--
"I don't wonder that so many men are wicked.
I do wonder that so many are unashamed"
Paul F Austin
pau...@digital.net
Joe Slater
> Seriously, all SF fans should read at least a fair amount of
>Heinlein's works, and probably all of 'em... SF fans who don't read
>Heinlein is like studying English but not reading Shakespeare.
ALL of them? Oh yeah, you'll get a lot of people reading _The Cat Who
Walks through Walls_ or _The Number of the Beast_.
You seem to confuse *studying* English, something typically done out
of obligation, with reading - which ought to be done for pleasure. If
you said that people *studying* SF should read Heinlein, I'd agree -
but even then I wouldn't suggest that they read all of it, just a
couple of juveniles, TMIAHM, Starship Troopers, and SIASL. They'd also
have to read other authors - Asimov, Leinster, Tiptree, Shaver and so
forth.
jds
--
Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must
have come from the crude hereditary folk-tales which circulated in even
the most decadent of communities.
_Beyond the Wall of Sleep_ by H P Lovecraft
Mike Bruner
Speaking for my own experience, the University of Delaware Biological Sciences
department seems to have at least as many female graduate students as male ones,
possibly even more. I'm starting to wonder if biology is going to start having a
serious female domination after a few decades given the number of women I see
around me in classes and seminars these days. Actually, aren't there statistics
suggesting more women than men have been going into higher education lately, or at
least they've increased faster than men are? I seem to recall seeing something
like that once, although my brain is melted from taking two finals today so take
my memory with a grain of salt at the moment :) (Those were the last classes I'm
ever going to have to take for grades in my life though! Now I just have to finish
the research in the next few years...).
--
Mike Bruner-m...@NOSPAMhome.com
"Yes, I am a servant of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial".
Now back to your regularly scheduled off-topic thread.
Mike Bruner
> pho...@ugcs.caltech.edu (Damien Raphael Sullivan) writes:
>
> >"Celes Knight" <NOknig...@NOrconnectSP.AMcom> wrote:
>
> >>Hmmm. It would seem logical for the gov't to offer large grants in areas
> >>that would benefit the country as a whole (engineers, doctors, hard
> >>science), smaller grants in areas that the country needs more of (maybe law
> >>enforcement or teachers), and little to no help in areas that might be
> >>interesting but doesn't really benefit the country (art history). I wonder
> >>why they don't?
>
> >I think they sort of do for science PhDs. My understanding of grad school is:
>
> >engineering degrees, or science Master's: you're boosting your employment
> >prospects, so you take loans.
>
> >science doctorate: you're probably headed for research, and thus have social
> >value, without matching income. You get stipends.
>
> In particular, note the omnipresent Research Assistant. Universities are
> not mere centers of education, they also do extensive original research
> in various fields. This is financed not just by the University, but by
> government agencies, private foundations, even corporations that want to
> see some particular research project carried out. And much of the money
> thus obtained, is used to pay graduate students for part-time work as RAs
> at starving-student wages plus free tuition.
Ah yes, you've summed up my current occupation well. Dunno if I'd call them
"starving student" wages necessarily; granted, I couldn't live at my apartment if
my parents weren't covering the rent for me, but I could probably afford somewhere
(it's just that my parents prefered I not be living at the actual level I would be
on my own dime ;)). For damn sure it ain't "part time" given how many hours I'm at
the lab seven days a week :). My current value society-wise IS probably not
accurately reflected by my personal income for what I do, since the sale of
technology based on my results could be worth a LOT of money. Heck, depending how
you look at it, my lab's already looking at some useful things we can license that
to a certain extent were developed from the work I was doing for my masters in the
lab a few years ago (and back then they WEREN'T paying me at all for working in the
lab, I was paying!). About all I can get out of it is a pat on the head and
eventually a little piece of paper that says "Dr. Bruner" on it (and THEN I can go
work as a post-doc for a slight increase in pay and respect (I tell ya, you never
hear a post-doc refered to as "Dr." :))). Ah well, it's a living (death)!