Over at NSLog(); the question of the day is how do you feel about open book tests. Ambivalent at best would be my first answer.
When I was in college, in the late 1970’s studying computer science, the only courses that regularly presented open book exams were the ones from my core curriculum, internal data structures, COBOL, online (CICS) programming, et-cetera. Sure, they could ask more obscure questions about the topic at hand, but if you were going to rely solely on the book or your notes to get all the answers then you weren’t going to do very well.
Without a solid basic understanding of the material at hand you’d lose too much time flipping through the book to complete the test. Most of the time I’d use the book to look up obscure tidbits, like the volume in bytes of a track on a 3350 disk drive.
The larger question for me is, “how do I feel about testing?” Throughout my high school and college careers I was constantly in trouble of failing or on academic probation. And yet I was one of the best programmers in my class and I have had a very successful working career for over 20 years now. Not only was I a poor test taker, I wasn’t motivated by the thought of getting a lessor grade.
I think that most testing fails because it is subjectively based on the teacher’s perspective of the material. If the test itself was a poor representation of the material covered in the classroom, then how could my failure on the test be an accurate measure of my knowledge of that material. Too often, in my experience as a student, the tests were wide of the mark when it came to accurately reflecting the course content.
Especially for the technical side of computer science, and any other discipline with a measurable outcome, I think a fairer evaluation would be of product produced and not just regurgitation of facts or theories.
With the recent reports of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease” in the United States, Michele and I have been looking at our diet. Michele has been and continues to be largely vegetarian in her approach to food. I have always been a meat and potatoes man. She eats meat mostly because I do, and since I prepare a majority of our evening meals, there’s meat on the table.
The recent focus on meat, and how it is produced, has brought our different lifestyles vis-a-vis food to the foreground. Not in a negative way, but in a “we need to look at what we are doing and understand it better” way.
Growing up I wasn’t allowed control over my diet. Food was placed on my plate and I was expected to eat it. There were frequent battles between my mother and I over food. The specifics aren’t important here, but the result, a stubborn resistance to new or different foods, is the crux of the matter today.
Giving up a diet that consists of chili, Salisbury steak, hamburgers, spaghetti with meat sauce, et-cetera, for one with Tofu, soy crumbles, and fish, augmented with vegetables is major for me. In the 7 years we have been living together I have broadened my eating horizons thanks largely to Michele’s patience and understanding. But it has been at a slow pace. I tend to make one or two changes and live with them for a long time before adding more food to my recurring diet.
The abruptness of the mad cow scare was mirrored by an abrupt shift in our evening meal selections. It has been difficult not to feel like I’m being punished for some wrong. This week we’ve had only one evening meal with meat, the rest were meatless, used fish, shrimp, or tofu crumbles. Each meal has been good, the shrimp fried rice was excellent, but I have missed my meat and potatoes.
This afternoon we purchased a halibut fillet for dinner. I had been looking forward to spaghetti sauce (with tofu crumbles) so I was uncomfortable with the menu shift. We found an easy bake recipe using salsa, dijon mustard, and honey. As the time approached to make the meal I was increasingly upset and scared. I broke down and cried as I explained to Michele how scared I was about all the changes in our menu thanks to the meat industry’s greed. She gave me a safe place to express the fears little Mark was having about all these different foods. Letting go of the build up of frustration and hurt at this whole situation helped me to feel more in control.
In control enough to make the fish and eat it. It wasn’t the best meal I’ve ever made or eaten, but it wasn’t bad either. Afterwards I again was overcome with emotion; this time relief at having faced my childhood fears about new food.
Knowing that I can express my childhood fears, however petty they may sound, safely allows me to grow and move past the places these fears have held me for so long. Thanks to my beautiful wife, Michele, I am able to comfort and heal the parts of me that were damaged or left uncompleted as I was growing up.
The online poll I talked about a while back has succeeded admirably. At least from my humanist stance. Voting was running 2 to 1 in favor of gay marriage or civil union when the organizers pulled the plug. Wired has the story.
Years ago, when the anti-smoking crusaders were cleaning out office buildings and restaurants, I remember saying that while I liked the idea of clean air to breathe I wasn’t sure I like the idea of laws against personal choice. My belief is that zealotry needs a target, and while today’s target may please you, you could very well end up being tomorrow’s victim.
Smoking is on the run and it appears that sexual orientation is next. All of which leads me to ask, how is the dogmatic approach to social issues and structure in this country by the Christian Fundamentalists any better or different than the dogmatic approach to society held by Islamic Fundamentalists in the Middle East?
For some time now I’ve known that I enjoy (suffer from) attention deficit disorder. I believe that it actually allows me to perform better in some areas of my life; I can work on multiple things at once for example. It does have a downside or two, but I’ve forgotten what they are right now.
This posting perfectly captures how I see ADD, or as the author perfectly describes it, nerd attention deficit disorder.
This week I am updating my wife’s site, andifyoudidknow.com with new style sheets, images and color changes.
The basic structure is there now, with color changes and minor tweaks coming. Give her a look and let me (or her) know what you think.
Today marked the end of a long ordeal for Michele and I. After going into business for myself four years ago I significantly under-estimated my annual federal income tax. With each attempt to catch up and pay what I owed it seemed we only got in deeper.
This summer, with my job future here in question, I finally came clean and admitted that I had a problem dealing with this and that I needed help. Talking to Michele allowed me to see that my addictive side was hooked on the sick thrill of having this incredible debt looming over me. Knowing that an authority figure could come crashing down on my life somehow satisfied me. In transactional analysis terms I had found the ultimate “I’m not okay, you’re okay” situation. Uncle Sam plays for keeps and I was walking a very thin line towards disaster.
Michele rightly expressed dismay and hurt that I had allowed this situation to get out of hand. She expressed a loss of trust that I hadn’t come to her sooner and told her the truth of our situation. There were a couple of days there that were the hardest I’ve ever lived through. Afterwards we talked about what I needed to do to gain control of this part of my personality.
We restructured our finances and obtained a large second mortgage on our home with the money earmarked for paying off our back taxes. We filed an offer in compromise with the IRS to see if we could bargain to pay back a reduced amount against the promise of no late payments in the future. I learned to honestly look at money and what it meant to me.
Our offer was rejected, and our appeal was also denied. So today I wrote the check and sent a full payment to the Treasury. The monkey that has lived on my back for nearly three years is no longer there. The monkey isn’t dead, he’s just not actively weighing me down. I understand better now what people mean when they say they are a recovering addict. I will always be addicted to tempting authority; a part of me still craves the sick, hurt feeling I get when an authority figure is mad at me and punishing me.
The monkey is gone for today, I don’t know what form he will take next. I only hope that I have learned enough to be open and honest about any part of my life where I am tempting fate. I do not ever want to feel like this again. Because I like the feeling, and giving into it will ultimately destroy me.
Some times a little information is a dangerous thing.
After upgrading to 10.2.8 on my Powerbook (eeyore) I discovered the ‘sysctl’ command. Among other things it purports to report the CPU frequency of the machine. You do this by issuing this command:
sysctl hw.cpufrequency
Only the output may upset you. It certainly did me. I have a 867 MHz G4 but sysctl reported my CPU frequency as 667000000. A difference of 200 MHz or about 23%. Not cool. Further investigation into the matter had me reseting my PMU every time I had to restart my laptop. You see after reseting the PMU (and reseting the clock from 12/31/1969 each time) sysctl would return a beautiful 867000000 for cpuFrequency.
Not being happy with this situation I have been searching for clarification about this problem and a fix to make it go away. Yesterday, thanks to live journal thread on cpu frequency I think I found out what is happening. Moreover, I have confidence that my understanding is now the truth.
The hw.cpufrequency is an undocumented parameter of the sysctl command. Its results are not accurate. With the help of the XCode developer’s disk included in 10.3 (Panther) I installed the Skidmark GT benchmark tool yesterday. Upon running it with sysctl reporting 867 as the cpu frequency I got benchmarks of 86, 86, and 86 for Integer, Floating Point, and Vector.
Rebooting and not reseting the PMU results in sysctl showing 667 once again. Running Skidmark again I got 86, 86, and 86. Skidmark rates a 1.0 GHz CPU at 100, so values of 86 would be correct for a 867 MHz processor.
In other words, if you have been chasing after the solution to the sysctl hw.cpufrequency “bug” like I have, you can stop. Hw.cpufrequency is undocumented and returns a false value for G4 processors. If you have 10.3, put the XCode CD in your machine and install the Skidmark GT tool (it’s part of the CHUD benchmarking package) and use it to evaluate your machine’s performance.
In ten or so years of personal computer ownership I have upgraded operating systems, office productivity tools, development environments, and a host of other applications large and small.
I’ve survived OS/2 Warp and it’s 20 plus diskettes, and made the hike up through Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, and XP Professional. I made detours along the way to play with QNX, BeOS, and some Red Hat Linux distributions.
In all the upgrades, new editions, and “clean” installs I’ve never not had a problem. The closest I came was with Windows XP Professional that installed with no errors in less than an hour, only to blue screen on the first boot.
This week I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), upgraded that to 10.3.2, and then installed iLife ‘04 on two different Macs with not a single hiccup. Insert the disk, click on continue a few times, select an option or two and sit back and relax.
I installed 10.3 on my Powerbook sans backup, I took a leap of faith and trusted that the “archive and install” option provided would be all the safety net I’d need. I was amply rewarded. The upgrade to 10.3.2 and later installation of iLife was a breeze.
My wife who has been subject to the horrors of “a simple install” before was reluctant to upgrade her iMac. Not that it wouldn’t be working in the end, but that it would take hours and hours with extreme amounts of frustration. We installed 10.3, upgraded it to 10.3.2, and installed iLife in about 3 hours. Everything works, out of the box, no sweat, no worries.
Years ago I remember running across the term “out of box experience.” For my money no one beats Apple’s OOBE. Nothing will beat the original OOBE, when we first brought our Macs home, but this software “refresh” comes damn close.
Kudos to Apple.
Thanks to Inluminent, I now have a full entry RSS feed. Scroll to the very bottom of this page and select the rss 2.0 link and you are in business.
Thanks to John’s generosity I was literally able to copy and paste his template into a new template in my movableType set up. Very cool.