Things you just don't get

[death shot]

Wikipedia has come a long way.

 

[indesertum]

:\

i told my girl that she spent a lot of money on ugly shoes (kenneth cole sandal heels... and the like from amazon) and now she's not very happy


but kenneth cole.....

 

[death shot]

Well, what kind of REACTION did you expect?!

 

[acidboy]



I don't get the popularity - or do I say "genius" - of Elvis Costello.

I don't get how people suddenly ride on the bandwagon just because someone says this act is a "genius" or "the next big thing"- sure they sound great and they look cool but, really?! people need someone to decide what they think they'll like?

 

[Liam O]

How accurate is wikipedia? I remember in H.S. my teachers not wanting me to use wikipedia for sources of information because they were "unreliable"

So are most peer reviewed journals, really. In the humanities (I don't know about hard sciences, but I've heard stories), most stuff is a lot of speculation about a very finite amount of data/information.


I deal with this stuff all the time, and when I'm pulling articles for a paper in something like a linguistics class, the country I pull the article from will affect the "facts" as much as the individual author. E.G. Old school linguists loved making "family trees" to show the divergence of languages. English and German sources until pretty recently would classify things as East, West and North Germanic subfamilies (I'm just using this as an example because its sort of in my area) with Modern English and the German dialects firmly in the "West Germanic" category (along with the other "Low German" languages) Gothic off by itself in East Germanic, and North Germanic being basically the Ingvaeonic dialects. When I started in Old English, I found I could read Continental Saxon quite easily once I got used to the differences in orthography, Old Norse was only marginally harder, and Old Gothic was comprehensible once I understood the use of certain verb forms and clitics. I couldn't read OHG, however, despite it being in the same sub-family as OS and AS, and texts written prior to the second consonant shift were as foreign to me as Koine Greek or Old Irish. Now, having read a substantial amount of Scandinavian contemporary linguistics scholarship, the relation between the so-called "Low German" dialects (Saxon, Frisian, Frankish, Flemish, etc) and Ingvaeonic seem a lot closer, and the grouping of Low and High German into West Germanic seems more a product of the Nationalist movement's effect on scholarship during the nascence of the German state. The similarities between the groups are undoubtedly the result of common ancestry AND prolonged contact, going in both directions, and rather than family trees perhaps considering venn diagrams with overlaps of influence and exchange of ideas would be a more rational approach.


This is to say that a source like Wikipedia often, though not always, considers multiple viewpoints, and will take pains to note both the prevailing theories and less commonly held, but often more plausible ones, which one rarely sees in peer reviewed papers where someone is trying to "prove" their opinion is the correct one while maintaining it is novel enough to be worth publishing, thus putting an onus on them to say something at least slightly controversial, which leads to a distressing tendency to exaggerate claims.

yes. so many times. it's unbelievable. especially when you start reading the source material
i remember a study showing that wikipedia was as accurate as brittanica. encyclopedias in general are not very good to use as source material but they're great ways to find source material. i feel like teachers dont like wikipedia citing because it's lazy and it looks bad

I love it for finding sources, but also because it tends to present a number of opposing views on subjects, I also like it for honing arguments. Its easier to critique someone else's rebuttal of a point in your initial paper than answer awkward questions after the fact.

:\
i told my girl that she spent a lot of money on ugly shoes (kenneth cole sandal heels... and the like from amazon) and now she's not very happy

but kenneth cole.....

Dude... doesn't matter how ugly. You wear them out to dinner with her a few times so she "knows" you like them, then you push them to the back of your closet and they quietly disappear to a Salvy Army bin a year down the line.

If she notices they're gone, you act distraught, say you don't know what happened to them and you tried to replace them but the model is discontinued, then propose that you both go to pick out a new pair of shoes and subtly direct her to buy something you actually like.

 

[indesertum]

^right on about wikipedia


she bought them for herself. i've been realizing more and more she has normal person taste and i dont know how to move her in a better direction without offending her (or making her spend a lot of money) she takes criticisms too personally

 

[Liam O]

Go WINDOW shopping somewhere that doesn't have cheap crap, and just tell her "This would look great on you" occasionally. Praise is better than criticism, which in my experience just tends to make people go "uh huh" then convince them they were right all along and that you're an asshole for telling them that they really should do something about their arm because its on fire.

 

[indesertum]

i will try that thanks

 

[Liam O]

No worries man. I don't think my missus owns any natural fabrics that I haven't bought her, and dresses like an 18 year old art student... We're both substantially older than that and I've been trying to get her to look more professional for ages.

NOT easy.

 

[blahman]



i remember a study showing that wikipedia was as accurate as brittanica. encyclopedias in general are not very good to use as source material but they're great ways to find source material. i feel like teachers dont like wikipedia citing because it's lazy and it looks bad

Any proper unit from a reputable institution beyond high school will not accept Wikipedia citations in your papers. The whole point is that you go through primary sources and make your own analysis and draw your own conclusions from the evidence you just looked at. You may use reviews and other secondary sources for tracking general overviews and consensuses.

Encyclopedias are just for kids regurgitating information in a different form in grade school.

 

[why]

Liam, those language groupings are made based on diachronic analysis of phonetics. As a trivial example, most Latinate speakers have little trouble reading a large portion of modern English words (especially in the sciences) despite the obvious fact that their native language is from an entirely different language family; the contact of Latin and French with English has increased similarity between the languages, but under phonetic diachronic analysis they are clearly not closely related. Langue, not parole (as my professor said his professor used to say).

 

[patrickBOOTH]



My battery died and now I can't find it... Which sucks, because I had a strong prior interest in the subject. I'll be combing JSTOR for it after tomorrow, because I just realized a week from friday I NO LONGER HAVE ACCESS TO JSTOR AND MY LIFE IS OVER.

I'll link it if I find it again

I never had a any luck with JSTOR. It seems like they are always revoking access to it and when it did work I could never find anything useful on it.

are you kidding...?? pretty much every time I'm on it. reading something, oh what's that? click. read something else... oh what's THAT? click. wash, rinse, repeat! wiki = information crack.

Totally, probably every day of my life.

How accurate is wikipedia? I remember in H.S. my teachers not wanting me to use wikipedia for sources of information because they were "unreliable"

It has gotten much better. They are usually pretty good about removing content that is either obvious bullshit, or warning you about pages that have no citations. In most cases when pages are cited they are pretty legit. I know that the public affairs group at my company maintains the accuracy of our own page and such. I would suspect other companies/entities do the same.

 

[MrG]



Yes, those people you listed plus many more black artists influenced the British invasion but by that time they were done and dusted and American radio stations were not giving fair airplay to black artists and to an extent black influenced music unless it was safe pop crap like Chubby Checker. You might have been listening to decent music, but "you lot" AKA the general American public probably would not have been because you didn't have access to it. Hendrix had to go to England to find an audience. When the British invasion came it was a reintroduction to America of what had once been a uniquely American genre. Radio stations played British music because it was one more step removed from its black roots.
Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash etc are a different story though because country and country influenced music was still quite healthy at the time, I think that's a different topic however.

Excellent points re: black artists. You know your stuff!

That said, I have to disagree that you can divorce Waylon and Cash from the conversation on rock 'n' roll. I know we view them as country, and I don't doubt they were getting airplay on country radio, but they're also a crucial part of early rock 'n' roll. It's easy to forget that they were far less country back then than they're considered now. For illustration, listen to old Hank Williams and compare that the Cash and Waylon's work. Cash was a Sun Records guy, and Waylon was in Buddy Holly's band (Waylon even narrowly avoided the American Pie crash). That being the case, the fact that they were continuing to get airplay during the British Invasion means that American radio wasn't completely devoid of early rock 'n' roll during those years.

Interesting aside, if you haven't listened to it, check out the song "Carl Perkins' Cadillac" by Drive-By Truckers. Even if you're not a fan of the band/genre, it's a really cool 5:30 long narrative on the whole Sun Records culture of the '50s.

 

[LawrenceMD]

I don't get About.com - i realize its purely engineered to gather internet traffic, but its worse then useless - it wastes time.

its like when you walk into an office and start talking to a clueless receptionist, but the receptionist has to say something so she'll start blabbering inanely until you find the place/person who has the relevant and useful information your actually looking for.

about.com is the clueless receptionist of the interwebs.

 

[patrickBOOTH]



I don't get About.com - i realize its purely engineered to gather internet traffic, but its worse then useless - it wastes time.
its like when you walk into an office and start talking to a clueless receptionist, but the receptionist has to say something so she'll start blabbering inanely until you find the place/person who has the relevant and useful information your actually looking for.
about.com is the clueless receptionist of the interwebs.

Very true. I feel the same way about ehow and wisegeeks, though wisegeeks has proved useful once or twice.