Recent Burger King progressions into unconventionality have me worried.
Here, a delicious new product from Burger King, the home of the King of Whoppers.
and
There, an unconventional coupon offer from your friendly neighborhood King of the Burgers.
What are we coming to? We have too many casually "friend-ed" people on Facebook that Burger King was kind enough to take the time out to motivate us to clean up some of that Facebook clutter? Why Facebook? Why not MySpace, Burger King? Why not set your sacrificial rites on the terrible court jester of crap, Mr. MySpace? Alarming that so many people have sacrificed their Facebook buddies for a Whopper, but what's really alarming is the first link up there.
"Mmm. Burgers cooking on the grill smell so delicious! I want to smell like that too!" /spritz spritz.
Ahh, my world is perfect now. /woman bound to where I am and trail me like my scent trails
What?!
30 January 2009
BK cologne + sacrificial rituals?
20 January 2009
09 December 2008
This is untoward! This is NOT toward!
We all know that I have had my fair share of problems with the College Board. Read: I fucking hate the College Board. In high school, this organization provided singlehandedly the bane of my existence. And I feel like the way they structure their exams is meant to completely discourage good scores of any kind, much less for the less fortunate.
Now, I know, I've said it again and again - I come from a place that is relatively low-income in terms of general residents. And my high school was hardly loaded for cash. Which is why I feel like the SAT as a whole is biased. This is the reasoning behind why analogies were slowly being eased out of the SAT reasoning portion of the exam.
Herrnstein and Murray concede this problem and give an excellent example of the built-in bias that IQ tests entail. This particular example was taken from the verbal analogy portion of the SAT (p. 281). RUNNER:MARATHON
(A) envoy:embassy
(B) martyr:massacre
(C) oarsman:regatta
(D) referee:tournament
(E) horse:stableAs Herrnstein and Murray explain, "The answer is oarsman:regatta--fairly easy if you know what both a marathon and a regatta are, a matter of guess work otherwise. How would a black youngster from the inner city ever have heard of a regatta?" (p. 281). But the real question is: What do the psychometricians have on their mind when they create such tests and from what conceptual scheme are they deriving their questions? Herrnstein and Murray go on to say that other more sophisticated tests have eliminated vocabulary bias (e.g., geometrical figures, etc.) and now measure reaction time and movement time, which give a more reliable figure to the G factor (p. 281-295). Again, this has been broken down according to ethnicity. Even with the limitations of test bias and the amendments to the new testing methods, there is widespread failure to note the unargued assumptions that go into the creation of these revised instruments. Without any solid theoretical framework, there are many inferences that one could make regarding the amount of time someone spends answering a question and the speed with which the hand moves to answer the question, not one of which would necessarily have anything to do with the phenomenon of intelligence or the category of race. The point applies to all tests including those that utilize geometric figures instead of vocabulary. The conceptual framework from which the tests were created can never be completely purified of the single-minded bias of the creators. Many have written about this problem; but perhaps the most famous is Stephen Jay Gould. In his The Mismeasure of Man, he states succinctly that "determinist arguments for ranking people according to a single scale of intelligence, no matter how numerically sophisticated, have recorded little more than social prejudice (Gould, p. 27-28, 1981). SOURCE
After all, the SAT test is supposed to be a good determination of how a student will fare in college. Except it's not. Standardized testing has almost no relation to classroom performance other than how to take a multiple choice test. I've certainly known hundreds and thousands of students who are good guessers and certainly beat my SAT score by around 1000 points. It's really all about the prep. And of course the wealthier kids can afford the best test prep there is and knock us all out of the park and go to the Ivies.
(Well, let's just be honest - rich kids don't even need to try to get into the Ivies, just gotta flash the bling that Daddy gives.)
Further, I think it's pretty ridiculous that the test is structured the way it is. You're cooped up in a high school room for roughly four hours. At 7:30 a.m. AT 7:30 IN THE MORNING ON A SATURDAY, THIS HAPPENS. To think that anyone could write a decent essay on the American flag at 7:30 am without food and having just been woken up is ridiculous. On a normal Saturday morning, basic functioning processes are near impossible much less at 7:30 a.m. Lest we forget that the whole college application process involves making yourself look like the prettiest showdog out there with the greatest number of activities. Some of us were out until 1 or 2 in the morning following some sort of marching band adventure, so thanks for that, College Board.
A HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS, people. A hundred million dollars is spent on this kind of thing. This is madness.
Is the SAT an IQ test?No.
Why isn't it an IQ test?
Because it doesn't measure IQ. It is used that way. And it was developed from the army IQ test. But even the College Board will refuse to say that this is an intelligence test. And I'd love to see them say it. I'd love to see them say anything because then you can attack it. But there's this kind of mushy response that when you work your way through it, there's sort of nothing left--'Well, it has a slight predictive validity to freshman year grades in college.' We spend a 100 million dollars a year for that? You know--your grades in high school predict college grades better than this and we didn't have to spend anything. (John Katzman, founder of The Princeton Review)
Well, education has always been about the Benjamins, if nothing else, and it's finally caught up with them. At least, it has in the court of public opinion.
What does the SAT predict?The sole scientific claim of the SAT is its capacity to predict first year grades. According to the technical studies done by the Educational Testing Service and College Board, the SAT predicts about one factor in six--one sixth of the difference between two kids' first-year grades. The predictive value declines after that--looking at four year grades or graduation rates. So even the test makers agree that five out of six parts of whatever it takes to predict how well you're going to do in your freshman year, is not their test.
It does correlate extremely highly with an IQ test. It was developed from the army IQ test...
That's part of the seedy under side of the SAT. The SAT was originally developed by straight out racists--eugenicists, people who thought my forbearers--not just people of color--were imbeciles and shouldn't be allowed in their country because they didn't know the language and couldn't score high on their test. I wouldn't suggest the current people who run those companies share those kinds of ugly views. But it's a self-reinforcing notion of defining intelligence as that which whatever the dominant group in society has. Ends up giving that group higher scores and lower scores. The fact that test scores correlate with test scores is rather meaningless. The tests are measuring the same set of factors. What's more important is whether the test accurately predicts how well you're going to do.
Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director for FairTest
And for one last bit:
And what I was about to say earlier was that, with FairTest and others, they will say that what the test actually judges is quick strategic guessing with less than perfect information. Boys, for example, do better on the math portion of the SAT than girls. They routinely score 40 to 50 points higher. Many people say, well that's because girls are ignored in high school math. That may be true. And yet the girls do just as well in college when they take math courses as the boys, despite their lower SAT scores on the math portion. And when you interview the boys as to how they approach the test, the answer is they basically viewed it as a pinball machine. And the goal was speed and winning. And the girls on the other hand, wanted to work through the problems before they put down the answer. That, apparently, is not merit.
Somebody who wants to work through a problem before concluding with an answer, is not guessing and they're not fast. And so on some level, what we are confusing as a result of this over-emphasis on the testocracy--what we're confusing merit with is speed and the confidence to guess.
Lani Guinier, Prof., Harvard Law School
There's always been discussion of the SAT's potential to be gender-biased, especially on the Math/English front and I feel like this explores the issue well. The SATs are solely meant to rake in money, for the Ivies and for the College Board itself. You pay $40 essentially to take the test, much less $9 per school to send it out. This is what it was when I took the test three years ago - with the recession and inflation, who knows how much more it might be now? Granted, that a student will take the SAT on average twice and apply to three schools (which is meager - I know people who applied to 8), that's $134 per person. When you factor in that it's juniors and seniors who take the SAT, and let's use my HS statistics here, 793 students, that's a little over $106,000 from my high school ALONE. JUST for the SAT. Now, let's assume that number is stable for all the high schools across the country. Not private high schools, public high schools. That's over 2 billion. HOLY CRAP. Much less all the prep and the tests they do on the side that actually matter, like the AP exam.
Anyway, the College Board has just agreed to settle state investigations into its student loan system. Basically, the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut found that they discounted financial aid services for colleges that agreed to put their loans on lists of "preferred lenders." Oh, College Board. Oh, education, you reek of selflessness. (SOURCE.)
I don't know what's to be done, but I think it's important to note the growing movement of liberal arts colleges to stop abiding by the SAT. These kinds of standardized tests are no real measure for ability, as they claim, but just hint at who's a better guesser, a faster guesser, or has more test prep. Well, fantastic. As I did none of those, I'm pretty much screwed. And let's also take into consideration that SAT scores are the first wave of deciding college apps for the Ivies. There's certainly a line (I think it's 1950, with the new system of scoring) where everyone below gets shuffled off as a reject and everybody else's essays actually get read.
Now whether or not they admit this, I kind of believe it to be true.
Until the education system decides whether it's totally for profit or for its students, instead of this wishy-washy doing one but claiming another, then I don't think anything good can come of it.
02 December 2008
STFD, BBS.
(And for those of you who don't speak Internet, it means 'simmer the fuck down.')
See, this is why we can't have nice things. (Also a caveat to avoid reading the comments page of any news site ever. Oh, why can't I ever learn?)
With the news of Black Friday sales statistics popping in from analysts everywhere, gamers are fighting their own little war right now. What war is that exactly? The Wii War. The Gaming War. The Whatever War. BOTH Microsoft and Sony refuse to acknowledge the status of Nintendo as a potential competitor because they feel it's not on par with their consoles. But I say - what? What makes a competitor? While the Wii is still struggling to beat PS2 sales, that still doesn't change the fact that it's been this season's best console so far. For lower/middle-class folk, $400 - $600 is a lot to shell out for a console, much less $50-$75 a game. And for what?
The fanboys are screaming: "Graphics! Graphics! Graphics and high-res make the game." But if this year's sales have anything to say about it, the answer is NO, THEY DON'T. Nintendo gets a lot of flack from the hard-core gamers because they feel the company exploits the niche market, a little cul-de-sac of shoppers not wooed by the big companies. While Call of Duty and Halo belong to the so-called "Big 2", Nintendo is pushed onto the outskirts because of its animation style video games and its so-called family orientation. Super Smash Bros.? Mario Kart? Wii Tennis? PSHAW, they say. PSHAW. Where is the blood, the gore, the utter violence and destruction? And under this giant umbrella of an argument, they yell graphics.
Sure, I'll cave. The Wii doesn't have the awesome specs that both the 360 and the PS3 boast. But does it need to? To be a competitor, does it mean that specs have to be the same? The DS outsold the PSP in mass numbers - and financially speaking, every PS3 sold still means Sony loses money while the 360 barely allows Microsoft to break even while Nintendo rakes them both over the coals with a $6 profit per console. But awesome specs is not Nintendo's goal. It's all about gameplay. It's always been about gameplay. I enjoy gaming as much as the next girl. Hell, probably even MORE than the next girl. I'm the non-creepy girl gamer who has played an RPG or two, mmkay? So don't start preaching to me about practicing what I rant. Because I have (and I prefer Final Fantasy X to all the others, including VII, so if you want to disown my opinion, feel free to do so on that; go ahead, that was a freebie) played games and I honestly say that the interactive element of the Wii is probably its biggest selling point. Families nowadays need excuses and devices to get together, and the Wii lets that happen.
It has mainly non-violent games (unlike Call of Duty or Medal of Honor or Bloodlust or whatever they're making) that prove to be the big sellers (like Legend of Zelda, the cartoonish Super Smash Bros., and Mario Kart, Mario Party, Paper Mario, etc. etc.). The tried-and-true party titles are available for Wii, like Karaoke Revolution, DDR, Rock Band, and Guitar Hero. A lot of people have talked about how the Game Cube was a huge huge failure (let it be known that I do own one). Gameplay is the name of the game, my friends, so clearly Wii is a competitor.
I know that Wii doesn't operate on the same fanboy level as the other two do, so maybe it's not a competitor in terms of fan cons. But lo and behold, all you fanboy snobs, that your opinion does not apply to the 5,999,999,998 other people on earth. So maybe its graphics are unimpressive in comparison but sales-wise, it's still kicking Sony's ass this financial season, so maybe you should shut up, stfd, play a game, and chillax, bbs.
Want a rec? I hear Tennis is a great destressor. So suck on that.
ref: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10111170-17.html
They call him Sparkles, the tap-dancing vampire!
Hello, friends. In the interest of the season and my own amusement, I've decided to undertake something for nefarious purposes. What am I undertaking, you may ask? Reading the "Twilight" series. Why is this a nefarious purpose? Because I am reading it to pick it apart and laugh. Laugh hard.
Twelve-year-old fangirls, turn away and cry here.
Now, in no way am I disparaging fangirls. God knows I've done my fair share of fangirling. I just have to say, as a sci-fi connoisseur and a lover of geekery, I agree with the masses of people who got so pissed off that the twelve-year-olds swarmed ComicCon and ruined it for everyone else. Have your fun, but in no way are you more legit than the Battlestar Galactica or Buffy fans who've been flocking there for ages.
Twilight is a young adult novel. And it's a love story. My problem with many young adult novels is their tendency to play for the melodramatic, to hype things up and be overly obvious, and act as if it's not a novel, but a soap opera. This doesn't mean I don't have respect for the genre (though I can understand why some people don't with the fodder that gets published - yecch). "Homecoming?" Brilliant. "Artemis Fowl?" Nice. "A Series of Unfortunate Events?" Filled, filled with literary goodness. Roald Dahl? Are you kidding? Meg Cabot! Come on! But then we get all the trashy high school romance, clique-y, woe-is-me club. Gossip Girl. *shudder* All that Lurlene McDaniels crap.
Getting back to my point, Twilight is about the forbidden love of a human, Bella Swan, and a vampire, Edward Cullen. (Initial point of judgment: the horridly drab Edward is meant to be a Gothic hero, which - Smeyer, you're doing it wrong - based off of Edward Ferrars and Mr. Darcy. Really? REALLY? So I have my prejudices, but I hope you'll lend me the space for them because I'll bring the literary evidence to back it up. YES INDEED.
Now, some of you may be asking: "Karen, what's wrong with a little escapist literature? Don't we all love to read a trashy romance here and there? I mean, Shopaholic is hardly The Odyssey." That's true. Normally, I have no problems with trashy lit. I've read it, I indulge in it - the problem is that this series is being shipped off to middle schools everywhere for young girls to read and absorb, who then expound that it's the greatest book ever OMG! and that nothing compares. Jane Austen? Pfffffffft, take a lesson from Ms. Meyer here. She's got it going on. None of this personality bidniz, or that whole plot thingamajigger, or, what's-it-called-oh-yeah-FEMINISM.
So I've been browsing the Amazon chat boards because, god knows, I need more ways to procrastinate. And I've read plenty of reviews defending Twilight because it portrays teenagers accurately. So Bella is shallow? So are teenagers! Thus she is a perfect heroine! I just have two words to say to you all: SCARLETT O'HARA. You want shallow? Vain? Bitchy? KATIE SCARLETT'S GOT YOU COVERED. She uses men (which you can argue is antifeminist), but at the same time, she's got BALLS, okay? She gets her shit together when things get tough, uses what she can, takes care of her family. She throws vanity down the fucking drain when it comes to growing food - she doesn't care how people see her, she just wants to survive. THAT is a heroine.
(And none of the Twihards have even read the book, I gather, just watched the epic of a film that eliminated two of her children.)
A lot of what bothers me is how people argue that Bella's obsessive love for Edward is feminist in its portrayal of her decision and choice to shy away from things like school and a career in favor of love. That's all well and good - yes, feminism is about choice. But feminism is about equal rights as well - and there's a limit. You can say you're choosing to do what you please for yourself as much as you like, but if it's an abusive relationship, when should people step in and tell you that what you're choosing isn't the right option? That's mainly the problem with the characters so far. Edward and Bella fall in love in split-seconds, almost (which is mainly my reason for disliking, by which I mean HATING, Romeo and Juliet, but to be fair, they do die at the end, so you have to give them props for committing), and then become devoted to each other in this awesome, sparkletastic, obsessive, stalkerish way. No. This is not healthy. Stop telling twelve-year-olds this is healthy, Smeyer.
Edward tells Bella what to do and she obeys for the most part, waits to be saved, is a damsel in distress, is wholly apathetic and unwilling to make changes in her life yet expects it, becomes suicidal when Edward decides to leave her alone - what? WHAT? This isn't love, guys, this is called OBSESSION. It's unhealthy.
I don't think I could ever bring myself to the point to call Bella a feminist heroine. She's simply not. Heroines are proactive, and do something - Bella just waits patiently to be saved. And feminist? She whines and allows herself to be dominated by men. And I have no issues with the domestic aspect of it. As a woman, you should be allowed to choose how you want to live your life. But I have issues with dominion. Women are not property ANYMORE and her willingness to go along with it goes beyond this idea of choice. It's just embarrassing for anyone with ovaries.
21 November 2008
Collegian training, nail paint and relationships
I freakin' love blogging. You wouldn't be able to tell from my oh so frequent posts, of course, but I really do.
So life's been fun lately. I've gone through some downs. Actually I've gone through lots of downs (I maintain that it could have been much worse, though) and I'm very grateful that I'm so lucky to have great people with me. To my best friend and cousin, Karen: I love you so freaking much. In all our crazy phone mis-conversations and what not. I think the real solution to this recent blargh-ity feeling would be locking ourselves in the bathroom and having a good, long talk. Just like when we were little! :D
As if I didn't have enough on my plate, I added a second job! I'm in training for it right now and it's an experience so far. I've made new discoveries regarding my personal interests, strengths, and motivations for life, for school, and for play. There's just so much to sponge up, I hope my brain can take it! The experience here as a member of the creative team hopefully will be useful in a career sense. If not, I suppose I'm strengthening my time management muscle. : /
I love the weekend as much as the next person, but I never really "lived for the weekend". Nowadays? Definitely living for the weekend. Each week, I look at this calendar printout and the time slots are ALL FILLED IN. Even then, I barely have time to finish reading all these novels.
Who else finds is strange to go from reading a novel for an Asian history class to reading a sci-fi novel? I wonder what my brain looks like when it switches modes.
Sci-fi.Totally ridiculous.
Asian history.
Martian colonies.
Khmer Rouge.
Human versus machine.
Refugee camp brutality in gruesome detail.
20 November 2008
Si, se puede.
Guys, guys, all two of you out on Mars who are reading, this comes a little late, but regardless, I wanted to let you guys know that national pride doesn't falter often. And I'm so proud of our country for electing Barack Obama. You know, there'll be tons of naysayers out there who'll say that he's a socialist (which, come on, we do have a Socialist party in the US, though it's been long dormant, and if he was, he'd totally run under that banner) and that he's not doing enough to help fix the country. Blah, blah, blah, we haven't gotten to that point yet. Or have we?
Being in college, I try not to waste time that could be spent sleeping or studying or eating, but this ultimately proves to be a failed venture. So, as a college student, one of my Firefox staples is Facebook. Yes, yes, let's espouse how much it wastes our time and is pointless, but I use it nonetheless. And Bumper Sticker? That annoying application? Why, yes, I use that too. And when I was browsing through groups and random other things, I've noticed a trend.
There are about a handful to a dozen Facebook groups calling for Barack Obama's impeachment. His impeachment, ladies and gents. Let's--let's take a minute here to let this fully sink in. A president-elect, a man who has a good two months before being inaugurated is going to be the subject of an impeachment hearing by the Senate (or so some people hope). A president-elect. Can we just repeat those words over and over again like a mantra for the stupid? He's a fucking PRESIDENT-ELECT. What could he possibly have done in the two weeks or so that he's not yet held office to have pissed off so many members of the American people in such a way that requires their response and pleas to Congress for his impeachment? Is it the fact that he's young? Black? May have sex with his wife on a regular basis? (Seriously, that warranted a Huffington Post article because apparently, presidents are very asexual and old, and the fact that he may have sex with Michelle more than once a year like the Carters did is, you know, distressing to all those political analysts.) Let me reiterate: WHAT COULD HE POSSIBLY HAVE DONE IN THIS PERIOD OF POSSESSING NO POWER TO HAVE BROUGHT ON THE WRATH OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?
Sigh.
Let's not go any further before I give myself an aneurysm.
In other news, you should check out IOUSA. It's directed by Patrick Creadon, who is responsible for the documentary piece, Wordplay, that came out a while back. It mainly focuses on these economists and such in a way to explain the economic fate of the country in simple layman's terms so that we can all understand how fucked we are. And in terms of fuckage, my age group? My demographic? Be prepared to be fucked worse than the generation that's paying for us now.
If you have time, they have a Facebook group (the movie does) where you can watch a quick 30 minute bit. But I'd wait for it to come out on DVD and watch it in its full glory. Honestly, as one of those socially anxious neurotic people, it freaked me the hell out to the point where paranoia does not cover the grand scheme of my reaction. But it's very informative, to say the least, and uses graphs and economists.
And as a parting note, I'd like to note that all this economic fuckwittage occurred in EIGHT YEARS. So those of you who are bitching about Obama being a Clinton Clone (as you call it) economically, socially, etc. etc., let me just stick this in here: that would be great for the country. Grrrrrrrrrreat. (Even Tony the Tiger espouses Clinton.) Because Clinton was the only president in the history of the United States to ever achieve an economic surplus. From balancing the budget.
Quick sound bite from the movie:
"Everyone hates to hear the term 'raising taxes.' It's a political campaign-killer. But as an economist, I'm just telling you right now, there's no way for us to climb out of this hole without raising taxes."
Yep. So the whole "tax-and-spend Democrats" label? At least we're covering our asses when we spend money for things. Unlike the "slash-and-spend Repubs."