Posts by Lucy Stewart
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but really the GREs are intended to allow the best schools a way to pick the best students - so anything simple that weeds people out probably is to be expected
I feel somewhat skeptical that a multi-choice test of your arcane vocabulary knowledge and fifth-form maths is actually going to separate people in a meaningful way, especially when the difference between a high and a mediocre grade can be as little as five questions.
I agree with your comments re Dennis Dutton. I have clashed with him in the past and he turns everything into a personal attack. He is probably the reason why I have never joined the Skeptics.
I have heard he's also the kind of person who assigns his own books and essays as a very significant portion of the reading for courses he teaches, which is...somewhat telling.
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What I want to know is if Tolley thinks that there's a way to teach science and science concepts *without* addressing literacy and numeracy. If nothing else, if you're not introducing a whole lot of new words and logical ways of thinking, you're not teaching it right.
(This has weighed on my mind somewhat because on Saturday I have to sit the general GRE, an US requirement for graduate school entrance that tests literacy and numeracy. If your university system is organised in such a way that someone having an undergraduate degree is not enough evidence that they are, in fact, literate and numerate, *you're doing it wrong*.)
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The one in three in a lifetime figure wouldn't surprise me. Most people will never talk about their experiences with anyone but those they are extremely close to, and even then they often don't.
If the parameters include not feeling able to say no then, based on anecdotal evidence from friends, one in four might be correct.
The truth is probably a mixture of these - the number who have been sexually abused depends on the parameters you use, and a lifetime is, well, a pretty long time. It might not be as high as 1 in 3 but it woudn't be a whole lot lower.
Think about domestic violence stats - I think they're also estimated at 1 in 3, over a woman's lifetime, and if you include all the women who have been in situations where they didn't say no to sex they didn't want because they knew there was a high chance of violence if they did...you're going to get quite high numbers quite quickly.
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This is just going on his non-paper-published remarks, so I have no particular opinion on his published novels, but.
Really? Interesting. I read the mailing list that he participates on, and I haven't seen a great deal of this. I mean, there's stuff I disagree with him violently about - he has a firm belief in the specialness of the West and a evident dislike of Islam which I find odd from someone who is otherwise well-informed about history - but I've yet to see anything which would lead me to classify him as that wrong-headed.
Mind you, I suspect the fact that he's the *only* mainstream fantasy author I've found who has truly varied main casts means that I'm inclined to cut him more slack than I otherwise would.
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Stirling might be down with the gays, but someone really need to take a good hard look at casual racism as a fantasy trope.
Yeah, definite issues there. The Hot Ninja Lesbians vs. gay men balance also suffers from severe skew, despite background male gay characters.
OTOH, he usually has a good spectrum of main characters, race-wise, so he's not *unaware* of the issues, and I vastly prefer my fiction with black and Jewish and Middle Eastern main characters to the many all-white worlds out there.
And just for a bit of light relief, who would have guessed that among its many other sins the Twilight franchise will turn your daughters into fag hags! You have been warmed...
Trek is waaaay ahead here. (Although knowing that Meyer is a Mormon makes this whole article even funnier.)
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But I like the dick. :)
Good when they have 'em, not when they're being them.
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It's quite refreshing, especially in a book like The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan where homophobia is standard and the goadingly unrepentant gay hero is totally kick-arse.
I am obliged to briefly threadjack to recommend anyone who wants their fantasy to come with awesome gay characters to check out S M Stirling's work of the last decade or so, in particular the Nantucket trilogy. Mainstream fantasy + lead lesbian romance = WIN.
(Also, does Lois McMaster Bujold's Aral Vorkosigan count as a decent bisexual character? To quote his wife, he's now monogamous, but his bisexuality is hardly ignored.)
"I'll just go and look at one TV Tropes page," I said to myself.
Bwahahahahahahahaha.
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Your observation may be accurate, but MFC wasnt completed until the early '80's and the clip is from the '70's so its moot...
What, you expect me to remember stuff that happened before I was born? That's, like, youthism.
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OTOH, I like Editing The Herald's take on the reporting thereof.
ETH: making reading the Herald feel slightly less like beating your head against a brick wall since 2009.
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They are going to start sicking up soon, from what I'm reading.
As long as they're doing it on the other side of campus, I am slightly vindictively pleased by that.
Further evidence is found at :24 the family concert is at none other than the Christchurch town hall.
Can't look at the clip right now, but: if it's an indoors one, the Michael Fowler Centre and Chch town hall are identical, pretty much. I have yet to work out which is the evil twin, though.