#RELYING UPON SYSTEMS THAT AREN'T EVEN FUNCTIONING AS THEY WOULD BE EXPECTED TO FUNCTION

[technologywrite]

ANALYSIS OR RECORDING AVOIDED TO REDUCE USE OF TAPE MEMORY SYSTEMS THAT CANNOT BE UPGRADED OR HAVE THEIR MEDIA REPLACED

[the-owl-tree]

on that note, if you were going to rewrite the sisters/write a similar group, what sort of approach would you take? ( planning on doing something like that if the motivation gods bless me)

i've made some big changes for the sisters for my beanie blog (pspspsps @askwcbean) but I think it really depends on the group you're trying to create. I wanted to keep the Sisters as a sustainable, self-growing group but keep some of the flaws (their strong sense of a gender binary). I don't want to make a utopian society out of spite, but I do want to make a society that could reasonably survive. Soooo (a combo of my ideas & stealing from others):

my collection of bullet point ramblings under the cut

The Sisters are very open to those willing to join and learn. They are a collection of loners, rogues, and kittypets. Not only does this keep our bloodlines less janked up, but it makes sense as to why the group can keep a reasonable amount of cats - they aren't closed off like the clans.

They'll often adopt abandoned kits, cats who are in bad situations, and generally anyone who is willing to learn and work with the group. This is a group that relies on diplomacy and good relations with others, they should be very open to outsiders.

Get rid of the super special bloodline thing. It's both a personal and practical thing, it doesn't work for a group like this. Have being able to see spirits be something you can be taught

I'm not giving Tree super special ghost powers. Sorry, I'm going to forever make fun of his novella it's so fucking stupid. He can see ghosts and has a heightened sensitivity to them, but it takes multiple Sisters and Brothers to be able to summon ghosts into views.

Keep the "Mother" kittypet origin story.

But how do they function? Well, the Sisters seem to operate a fairly small group, it doesn't really make sense to me for them to need a centralized structure. So, going for a decentralized system in the Sisters, power is distributed across the group and there is an emphasis on teamwork and decision making on all parts.

Choosing representatives for when meeting new groups tends to fall on reputation, charisma, and experience. Moonlight was chosen for these reasons, but she does not control the entirety of the group, though cats will lean on her words when she gives advice. She doesn't have legitimate power like a Clan leader, she relies on social influence and respect. Her word isn't law, but she does carry some weight due to her experience.

The Sisters have a fairly strong gender binary: Brothers, Sisters, Mothers, Fathers. You can be one or the other, they'll try to work around those who feel they don't fit for either role....but it doesn't always work out. I lean towards this not being decided by agab, you can shift from Brother to Sister and vice versa, it's those cats that don't exist in that binary who may feel out of place (but this is a wip idea and I want to tweak it more before i commit. i know for sure that Bean is one of those cats who doesn't want to fit this binary and is why she left to take up a "Brother" role despite not seeing herself as a Brother. I don't want them to treat them poorly, though it can happen, but that there's a lot of...reluctance to try and expand their ideas for these cats).

Toms don't get kicked out as babies. It's dumb, sorry everyone who likes that. There's no real logic to it besides a very half-assed attempt at trying to expand on the Sisters beliefs and even then, a kid with no training would get the shit kicked out of him by the wilderness lol

So, Brothers are socialized and trained on how to survive on their own. They're given information on medical herbs, hunting and gathering skills, best material to build dens and where to find a makeshift one in case of an emergency. Once again, this is not suddenly thrust upon them, they are socialized, this is something that they are believed to be as completely natural and an expectation for them.

When they are sufficiently deemed to be ready, the Brother is sent out to find a territory. They just don't just wander around (because I mean...the Sisters fill that role. They're nomadic). This is where I am yoinking a bit from others (notably bonefall's take on them), these territories act as base camps for the Sisters during their travels when they need to restock on herb supplies, have an injured or pregnant member, young kits, etc. That's why it's so important to them to have as many wide varieties of camps across their travels, and it's why Tree and Moonlight have some tension upon their meeting.

Boy picked a bad territory in their opinion, but in his defense, he didn't pick it for the Sisters. My base idea for these is Tree had a bad bad outing, but it needs work. I'll keep their strained relationship, but I'd like a little more depth to it just than the Erins beloved eeeeevvuuuulll mommmmyyyy (sooo scary!).

The Sisters believe they have a duty to help put spirits to rest, as well as help more malevolent ones find peace in the afterlife. They help with hauntings, lingering spirits, malicious spirits, etc.

They work in groups! The more malicious the spirit, the more Sisters it will take to pacify them and eventually release them from whatever is trapping them to the mortal plane.

Annnd so far that's what I've got! I have some more spirit lore over on my Bean blog, but this has been my working ideas for the Sisters themselves. Hope it helps :D

[arcticdementor]

The University of California system is getting rid of its SAT/ACT requirement. More will follow.

There’s a lot to say. First, we must distinguish between two types of tests, or really two types of testing. When people say “standardized tests,” they think of the SAT, but they also think of state-mandated exams (usually bought, at great taxpayer expense, from Pearson and other for-profit companies) that are designed to serve as assessments of public K-12 schools, of aggregates and averages of students. The SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, and similar tests are oriented towards individual ability or aptitude; they exist to show prerequisite skills to admissions officers. (And, in one of the most essential purposes of college admissions, to employers, who are restricted in the types of testing they can perform thanks to Griggs v Duke Power Co.) Sure, sometimes researchers will use SAT data to reflect on, for example, the fact that there’s no underlying educational justification for higher graduation rates1, but SATs are really about the individual. State K-12 testing is about cities and districts, and exists to provide (typically dubious) justification for changes to education policy2. SATs and similar help admissions officers sort students for spots in undergraduate and graduate programs. This post is about those predictive entrance tests like the SAT.

Liberals repeat several types of myths about the SAT/ACT with such utter confidence and repetition that they’ve become a kind of holy writ. But myths they are.

1. SATs/ACTs don’t predict college success. They do, indeed. This one is clung to so desperately by liberals that you’d think there was some sort of compelling empirical basis to believe this. There isn’t. There never has been. They’re making it up. They want it to be true, and so they believe it to be true.

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2. The SATs only tell you how well a student takes the SAT. This is perhaps a corollary to 1., and is equally wrong. They tell us what they were designed to tell us: how well students are likely to perform in college. But the SATs tell us about much more than college success. Let me run this graphic again.

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3. SATs just replicate the income distribution. No. Again, asserted with utter confidence by liberals despite overwhelming evidence that this is not true. I believe that this research represents the largest publicly-available sample of SAT scores and income information, with an n of almost 150,000, and the observed correlation between family income and SAT score is .25. This is not nothing. It is a meaningful predictor. But it means that the large majority of the variance in SAT scores is not explainable by income information. A correlation of .25 means that there are vast numbers of lower-income students outperforming higher-income students. Other analyses find similar correlations. If SAT critics wanted to say that “there is a relatively small but meaningful correlation between family income and SAT scores and we should talk about that,” fair game. But that’s not how they talk. The routinely make far stronger claims than that in an effort to dismiss these tests all together, such as here by Yale’s Paul Bloom. (Whose work I generally like.) It’s just not that hard to correlate two variables together, guys. I don’t know why you wouldn’t ever ask yourselves “is this thing I constantly assert as absolute fact actually true?” Well, maybe I do.

In general, progressive and left types routinely overstate the power of the relationship between family wealth and academic performance on all manner of educational outcomes. The political logic is obvious: if you generally want to redistribute money (as I do) then the claim that educational problems are really economic problems provides ammo for your position. But the fact that there is a generic socioeconomic effect does not mean that giving people money will improve their educational outcomes very much, particularly if richer people are actually mildly but consistently better at school than poorer for sorting reasons that are not the direct product of differences in income. That is, what correlation does exist between SES and academic indicators might simply be the metrics accurately measuring the constructs they were designed to measure.

And throwing money at our educational problems, while noble in intent, hasn’t worked. (People react violently to this, but for example poorer and Blacker public schools receive significantly higher per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools, which should not be a surprise given that the policy apparatus has been shoveling money at the racial performance gap for 40 years.) All manner of major interventions in student socioeconomic status, including adoption into dramatically different home and family conditions, have failed to produce the benefits you’d expect if academic outcomes were a simple function of money. I believe in redistribution as a way to ameliorate the consequences of poor academic performance. There is no reason to think that redistribution will ameliorate poor academic performance itself.

5. SATs are easily gamed with expensive tutoring. They are not. This one is perhaps less empirically certain than the prior two and on which I’m most amenable to counterargument, but the preponderance of the evidence seems clear to me in saying that the benefits of tutoring/coaching for these tests are vastly overstated. Again, a simplistic proffered explanation for a troublesome set of facts that then implies simplistic solutions that would not work.

6. Going test optional increases racial diversity. This one, I think, must be called scientifically unsettled. However both Sweitzer, Blalock, and Sharma and Belasco, Rosinger, and Hearn find no appreciable increase in racial diversity after universities go test-optional. “Holistic” application criteria like admissions essays almost certainly benefit richer students anyway. What’s more, we have to ask ourselves what “diversity” really means in this context. Private colleges and universities keep the relevant data close to the vest, for obvious reasons, but it’s widely believed that many elite schools satisfy their internal diversity goals for Black students by aggressively pursuing wealthy Kenyan and Nigerian international students, whose parents have the means to be the kind of reliable donors that such schools rely on so heavily. I’m not aware of a really comprehensive study that examines this issue, and it would be hard to pull off, but the relevant question is “do various policies intended to improve diversity on campus actually increase the enrollment of American-born descendants of African slaves?” I can’t say, but you can guess where my suspicions lie.

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All of that is prologue to the bigger point: the controversy over college entrance examinations stems not from the examinations themselves, but from the fact that they reveal profound differences in human capital that make progressives uncomfortable. The SATs don’t create inequality. They reveal inequality.

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The racial achievement/performance gap is a curious thing even in the context of an American political discourse that seems to get more bizarre by the day. That the gap exists is, on balance, not controversial. Gaps in performance are observed on essentially every measured academic metric, though the size of the effects vary from context to context, and the general distribution is Asian American students at the top, white students next, then Hispanic, then Black. The Black-white gap in particular has shrunk from the era of (explicitly) segregated schools but progress has not been consistent or linear. Most people in academia and politics admit it exists: prominent Black politicians like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris reference it, every major think tank and foundation operating in the educational space identifies it as a major priority, and the NAACP used to address if often, though their Education and Education Strategy pages have recently disappeared so it’s hard to know where they stand now. These things are faddish but once upon a time every other dissertation written by someone getting a PhD in Education was about the gap. We can observe it even outside of reference to controversial tests, such as noting that the white high school graduation rate is 10% higher than that for Black students. The achievement gap is a thing.

And yet I also find a rapidly-congealing social prohibition against talking about these gaps in progressive spaces. If you refer to a racial achievement gap in a lot of liberal or left contexts now, you’ll find that people clam up fast and get visibly uncomfortable, even if you take pains to point out that an academic achievement gap does not imply an academic potential gap. People just don’t want to acknowledge that gaps exist at all; our racial discourse appears to have become such a blunt instrument that the acknowledgement of racial difference is controversial even when you preface discussion with the belief (that I hold) that the gap is the product of innumerable environmental and sociocultural factors rather than genetics or other inherent differences. Simply saying “Black students consistently score lower on tests like the SATs, have lower average GPAs, and have worse metrics on ancillary concerns like truancy” - again, Barack Obama’s position, Kamala Harris’s position, Cory Booker’s position - is enough for people to start launching into harangues about the inherent violence of those comparisons. People just do not want to talk about this stuff.

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Those concerns with group differences, at least, have some sort of basic political logic and are amenable to complaints that they are the product of systemic inequality. (They are, but not the inequalities that people think, and again the SAT gap is a result of systemic inequality, not a cause of systemic inequality.) More disturbing to me is the rise of resistance within academia to the notion of inequalities between individuals. When I was in grad school more than a half-decade ago, I observed with some considerable unhappiness that it had become increasingly socially unacceptable to speak of some students as simply better students than others, as being more talented, harder working, or more prepared. All of this was seen as inegalitarian and, eventually, as “white supremacist” even if every student being compared in a given context was white. There were many instructors back then who bragged about giving all students As, etc., and I must assume this practice has only grown over time. In the humanities and social sciences especially there is a growing movement to reject assessment, including grading - the means through which we sort better students from worse - as the hand of illegitimate power that “does violence” to the students who voluntarily attend college.

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Of course, that complicity in the neoliberal machine is not some recent injustice; it is the very reason that colleges and universities are funded by our society at all. If this trend continues, not just eliminating SAT requirements or increasingly refusing to hierarchize students with grades but in rejecting the entire sorting function of the university, academia will collapse. Wealthy parents aren’t paying Harvard to enrich their children in the humanistic sense. They’re paying Harvard to act as a marker of their child’s superiority in the labor market and the social hierarchy. Employers value college because it provides at least some meaningful information about who will succeed as a worker; remove that function and the financial justification for a hideously expensive system dies. I would love if education dropped its association with meritocracy, but that cannot occur within our current system. The professors who self-aggrandize through their rejection of their hierarchizing function, if successful, would cause the doom of the modern university. (These tenured radicals, of course, never are so moved by the inherent inequities of academia that they quit the profession.)

Today, it is somehow controversial to say “some people are smarter than others,” a reflection of one of the simple brute realities of human life and something that has been accepted as true for thousands of years.

Here is the essence of it: hierarchies of relative academic performance are remarkably stable throughout life, due to differences in inherent or intrinsic academic ability of whatever origin, and the SATs and similar mechanisms reveal those differences in a way that liberal America is increasingly unable to accept. This is the source of all of this angst, not the technical details of whether a test is fair or valid or just, but a liberal intelligentsia that is incapable of honestly confronting the fact that different human beings have fundamentally different intrinsic abilities. I believe in political equality, social equality, equality of rights, equality of dignity, equality of protection under the law. But the notion that all people are equally talented, in academics or anything else, is an absurdity, and as much as people will rush to deny intrinsic difference, I suspect that pretty much everybody knows that they are real. When you were a child you casually assumed that some of your classmates were naturally better at school than others, and you did because it was true.

This is the conversation that I tried, and failed, to force with my book: left-of-center political movements, from center-left to radically socialist, cannot achieve the goal of the greater good for everyone, including greater political and economic equality, while pretending that we believe in equality of human ability. The only way to intelligently address various social, economic, and political equalities related to differences in human potential is to acknowledge that those differences exist. The current rending of garments regarding inequalities within our education system has led to certifiably bizarre situations like the movement, currently gathering steam, to teach math as if it is as subjective as literature or art. But this won’t make Black kids or poor kids or girls or anyone else actually better at math. And if the universities really give up their function of creating an academic hierarchy for political reasons, employers will find new systems that do that, or a lot of people will get hired and quickly fired for not being competent. This is not an intelligent policy approach. Getting rid of the SATs won’t make unprepared kids prepared. It won’t make naturally untalented students naturally talented. It won’t make kids who aren’t smart into smart kids. All it will do is hide the reality of those unpleasant inequalities.

[lifealiveness]

Resilient Businesses Move Their People To The Cloud

Consistently, as the Atlantic tropical storm season approaches numerous organizations have a pestering acknowledgment that they are in danger due to a calamitous "Dark Swan " occasion. Dark Swan occasions are a consistent wellspring of hazard in states like Florida where numerous networks are dependent upon disturbance because of waterfront storms. This danger is especially intense for organizations that rely upon the capacity of on-line information in case there is a possibility their basic information could become lost or ruined. However, the danger from Black Swan occasions isn't restricted to Florida, nor is it restricted to enormous scope problematic occasions like hurricanes.The dark swan hypothesis or hypothesis of dark swan occasions depicts a troublesome occasion that comes as an astonishment, has a significant impact, and is regularly improperly legitimized sometime later with the advantage of knowing the past. The term depends on an old saying which assumed dark swans didn't exist, however the idiom was revamped after dark swans were found in nature. Think about the accompanying situation.

"We will in general consider calamities as far as the assaults on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, or other uber occasions. Now and again, notwithstanding, less outstanding occasions happen that can catastrophically affect a business. In February 1981, an electrical fire in the cellar of the State Office Building in Binghamton, New York, spread all through the storm cellar of the structure burning down a transformer containing over 1,000 gallons of poison loaded oil. Initially thought to be PCBs, the poisons were not set in stone to contain dioxin and dibenzofuran, two of the most risky synthetic compounds at any point made. The fire was smoky and immediately filled the 18-story working with smoke. As the transformer consumed, the residue entered the structures ventilation shafts and immediately spread harmful ash all through the structure. The structure was so seriously tainted that it required 13 years and more than $47 million to clean before the structure could be reemerged or utilized. As a result of the idea of the fire, the structure and its substance, including all paper records, PCs, and belongings of individuals who worked there, were not recoverable. This kind of occasion would be irretrievable for some organizations." - Operations Due Diligence, Published by McGraw Hill

What influence would a disastrous storm that influenced a whole area or a confined problematic occasion like a fire have on the activity of your business? Could you endure that sort of interference or misfortune? As the reliance on-line information has filled in practically every kind of business, so has the danger that deficiency of their information could upset the activity of the business and even outcome in its total disappointment. Because of these dangers, there has been a development in the methodologies used to moderate these dangers as the volume of on-line information has kept on developing. Initially, the idea of Disaster Recovery (DR) arose as a relief system that zeroed in on the recuperation of basic information after a problematic occasion by enabling the business to reestablish upset IT tasks.

Catastrophe Recovery (DR) includes a bunch of approaches and methodology that empower the rebuilding of basic business information and permits the IT foundation to be reestablished to an earlier state. DR was initially seen as the space of the IT office who were given liability regarding relieving the danger. To limit the danger, framework reinforcements were booked often and forceful DR plans that included worker cold beginning methodology and information reinforcements were executed.

The objective was to reestablish the framework to the last point where the information had been upheld (at that point, regularly on tape). The adequate DR rehearses at the time permitted the IT framework to be rebooted when the office power was at last reestablished... Except if it was in a flood zone or the off-site reinforcement storeroom had likewise been affected. Regardless, the activity of the office might actually be disturbed for some timeframe and the information rebuilding was additionally possibly in danger relying upon where reinforcements were put away.

Presently how about we roll the schedule ahead... As innovation developed so did the Disaster Recovery techniques, which lead to new ideas that advanced to the prerequisites for a Business Continuity arrangement as a method for moderating danger. Still seen as its space, as innovation moved towards arrangements like shadow workers, appropriated information areas and fast mass information transmission with hyper network. Information at this point not must be "recuperated", it just must be associated in disseminated areas where it very well may be distantly gotten to. Business Continuity alleviated the danger of information misfortune and permitted a business to recuperate substantially more rapidly and proficiently from a Black Swan occasion since its workers never went totally down.

Business Continuity initially included arranging and arrangement to guarantee that an association's IT foundation stayed flawless empowering the business to productively recuperate to a functional state inside a sensibly brief period following a Black Swan occasion. Innovation today has developed towards cloud arrangements that put both the information and the applications into remote "cloud" areas so apparently the IT obligation regarding relieving the danger of on-line information misfortune or defilement has been settled. With profoundly associated, completely conveyed arrangements, certain individuals feel the requirement for business coherence might be blurring in criticality. Nothing could be further from reality...

The truth of the matter is the danger was never exclusively in the deficiency of the information yet the deficiency of the organizations capacity to work. There are organizations that can't endure any interruption to their tasks. These incorporate medical services, protection, and correspondences organizations, basic strategic providers, transportation suppliers and nearby governments. It is during Black Swan occasions that the administrations and items these organizations give might be generally required. The necessities of other, less basic organizations, whose tasks could be hindered for quite a long time or even weeks, however who may confront a critical monetary danger, may likewise make their proceeded with activity a question of corporate endurance.

The present innovation has totally preoccupied business preparing and information from the client by moving basic IT frameworks into the cloud. Cloud innovation empowers clients to work from distant areas, however utilization of the cloud doesn't completely alleviate functional danger. It implies individuals have now supplanted PCs as the basic way to proceeded with tasks. The activity of the business is bound to be interfered with in light of the fact that key work force aren't ready to support tasks during a Black Swan occasion. They don't have an office that has been proactively intended to help activities during troublesome occasions that could keep going for quite a long time, days or weeks. Especially in regions like Florida, where enormous cataclysmic events, for example, tropical storms can disturb administrations to whole networks, tough organizations need to get ready ahead of time for supported tasks during a problematic occasion. The capacity of a business to proceed with its activities during seasons of trouble are a proportion of the organizations strength.

Business Resiliency: takes business coherence to another level since it makes it the space of activities the executives as opposed to leaving it exclusively as the area of the IT Department. When anticipating fiasco recuperation or business coherence the basic connection is currently individuals who are expected to work basic frameworks distantly. Indeed, there are events where staff can telecommute or from far off offices the business might work, nonetheless, this isn't generally an agreeable reply and in any event, when it is, organizations regularly end up scrambling to play make up for lost time, attempting to sort out who does what and "how might we make it happen under these conditions" circumstances. During Black Swan occasions including territorial interruptions like tropical storms or neighborhood disturbances like fires, a significant number individuals the business depends on might not have force, web or even a telephone expected to empower them to telecommute. Since you can't place individuals in the cloud, Business Resiliency requires arranging, preparing and practice so your staff knows how and when to assemble.

Strong organizations incorporate Black Swan reaction into their proceeding with activities so that, when they are required, when the business and individuals are under pressure, everybody realizes how to react productively and adequately and where to go to give that reaction. Business strength requires a committed office that has been solidified to withstand Black Swan occasions and has been intended to offer the help benefits individuals and the IT framework will both need. Business strength requires proactive arranging and the combination of working systems into the organizations standard working intends to incorporate distant activities via prepared basic staff who have been assembled to react during troublesome occasions and it requires proactive practice to guarantee that, when far off tasks are required, individuals are prepared.