Edgwyn

My answer is very similar to Aloreal's in that I end up using a trackpad for a lot of games but prefer a mouse if I need precision. I do miss the games that I used to play with a joystick or paddles. My laptop does not have a numeric keypad which would come in handy for some of the games that I play. Lilith, when my daughter was a baby, I had read somewhere that a trackball was easier for a little kid to manipulate. So I would put her in her highchair in front of my computer with a trackball w/four buttons to play her sesame street game. Most of the time that meant I was playing my games with a trackball also since a couple of extra steps would be required to change input devices.

Scientific consensus does not equal understanding. There are many things where there is scientific consensus based on observed reality, not understanding of the mechanism that causes that reality. While in this debate I said it for climate science, I would also make the same statement if we were discussing quantum physics, evolutionary biology, astrophysics, etc. A more concrete example is Dark Matter/Dark Energy which have been theorized without observation to explain the discrepancies in observations. Most scientists agree that it exists, but they have not observed it, nor do they currently understand it (at least from my biases sense as an engineer not a scientist). There is scientific consensus (90 - 98% agreement) that global warming exists and that humans effect their environment. If you understand a process, you can build an accurate model of the process. Currently we do not have an accurate short term model of a long term process, much less an accurate model of the entire process.

Sylae, industry is caused by consumers (the average person). To me, too much of the environmental debate has been fueled by politics and poor science. Unfortunately there would not have been much environmental progress without popular outcries. Too often, the enacted "solution" to a particular problem is ill thought out. That gave us "green" lamps containing relatively high concentrations of Hg far outweighing the drop in CO2 generation. It gives us wind farms that kill endangered species and solar farms thats useful life is shorter than their payback period. Where fission power generation could buy us some time, the political process in the US (driven by the supposedly greener of our two political parties) has prevented the design and construction of safer nuclear power plants and the completion of a high-level radioactive waste storage site that is orders of magnitude safer and less likely to cause environmental damage than our current practices. As near as I can tell, nobody on either side of the climate change debate actually understands the earth's climate. I do think that we are closer than we were when I was a kid and the predictions were of the next ice age, but I don't think we are there yet. The earth's climate changes due to a bunch of natural processes that we do not fully understand and do not cause (like the 17,000 year global warming trend). Do I believe that it is likely that our production of CO2 is causing an increase in global temperatures over and above what occurs naturally, yes. I will be more convinced that we can quantify that difference once that is a model that actually fits observed facts for the past hundred years of our 17,000 year warming cycle. Should we reduce the amount of CO2 pollution we generate? Of course. Will completely eliminating all production of CO2 stop global warming? Probably not. Do we need to figure out how to survive on an earth that is going to be warmer and has higher sea levels in the next hundred years? Yes. Going back a bit to the original post: I use a thermostat with a clock, reusable grocery bags, LED and CFL (I try and find less nasty ones) lamps, have upgraded the windows in my house and recycle paper, aluminum, glass and plastic (which is very debatable).

All right, prefacing this with a couple of caveats: I graduated over 20 years ago, and all of my academic experience is in the US. 1. I am very glad that you want to make your parents proud. Ultimately, they will be proudest of what you do with your life after university than getting into the best university. 2. To expand on Randomizer's answer, and to paraphrase Sun Tzu, you need to know the test and you need to know yourself. There are several parts to this: a. Is time a factor, are their more questions than an average test taker can work in the allotted time, and are there more questions than you can answer in the allotted time. If the answer is yes, then you need to know if there is a penalty for guessing and if not be prepared to spend your last few minutes bubbling in random answers. b. Is your first answer usually correct? If there is time, checking your answers can be very useful in tests where you can make objective errors (e.g. multiplying by 4 instead of 5), but a lot of people find that when they are uncertain between two answers that can be correct, that the one they picked first is correct more often than the one they changed it to when they reviewed the question. You need to know if this is true for you. c. How does stress affect you and how do you become stressed. Most people do not take tests as well when they are stressed out. People stress them selves out by building up the importance of the test in their minds. You need to study for the test, but not so much so that you are overly stressed about it. Likewise most people do better when they good night's sleep before the test instead of trying to jam some more studying in. You need to know if you are one of them d. You need to know how to answer the type of questions on the test. I have taken standardized tests where there were three dimensional shapes to evaluate and wiring diagrams to follow. All of the instructions that were needed were there in the test booklet, but someone who already knew how to do what the test was asking would spend less time figuring the test out and more time answering the test questions properly. e. Finally, you can study for the test like Randomizer said.

Is the entrance exam the only tool used to determine who is accepted or do they use a combination of measures (grades, community involvement, etc)?

Alorael, I do not deny the existence of sexism in various aspects of the human endeavor. However, my objection to the hypothesis from the first thread that has now appeared again in this one is that these vampire stories represent the bulk of YA fantasy or SF. There are plenty of examples of modern YA or Adult fantasy books (I even provided a couple of examples) where the mentor is female. I believe that we have taken a sub-genre (YA paranormal romance) that is marketed to teen girls with the emphasis on romance and taken that un-representative sample as evidence to prove the hypothesis. My hypothesis is that modern mainstream F/SF (which used to be/is marketed towards teen boys) is actually more accepting of females in protagonist and mentor roles than the various sub-genres of romance that are marketed to teen girls and women. That said, despite the objections that some of us on this forum have to Twilight, Ms. Meyer obviously gave her audience (a subset of teen girls) exactly what they wanted. Ultimately, while I object to certain of the themes in Twilight, just like I object to some of the themes in romance novels, the reality is that there is plenty of good fantasy and SF out there that does not fall into the Twilight pattern.

I believe (without data) that the concept of a mentor is fairly common in adult fantasy and SF and not unheard of in other adult literature. In a previous post I tried scoring a couple of over-the-top characters (David Weber's Honor Harrington and Merlin) and did not come up with a "vampire". I would score Gandalf and Professor X as 12s based on SoT's criteria, and I would probably put Angel closer to a 12 than a 15 for that matter. I think (again, no actual data) that criteria 5, 8, and 9 (oxford comma) are relatively rare in most fantasy or SF sub-genres. Lilith may be right about the crush on the music teacher, although I choose to think of it as a way of demonstrating that the immoral/evil character is actually sensitive (or SoT's term "Care Bear") since some folks associate art and music with sensitivity. Too bad that I do not have any literary talent, I could write trashy YA romance with a gorgeous brooding engineer as the super human mentor that the protagonist falls in love with.

Trying to use the list of characteristics on a few series that I have been reading lately: David Webber: Honor Harrington: Despite everything, not even close to being a vampire Beginning of series: 1, 2, 2a, 3, 3a, 6; Later in series 1, 1a, 2, 2a, 3, 3a, 6, 7, 7a, 9 War God: None, there are several female mentors in the series despite a male dominated society. A female character does fall in love with and later marry the male protagonist, but they did not have the mentor relationship. Safehold: Merlin: 1, 2, 2a, 3, 3a, 4, 4a, 5, 6, 6a, 7, 7a, 9, 10. So Merlin might well be a vampire. Merlin's protege is male and there is not a romantic relationship between the two. David Drake's Lord of the Isles series and RCN series: No vampire to be found. Percy Jackson series: still no vampire. I guess that it is fairly hard to find the vampire outside of the young adult paranormal romance genre. Complaining about gender roles in romance novels seems like a waste of electrons to me.

Excalibur, since you have too much time on your hands then you might as well add font proportionality to your calculations. On almost all typewriters, each letter took up exactly the same amount of horizontal distance on a line, so an "i" took up just as much space as a "w". The easiest way to recreate this on a computer is that certain of the oldest fonts (like courier) were set up to match typing, so if you type a line of text in courier and then the same line of text in times, the line in courier will take up substantially more space. Even Helvetica which is a thicker/darker font than times takes up less horizontal space than courier. So switching to a proportional font (in a reasonable size) saves paper as well. Typewriters came in 10 and 12 pitch (characters per inch) varieties, but only the most advanced typewriters at the end of typewriters were able to do both (swappable daisy wheel or ball). A paragraph where the space between sentences was the same as the space between words was less readable so several generations were taught to put two spaces after a period. The advent of WYSIWG word processing programs and desktop publishing brought the fonts and font sizes onto computers from the printing industry. Their practices were kludged together with typewriter based typing techniques and that is how a lot of us ended up putting an unnecessary second space after a period. Which is a hard habit to break, though I would hope that people have stopped teaching it.

Just to familiarize myself with the genre I went through the list on wikipedia and determined that I have read not enough of the authors to form anything approaching a statistically valid sample, especially if I restrict myself to the last 20 years. My three teenage children have also only read a tiny fraction of the genre (though theirs is from the more modern end), but even together we have touched only a tiny portion of what is available. SoT, for your thesis are you looking at the sum total of YA fiction or just the sub-genre defined as YA Paranormal Romance? If it is the later, than I am sure that you will get the results that you seem to want.

I am a bit out of touch on the world of academia, though it sounds like not a lot has changed, since a completed my MS 16 years ago and choose a program with a comp instead of a thesis. With all of that said, there seems to be two problems, one is the publish or perish and the other is page count. Many academics are required to publish, so a scientifically valid paper with a bunch of co-authors is the way to go so everyone gets credit. My limited professional writing (briefings and reports) is required to be clear and concise, short and in active voice. It is only when they are trying to further "educate" me that I have to write a paper that is a certain minimum length. You tell almost anyone to write a ten page paper and there is going to be six pages of ideas, two pages worth of font size, spacing and margin tricks and two pages of fluff and filler that obscure the six pages of good writing. I have no idea how to do it, but there needs to be a better way of measuring effort in the academic world than page count.

I have not been able to break myself of the habit of two spaces after a period from learning to type on a type writer. Of course my first two computer word processor programs did not have proportional fonts and so did not automatically adjust the size of the space after a period. My third did with some fonts but not all. I have not tried very hard to break this habit as I have higher priority habits to break.

your underwear should not be visible you should wear underwear it is possible to walk uphill to school both ways i had an apple ii gs, not an amiga there are some cop cars so strong that they can carry an f-15 http://www.strategypage.com/military_photos/military_photos_200531423.aspx

Exactly that, I do not see myself as economically left of center, yet there I was.

I believe a key question that was left out of the Libertarian/Authoritarian track that might have effected some results is the ownership of fire arms. I would not be surprised if several of the folks who scored more towards social libertarian than I did (which so far is everyone) would move a step towards authoritarian if that question had been asked whereas I would have crossed into the libertarian side.

All I remember about AP English was that I had to read a bunch of books that I did not like (as opposed to all of the books I was reading in my free time that I did like), that the gender ratio in the class was very favorable to my preferences and that I did better on the AP test than I did in the class. Of course in my case it really was a long time ago.

After taking it, I have severe doubts about its calibration. I ended up with Economic -.88 which I just can't see and libertarian/Authoritarian of .10 which I can see. I also feel that there were not enough options for the answers and not enough questions to really cover the fine points of my personal beliefs.

I agree with Sylae. If every major and minor event in your life is predestined, then are you really a thinking creature? Of course predestination is one of those theories that is impossible to prove wrong.

I haven't read either at this point. Generation Kill and similar books (there are plenty available for Vietnam and WWII, some for Korea, a few for Desert Storm) are looking at broad sweeping events through a soda straw. I will assume that the reporter did his job and provided a fair and balanced look at what was going on and after the fact tried to provide some context to it, but you are still reading about one tree in a forest. This particular tree was well trained marine infantrymen with the mission of finding fixing and holding the enemy for larger forces to eliminate and their perspective is going to be very different from marine infantrymen who where in the follow up infantry battalions which will be different from marine logisticians and so on. Essentially Generation Kill is a tactical biography which provides a very detailed but very narrow perspective. A broader operational or strategic history can provide more perspective on the overall invasion but tends to completely lose the human factor that you get in Generation Kill. A collection of stories like in some of Stephen Ambrose or SLA Marshall's WWII books provides a broader perspective because they include the stories of people across many units versus just one. (Of course there are some objections to both Ambrose and Marshall's scholarship) IMO a book like Generation Kill which takes all of its information from a person who was embedded with a 150 person unit cannot accurately portray the experience of an invasion force of almost 200,000 US, British and Aussie personnel.

I certainly think what Jerakeen says is true for the hetero portion of most Western cultures. The other aspect of biology besides appearance is fertility. Men are fertile longer than women. One could even argue if so inclined that the evolutionary imperative favors the young nubile female capturing the successful established male just like in most of the books we are all complaining about. A relationship between equals is a very recent thing in Western Cultures (and still not a thing in a lot of other cultures). The more women graduate from college then men trend is a fairly new trend and will take time to impact marriage ages and still has to contend with biology and psychology. The other factor that will no doubt stir a lively debate is that many people believe that Women are emotionally mature sooner than men are, therefore men need to be a little older. Many high school and college age relationships are age appropriate, like in Harry Potter. A lot of fantasy works tend to thrust relatively young heroes or heroines into an adult society instead of having them in a school setting with their peers. As to clothes obsession in WoT, Mat was at least as clothes obsessed as the female characters were, probably more so. There was a lot more female nudity than male nudity, though not as much as you imply. It was mostly in a ritual to prove that a person was biologically female and in the Sauna, not for the casting of spells.

I took the survey, I expect my answers to be a little different due to my age. For others reading, there is nothing about Denver in the survey, it is all about the internet. If you are keeping track, I am not from nor living in Denver, though I have enjoyed visiting it.

Most of CJ Cherryh's and Andre Norton's books were written at a time when publishers discouraged authors from having female protagonists. And so despite the fact that they are both female, most of their characters are male. I did not mention Mercedes Lackey for essentially the same reason, though she wrote later she had very few female characters. In terms of the Dragonriders series, while there is certainly a lack of diversity of sexual orientation, I am unaware of her personal beliefs. Of course I mentioned the Darkover books and I do have issues with MZB's alleged real life tolerance of Pedophilia. In terms of WoT, I do not think that the female characters are any worse than the male characters. And the female characters do grow and change and have female mentors which was one of the complaints at the start of this thread.

Sticking to fantasy and ignoring SF: Among the older books, The Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley and the Dragon Riders of Pern series by Anne McCafferty, (though some consider them SF, I do not). For more modern examples: David Drake's Lord of the Isles and Elements series; Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time; Melanie Rawn's dragon series (but it has been a long time since I have read it so I may be mistaken); the later books in David Weber's War God series. For younger readers, the Percy Jackson series and its spinoffs is fairly well balanced. I haven't read them (I'm not into the various vampire series), but the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series has a female protagonist just because there were few out there. There are currently 21 books in the series, so it is certainly successful.

The cloak of bolts location isn't really an island. You have to find a concealed passage then move through a passage flying from dirt spot to dirt spot separated by lava. It is almost exactly due West of Bargha. It is on the West side of the river, but you have to approach the concealed door to the lava area from the North. It is East of the lava formation that is in the shape of a "b" rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise.

Going back to the original post, the books that SoT is referencing are essentially the trashy romance novels of the fantasy world. If you are concerned about what your daughter is getting out of the trashy romance novel genre, then find some fantasy or SF or literature or anything else that is not in the trashy romance genre. While there are plenty of fantasy and SF novels with female characters who are just there for romantic interests, there are many more, especially the more modern ones that have strong female and male characters. On the other hand, plenty of successful people like trashy romance novels and the best way to get your daughter to read more of them is to tell her she can't.