27 Comments

There's a long, inglorious history of young firebrands turning into old fogeys. (Wordsworth springs to my mind, but I'm sure there are older examples.) Are there any recorded examples of young fogeys morphing into cane-wielding anarchist oldies? These people are starting out so early as dumbshits, surely they're going to want to change before they get old? Or die (of a surfeit of votes), that'd work too. Doesn't wisdom come with age? (Um, no. Personal experience.)

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Can you cut cream cheese?

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"online scoring for the essay portion of the SAT"

I thought they had software for that.

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God, badly wanting to punish GOP voters by subjecting them to loud crappy music, approves this message.

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ad nauseam

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A rare moment of convergence where you and she can agree - you for the torture, she for the choice of victim.

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It's ready to go, as soon as they can work out a way to have people write essays by filling in the circles darkly and completely with a #2 pencil.

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I don't think <a href="" target="_blank">Tom Morello</a> will be campaigning for Obama, despite his loathing of Ryan, what with him having recently called him a war criminal.

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You'd be surprised to see <a href="http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/06\/10\/business\/essay-grading-software-as-teachers-aide-digital-domain.html" target="_blank">what's possible.</a>

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Hey Mitt, THE BOSS likes to fire people ... and he wants a word with you.

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Heh. Next thing you know they'll be writing software to judge a Turing contest.

Couple of key paragraphs, though:

<blockquote>We are talking here about providing a very rough kind of measurement, the assignment of a single summary score on, say, a seventh grader’s essay, not commentary on the use of metaphor in a college senior’s creative writing seminar.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Teachers would still judge the content of the essays. That’s crucial, because it’s been shown that students can game software by feeding in essays filled with factual nonsense that a human would notice instantly but software could not.</blockquote>

Sounds very much like the state of the software is not yet ready to replace humans entirely at any level, and certainly not yet ready to grade SAT essays by itself. To address the deficiencies inherent in such software, you'd definitely need "big data" - a contextual map of human knowledge - and that'd almost certainly eliminate the cost advantages over paying people (more phantom "government jobs")

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She's French?

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<blockquote>Wonder how he feels about Lindsay Lohan and that Clueless girl supporting Rmoney?</blockquote>

He'll work it out once he's done fapping over Jenna Jameson's endorsement of Mittens, so never.

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Say "puedo" again. Say "puedo" again. I dare you. I double-dare you, motherfucker.

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The author of this editorial is awesome! Insofar, he or she should totally write for the <i>Dunning-Kruger Picayune.</i>

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Forsooth, these writers strive valiantly to impress upon the gentlefolk consuming the fruits of their labors the semblance of great wisdom with florid prose, but alas the effort is vainglorious, for their skill is inadequate to meet the task.

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