Posted on 06/29/2013 6:30:34 PM PDT by Wellington VII
This week’s Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder overturned Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which mandated federal oversight of changes in voting procedure in jurisdictions that have a history of using a “test or device” to impede enfranchisement. Here is one example of such a test, used in Louisiana in 1964.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Which is of the following is the correct answer to question 27?
"right"
"right from the left to the right"
"right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here"
Much more satisfying and much simpler to set the Way Back Machine for 1982. Killer economy. Great President. Only downside is no FR.
Question 30 can’t be answered unless you guess what they were asking.
Describe what you like about data entry.
(Honest question. I’m asking because teaching and writing already seem coherent and I’m trying to understand the data entry piece.)
I like systematization. I like designing the database so that it can organize information better. I’m partially German, so it makes that part of me feels good when everything is *just so*.
I used to be a physics major in university but was one of the last cuts from my program. So I transferred into History and finished up my degree. One of the things I’ve been doing is harnassing databases to help me organize historical information. I’ve found myself doing a lot of work for election officials, and for political campaigns as a result, because of the intersect between my degree and my proficiency in data entry.
Right now I maintain donor databases. I have an unpublished thesis on genealogy, where I have an innovative design that is much more efficient than current products on the market and is much more scalable. I am working on refinements to make it more user-friendly. I have no idea how to market something like this to actually earn money.
My point was, that the test isn’t impossible. It’s stupid, and requires you to really read some of the questions, but it’s not impossible.
I had to apply for a job recently, and they made me take an aptitude test. They gave you two hours to take test, and any time beyond that would impact your score negatively.
I don’t think that I didn’t get the job because it took me three hours to take the test, but it’s entirely possible that the footage they might have viewed from the hidden cameras recording me as I took the test probably did the trick… I suspect that they looked at each other and said “Hell, we can’t hire that guy… He’s got Tourette’s syndrome…”
I’m not a big believer in tests like that, but I approached it in the spirit that it was given, because I do like a challenge. There was a math section, a logic section, and a reading comprehension section.
In the reading comprehension section, they had a question that went something like this: “You are a zookeeper. You have four lions, A, B, C, D, and you have two tigers, E, and F. You have six stalls, three on each side, facing each other. Lion D Must occupy stall number six, the tiger stalls cannot face each other, and Tiger E must be next to lion C...” and so on.
So here I am, diagramming out the stalls, putting lions and tigers in different stalls to see what works. I think I spent about 20 minutes on that question, cussing under my breath to myself the entire time things like “Geez… What kind of idiot thought of these questions?”
So I get all the way through that question and thought, “thank God I’m done with that one…” And as I turn the page to look to the next question, it’s another dumb ass lion and tiger word problem! I almost fell out of my chair…
There was one problem that I admit made me slap my forehead in frustration when I figured out. The question went like this: (if you’ve ever seen the movie “Blade Runner”, I felt like the replicant being questioned at the beginning of the movie… :-)
” As a gift, you’re given a special acorn to plant for tree that doubles in height every day. After 10 days, the tree is 40 feet high. On what day did the tree reach 10 feet high?”
So I grab my pencil and calculator and think to myself “Man, I haven’t done any kind of algebraic equation of any significance since I got out of college 30 years ago…” And I start trying to figure out the answer. Here I am, my browse all furrowed, I’m scribbling square root signs and stuff like that and puzzle over this for about 10 minutes, not making any headway. I realize that I’m burning up too much time on this, so just at the moment I decide that I’m just going to skip the question to leave it blank, the answer pops immediately into my head: the answer is day number eight. I realized all you had to do was start at the end, cut the height and half and subtract the day until you reach a height of 10.
I admit that I had to laugh at that one, I simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees. When I really get engrossed in something, I can occasionally miss the obvious!
What a lot of people don’t know is the reason for those Jim Crow laws.
After the war, Southern Whites were totally disenfranchised and the Black governments supported by the Radical Republicans who were some of the worst vermin ever to live, wanted to and succeeded in punishing the South.
They will tell you in modern history books just how enlightened they were but the truth is they and their Northern Carpetbag controllers stole money by the barrel. They would vote huge bonds and then steal the money.
Some Southern States did not completely pay off those bonds until the 1960s.
They had seen what Black rule meant and they never wanted to see it again and they did their best to make it so.
It was a time of Black troops murdering, raping, stealing and basically doing anything they wanted to Whites. The outrages finally got so bad and Southern people literally begged the Union general in charge to do something. He finally did withdraw the Black troops. This was in Georgia but the rest of the South was similar. I know it because I researched original documents while doing ancestor research.
It frankly reminds me of the movie “Birth of a Nation” which now is reviled as racist. In fact it was very accurate from what I have studied.
That’s a great example.
A benign point of view would consider the thrust of the question: to see if the test taker knew English well enough to understand the difference between “Write” and “right”, two English homonyms. Taking the test, I would assume the benign intent and write “Right” as the right answer.
A malevolent (but not unreasonable) point of view would be that ANY of the three answers you illustrate — and maybe even others — were “correct”, and the grader could pick and choose in order to arbitrarily disqualify a voter.
It gets back to the important question: does the fact that a literacy test COULD be used arbitrarily invalidate the whole concept of testing voter literacy?
Clearly a literacy test, to be fair as well as effective, must be carefully designed and uniformly adminstered and graded. Clearly this particular example lends itself to abuse.
Nah, I’d take everything I have in my bank account now and go back in time to 2012.
I’d then bet it all on Rick Santorum winning three states (Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota) on a trifecta bet. I think he was 10k to 1 or something.
Then I’d collect my winnings and then jump back to 5 seconds after the precise time I left.
>> So I grab my pencil and calculator and think to myself...
Too bad you’re not a programmer! Think power of 2 and work backwards. No calculator needed. 8 days, yeah?
( You’re probably an analog engineer or one of those other engineers with *genuine* skills.)
Loved the anecdote! Thanks for sharing it!
I could look it up but the proof is trivial. Vector representing side c is vector of side a + vector of side b. Therefore, their dot products are equal, and when you expand that it's c = sqrt(a^2 + b^2 - 2abcos(angle))
Collect the bet. Put all of the winnings in gold. Come back two weeks ago, sell all the gold for cash.
It was interesting and vaguely dehumanizing. I had never take a test for a job before. It was one of these newfangled consulting companies they brought in… My job got posted for people to apply for in another part of the company, so, in essence, if I wanted to keep doing the job I have (and have for nearly 20 years) I had to apply for like all the other candidates. Very strange.
Fortunately, my current department where my job is being moved out of was very eager to keep me in the department, so for the time being, I do have a job going forward.
The funniest thing about it was… I didn’t want to move. I really, really like the area I’m working in, and all the people in it. I have a great job, I get to manage myself and how I do my job (my bosses leave me alone because they know I’ll get the job done) and I get to help people all day long. It’s a very stressful job, but it’s extremely rewarding. I’m basically on call all the time, but I’m not primary call now… They only call me if they can’t figure something out.
So, in my heart I didn’t really want the job. I went out to eat at Chinese restaurant a couple weeks before my job interview, and I almost fell out of my chair when I broke open the fortune cookie and read it: “Never apply for a job you don’t really want.”
Was that a sign, or what?
#29.
You’re a hoot! All that sophisticated dithering and equational BS and you *still* don’t have an answer (because you’ve decided you don’t know the angle).
Dude! It’s a JOKE! And clearly a 3-4-5 right triangle. :-)
Hold a sheet of paper up to it if you’re not sure. That’s what Thomas Edison would do.
I’m glad I’m not paying you to do anything for me. I’d go broke.
Are you a lawyer? Or a politician?
>> Was that a sign, or what?
LOL! Let’s go with “sign”. Glad it all worked out.
FRegards
Also, note that 24 does not work for the extreme cases. When angle = 90, the resultant is 5 (Pythagoras.) But when the angle is 0, the answer must be 4-3=1 (it is, sqrt(25-24).) Finally, when the angle is 180, the length of the side must be 4+3=7. The only way you can get there is sqrt(25-24cos(180)) = sqrt(25+24) = sqrt(49) = 7.
It’s not a right triangle. You’re assuming a fact not in evidence from the diagram.
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