Interesting Links for 29-10-2018

[andrewducker]

I'm a member of the "Green Global Community" Clan, apparently. You?

(tags: demographics politics viaDanielDWilliam )

Cloudflare Just Banned a Social Media Refuge for Thousands of Sex Workers

(tags: sexwork censorship usa OhForFucksSake )

Travel companies are refusing to cover Brexit related problems

(tags: travel UK europe insurance )

Gang dressed as Ku Klux Klan outside Islamic centre in Northern Ireland

(tags: NorthernIreland racism OhForFucksSake islam )

Holographic Displays at the Tokyo Games Show

(tags: games Holograms Technology )

The optimum way to compile a multiple-choice test

(tags: testing design )

Comments

[simont]

Warrgh, it always catches me by surprise when these posts turn out to be at a fixed time in UTC rather than in local time :-)

[andrewducker]

One of these days I'll do a complete rewrite and fix that!

[ckd]

I think they should stay fixed to UTC. Of course,I also think they should use ISO 8601 date format....

I'm a member of the "Green Global Community" Clan, apparently. You?

[jack]

Yep, likewise. I was surprised how many of the questions I felt "strongly agree/strongly disagree" was insufficient and I wanted a stronger option, in contrast to my normal cautious "well, there's something on both sides" answers.

I didn't have to nitpick that much either, although I did sometimes :)

Re: I'm a member of the "Green Global Community" Clan, apparently. You?

[skington]

Same here, and I'm not surprised - the questions were designed to sort you into clans, not to be tricky. (I suspect that if any of the questions were about e.g. building houses on brownfield sites vs the green belt, answers would be more nuanced.)

Re: I'm a member of the "Green Global Community" Clan, apparently. You?

[skington]

It's frustrating that a survey that says that class is being abandoned as the main political signifier, doesn't ask about independence in Scotland.

[redbird]

That Cloudflare article is from April, so the "just banned" is confusing.

[marahmarie]

Just saw that (once you mentioned it I scrolled back up to check the date). But they're on Mastadon, now (decentralized social networking, from what a quick glance tells me) at switter.at.

I don't like that DW's outsourced a lot of things it might have once done itself, though it'd likely cost more to do so or keep on doing so: our CDN is also CloudFlare and storage is on AWS. I wish it were all homegrown, hand-rolled solutions instead, but oh, well.

[cmcmck]

Me too, so it appears! :o)

[calimac]

The problem I most find with multiple-choice tests is when none of the answers are precisely correct, but two or more are sort of close to it. Then I have to not only figure out the facts of the matter, but guess what the test-makers meant.

Another sort of test that's irritating is when the wrong answers are all too obviously wrong. Then it's easy to guess the right one even if you have no idea it's right. You get a good score, but if the test is just for fun then it's not any fun. We need craftier design of wrong answers. (Occasionally, when I do know the right answer, I can stop and admire truly crafty design of wrong answers.)