Tuesday 16 October 2012

16. Professions #2

In case you didn't read the blog post preceding this one, this is basically just a list of professions which I think aren't all that it's made out to be. This one won't be from personal experience by the way...

So on to the next one...

Wine Tasters

To be an expert on wine, surely you'd be expected to be able to taste and point out the differences between wine much better than the average person.

In an experiment, several wine experts were given a bottle labelled 'vin de table' *which is an average-tiered wine* and another bottle labelled 'grand cru' *which is like one of the highest rated vineyards*. Little did the expert know, that the wine was actually the same, only the labels are different. The wine is orignally white, yet through the use of food colouring, grand cru was modified to become red.

To cut a long story short, they found the first bottle to be "simple, unbalanced and weak," whilst the latter to be "complex, balanced and full." Funnily, their skills were highly put to disgrace and that alone is able to put me off on the profession of wine tasting.

So to sum it up, the wine experts were easily fooled by both the labels and the colouring of the wine...

The words that soon came out of their mouths were null...which truly makes me think that the whole idea of wine tasting is artificial and complete hokum...

15. Professions #1

People get paid a lot of money to be experts right? I mean it requires a high-tiered form of knowledge and everyone's expecting them to be more intellectual than the average kid yeah?

Well sadly, from my own personal experience I'm going to shed some light on some professions to which people may think is rather high-class or prestigious, but are actually full of it.

I am only listing the occupations from personal experience, so note that there may be more occupations which are worse than the ones I listed , like a garbage collector...*SEE WHAT I DID THERE? DID U GET IT? U GEDDIT? YEAHHHHH*

Stock Market Experts

Okay, so I've been doing a bit of stocks here and there and a side thing whilst drudging in uni, and when I was a beginner who knew the basics but lacked the actual skills to perform/analyse the graphs, I sought out these stock market 'experts' to help me out. 

First off, many of us find the stock market a bit scary to place your money in, well at least that would be the case if people actually had money. Anyway  many of us would go to these experts as well, they'd select a bunch of stocks which they'll purchase at your expense and then they'll tell you to "sit back, chillax, and watch as your stocks grow..."

What they ought to say is "sit back,  chillax, and watch as your stocks grow at a much slower rate than it would have if you picked it yourself..."

Yes, no kidding, and I'm not the only one.... Amongst fellow colleagues *six of them* who undertook stocks as a hobby, during their induction to stock trading, they also went to stock market experts for help, only to receive stocks that rose slower than ever...

So yeah to cut a long story short, the stock market experts were actually performing beneath the Dow and/or S&P indexes which are meant to represent the average performance of the market to begin with...

Hence, stock market experts trust rating: 2/10

I give them two points because they beat a colleague of mine who just randomly picked a variety of stocks...barely though...



Wednesday 10 October 2012

14. Uni Rant #2

Okay so my uni exams coming up in about 2 weeks or so, i dunno...shaking my head~

Anyways so landing in university you think that you've finally landed in a zone of smart, educated people who's only aspiration in life is to seek knowledge... *i'm just dicking with ya, who does that?*
But yeah far from it, university is much like those American dramas...which isn't a bad thing but I just wanna rant on the fact that about 99% of the entire cohort partakes in cheating.

Okay fine, I pulled that figure straight out of my ass, but come on...it has to be around that right? Heck, the other 1% are apparently the geniuses who hands out all those answers and cheat sheets to the crowd.

To further this fact, the university are doing nothing to stop this...
Heh, what I mean to say is that they're not ACTIVELY doing anything to stop cheating...hence the high rate of it... I mean every uni has a protocol that restricts and severely punishes those who cheat, but see they're only willing to go as far as they are willing to enforce it.

Apart from reinforcing the fact that plagiarism and such is forbidden about a thousand times, they do NOTHING else to stop students from undertaking this. Essentially, going after these kids require two factors:

  • Detecting that something is wrong
  • Deciding to give a f**k
Guess what two abilities the universities are missing? Well there you go, the ability to detect cheating and the wanting to give a crap is out of the window...

This doesn't help with the fact that technology is constantly up and running and there are so many new ways to just find the answers to your online tests. I mean yeah that are those who hand in their own teacher's work for his assignment and those who get caught via that plagiarism software, TurnItIn, but that's it.
There are no more ways to prevent plagiarism. Man even TurnItIn is easily broken through the use of a damn thesaurus.

I even heard about that one professor of mine who stated outright that made this one assignment unplagiarisable...but honestly, exclaiming that outright is only asking for everyone to attempt to cheat.
*to be honest, not like that it would make a difference whether he did tell the world*
It's like inventing an unbreakable chastity belt, no matter how effective it is, there's always something that'll crack it open, and guess what? People did find out how to cheat that one assignment out...too damn easy cuz...

Who knows, maybe the frauds will get it in the end...when they realise that they got the job but know absolutely nothing...



Saturday 6 October 2012

13. Uni Rant #1

Sorry guys, not having posted since like early in the year and it's pretty much because university has taken a toll on me. But who gives a f**k right?

Anyways, thought that maybe my first rant would be on uni itself and the benefits it offers [or lack of benefits I should say.]

So first off, you're all in high school and you foresee your lecturers/tutors as old men with Da Vinci beards possessing transcendent knowledge of time and space. Jokes...Most of them aren't even qualified/able to teach. No kidding, this isn't one of those rants where it was ultimately my fault like that time I said I didn't need a condom. Nah, THIS TIME it's really not my fault.

Anyway's now that I'm just a tad more studious than high school, I'd expect high grades cause you know... Good source of info + Study = You Win right? Well sadly the idea of uni lecturers and tutors being experts in their field and who inspire learning is as outdated as the idea of getting a job after graduation. I mean I'm in no dropkick college like the University of Harlem, heck I'm in one of the top universities in Australia (which actually isn't special) but honestly let me sum it up for you briefly.

My tutorials are taught by:

  • 30% - Other students a year [or two] older than I am. What? not even Ph.D. students.
  • 60% - Graduate students who are making an attempt stall off unemployment.
  • 10% - Elders or professors (I assume)  who know their sh*t yet are unable to relate and/or teach in a manner that we are all accustomed to, hence we don't get sh*t. Still stuck in the land of archaism.
My lectures are taught by:
  • 100% - Professors, whose aforementioned teaching habits are not well suited to the kids of this generation. Don't know if they ever were well suited in any day and age
Equipped with less training than a pre-school teacher, access to no class materials and usually a limited command of English has forced me to not attend more than 40% of my lectures, and heck, any tutorial which isn't compulsory I gladly bounce. Highly lacking in aptitude for teaching, it's as if these people who [attempt] to educate us has made a final ditch attempt to avoid unemployment and just land in this zone where demand is high and entry is easy.

I think you all got the gist of what I'm trying to relay here.