Good tips but the 3-month claims create unrealistic expectations. It likely results in higher book sales but means most people will give up before they actually become fluent in a foreign language.
Fluency, also, is difficult to define. I listened to a couple minutes of Benny stammering his way through a Mandarin language interview. His level seems on par for 3 months of study, so perhaps he equates basic communication as "fluency." If I can talk to a stranger on the bus for 10 minutes, does that mean I'm fluent? Not according to most language rating scales, though they are admittedly very subjective.
The Foreign Service Institute of the US State Dept sorts foreign languages into three groups, based upon how long it takes a typical student to reach professional competency (CEFR C1, IFL 3/3+):
Professional competency means: can you perform office functions in that language? Most non-Latin languages take a year of dedicated study (1000 hrs) to reach fluency. Exceptionally difficult languages, such as Arabic or Mandarin, take 2 years. Also, it's debatable whether even the 3/3+ moniker equates to fluency. I scored a 3+ in Russian and there are many, many situations that I cannot navigate in that language.
So could you, for instance, learn Arabic to a C1 level within 3 months? It's highly doubtful and shame on the author for giving people that impression.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Just curious what you do with returned inventory? I adhere to particular brands because I more or less know general quality and more importantly, I know how the clothes will fit. With a new designer each week, suddenly variance becomes a serious issue. Big retailers can absorb the inventory, but what will you do with out-of-date items?
In any case, i like the idea and hope it works out. I buy clothing online pretty frequently (most stores dont carry my size) and it's nice to see the industry evolving.
We will be baking in a detailed sizing chart soon. The chart will also have the closest analogy interms of fitting wrt size to a popular brand ( Zara, Armani ..etc). In terms of returned inventory - donations were one of the routes we were thinking.
Where are you manufacturing the pieces? I have a friend that was just in India for a year and they were able to make beautiful custom suits for around the $150 price point.
If you give directions to the buyers on how to measure themselves (or ask them to go to local tailors) you could have the pieces custom made for a fraction of the price of what it would cost in the USA.
I know it adds complexity to the process, but if I had a profile where I could input my measurements, buying would be much easier, would significantly reduce the return rate and increase my satisfaction.
I really like the concept you are going for. Good on ya!
Thanks! We have a handfull of partners right now and are growing the list at present to shoes, leathers ... etc. Yea we will be baking in a detailed sizing graph soon. Right now you can get collection 1 custom tailored for only $50 ( it's an option on the checkout page).
I agree with rmc. There are similar cultural roles in Samoa, India, Thailand. Gender-- the cultural notion, not the biological one-- is definitely more malleable than we typically assume.
I like that the article is attempting to encourage people to cook more, but the premise is flawed. You don't take someone who's interested in food and tell them to read the French Laundry Cookbook. You tell them to start with Julia Child, or the Joy of Cooking, or Cooks Illustrated, or Mark Bittman. Crawl, then walk, then run.
Similarly, you don't tell a novice to spend $1000 on equipment they might never use. I've cooked "gourmet" for over a decade and I've never owned a stand mixer. You tell them to buy a good chef's knife, a good paring knife. A stock pot, a frying pan, maybe a saucepan. I have a cast iron pan but i use my nonstick pans much more often.
The difficulty in learning to cook is not in getting the right tools. It's in getting someone to overcome their fear of it. You just need to show them that it's actually not a difficult thing, that you can screw up a recipe multiple times and still have a delicious result. Make a pot of spaghetti, then a simple soup or stew, roast a chicken, fry a steak. Then go nuts making Keller's Oysters and Pearls. But only after.
The people who would find use out of many of the items listed are the same people who know what they need, anyway.
Actually this brings up one concern I've had for a while. I've been doing yoga fairly regularly (2x a week) for about six years. I have no problem keeping up with advanced classes, holding plank/bridge/wheel, can almost do a full split, etc. Yet, I have pretty extreme APT. I don't really know where I'm going wrong; I've tried similar exercise and stretching regimens in the past, supplementing the yoga, but never seemed to get anywhere with them. As a result, I feel like perhaps more direct strength training (squat, deadlift, etc) might be worth a shot. Thoughts?
Also, is APT the same as lordosis or is there a medical distinction?
My experience with yoga is that it is not enough for serious structural issues. For a strength-building workout, it is not systematic enough at most schools. It also usually fails to correct the day to day movement problems at the root of many problems.
I've done a lot of research into correcting my issues and it seems like this is what is happening with me. After reading Mary Bond's New Rules of Posture and Esther Gokhale's book, I realized that the way I do everything is pretty much wrong. I walk wrong, sit wrong, lie down wrong, and stand wrong (which is why a standing desk also didn't help). A great example is after implementing what I thought were really healthy changes to my lifestyle- the standing desk and walking to work, I developed an unpleasant heel pain and a rather ugly callus on my right side. After reading the Bond book I figured out that it was because that side is my dominant foot, but I was getting all my energy from walking from the heel strike there, rather than pushing off from the non-dominant foot through the hamstring/toes. Correcting that got rid of the pain and also had the side effect that my rear is more toned. That's just one example, and I'm not done with improving my posture, but it has made a great difference in my life. I also have implemented more systematic weight training (making sure I get ALL areas worked out) and core training (pilates). I still do yoga for the mobility benefits. I also have seen a Rolfing and Feldenkrais coach, but I think those services are generally over-rated and overpriced and you can get similar benefits from taking an adult dance class. I would like to try Alexander too.
Perhaps its just how your body is build? Do you have any problems related to APT? I would tell about your concern your yoga teacher. He can help you design yoga routine to fix that if its an issue.
I think it'll be interesting to see if there are households who have a tablet but not a desktop/laptop. Until that happens, it still feels like a luxury product.
Despite owning my own bike, I have considered signing up for DC's bikeshare program (havent pulled the trigger yet; just moved here). A couple advantages for me:
- I don't have to worry about my own (rather nice) bike getting stolen
- I don't have to lug around a lock+chain for short trips.
- I'm not stuck with my bike if I use another means for the return trip
(e.g., going to a bar, then cabbing home or hitching a ride)
The main negative, aside from the subscription fee, is that the bikes supposedly weigh a ton and are far from smooth rides.
When I first moved here I was amazed by the number of people that use the program. I'm quite curious about the actual municipal cost, though-- especially as a before/after comparison. Also would be interested in other effects. For instance, did it decrease parking woes? Increase public transportation usage? Cause more traffic accidents?
I don't think this is news to anyone who's familiar with the rising popularity of social games. During the facebook gaming boom, "pink" games far outpaced "blue" ones in popularity and profit. I worked at a zynga competitor around 2008-10 and it was very clear that female audiences were less demanding, less prone to cheating, and more willing to regularly spend money (in the aggregate) than their male counterparts. In other words: lower maintenance, easier profits. We would release the exact same feature in two games-- one pink and one blue-- and the pink game's revenues would spike while the blue's flatlined. Definitely not a scientific approach, but one that repeated itself on multiple occasions.
All of this transitioned nicely into mobile social games, where we are today. There is some risky gender stereotyping that can arise in tandem with these kinds of discussions, but from my experience the revenues make it pretty clear which audience to target.
There is some risky gender stereotyping that can arise in tandem with these kinds of discussions
Damn straight, and you've already internalized the lingo. "Pink" and "blue" are the new "AAA" and "hardcore": game industry terms that piss me right off.
Many of the best games are profoundly gender-neutral. Your Marios, Zeldas, Sonics, and Katamari Damacys being the obvious examples. Then again you mentioned working for a Zynga competitor; I'm not so certain that delivering great games was in their mission statement.
Theoretically. In practice, Mario and Zelda are games where a rather blobby avatar is guided through platforms, labyrinths and puzzles, where some of said puzzles consist of autonomous moving blobs that try to touch you, and which you can defuse by touching them with your active end (the front--mid-sword-swing--for Link, the bottom--mid-jump--for Mario.)
Saying that the games are about princesses and mass-murder is a statement on about the same level as saying that chess is a game about military tactics: it might look decorated that way, but it's not what you spend your time thinking about when you're playing, and it's not what draws people to the games.
They're terminological shell games. It's difficult to tell whether "AAA game" means a popular game, a quality game, or merely a game with a very large budget. It depends on who's using the term and, often, there's a hidden implication that a game which has one of these traits must necessarily have the other two.
It's similarly difficult to tell whether "hardcore" means "challenging", "played online competitively", or "has adult themes like sex and violence". The best working definition I could find based on actual usage is if a game is an FPS, RTS, or MMORPG[0] it's "hardcore", otherwise not; but why not just say FPS, RTS, or MMORPG and not have this hidden value judgement that games which are not in these genres are "softcore"?
[0] Other game categories, like MOBAs and some third-person shooters may now qualify.
The only thing that is actually true of is underwear, and even there my girlfriend steals my boxers. Many products are targeted at women or men, but most often their consumption by one gender or another is more self-fulfilling marketing prophecy than real differences.
Limiting your audience to half the population seems stupid to me. Especially when it doesn't seem all that hard to crossover; mostly it involves not making those self-fulfilling marketing prophecies.
If many products are targeted at men or women then it certainly isn't true that the line is drawn at underwear. Catering to a specific subset of all people is not stupid even if it halves your potential audience. If that were so then the countless brands wouldn't set out to appeal to the tastes of each gender. If the numbers showed that most people like unisex things then that's what they'd all be pushing.
You seem to regard the distinct tastes between the genders as some kind of marketing brain washing. Masculinity and femininity weren't concocted in the board room.
It's not symmetric; you are less likely to steal your girlfriend's bras. And if you do, it probably means something different from when your girlfriend steals your boxers.
Men and women do differ even from an early age, but you are of course right that these differences do not necessarily track with cultural stereotypes. (And when they do it may be because those stereotypes are being conformed to in a strongly biologically underdetermined way)
If that's the case, then there's also a bit of a UI issue. The current shuffle button is a toggle, not a "click once each time you want to shuffle" button.
Yes, for sure. My speculation (from vague recollections of ancient Slashdot posts I didn't read closely at the time - never having used iAnything for music myself - so take it with a grain of salt) is that shuffle started out randomly picking the next song, but people complained that IT WASN'T RANDOM because they kept hearing the same songs - but of course if it is random, there's no protection against precisely that, and the people for whom it has happened to be well distributed probably arent' going online searching for "itunes shuffle randomness problem" or whatnot. So there may or may not have been a bug in the randomness, but randomness isn't really what people wanted anyway, and upon realizing that they changed it to the way it works now - where you shuffle it like a deck of cards, and then run through that deck repeatedly. Now, shuffle is an action where before it was a mode - and they forgot to change the UI to match.
For a playlist, it's "sort by the original arbitrary order that the user put it in" so you can't rely on the usual sort methods - e.g. clicking the column header.
Fluency, also, is difficult to define. I listened to a couple minutes of Benny stammering his way through a Mandarin language interview. His level seems on par for 3 months of study, so perhaps he equates basic communication as "fluency." If I can talk to a stranger on the bus for 10 minutes, does that mean I'm fluent? Not according to most language rating scales, though they are admittedly very subjective.
The Foreign Service Institute of the US State Dept sorts foreign languages into three groups, based upon how long it takes a typical student to reach professional competency (CEFR C1, IFL 3/3+):
http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...
Professional competency means: can you perform office functions in that language? Most non-Latin languages take a year of dedicated study (1000 hrs) to reach fluency. Exceptionally difficult languages, such as Arabic or Mandarin, take 2 years. Also, it's debatable whether even the 3/3+ moniker equates to fluency. I scored a 3+ in Russian and there are many, many situations that I cannot navigate in that language.
So could you, for instance, learn Arabic to a C1 level within 3 months? It's highly doubtful and shame on the author for giving people that impression.