OT: more PC insanity

Modern companies accept electronic submissions of resumes.

Computers sort through the resumes.

A smart submitter, lards up the resume with keywords, raising the weighting of the resume.

"Know Powerpoint, Excel, MSWord"

The resume then no longer follows a humanities professors idea of a good time. It looks like a sporge web page on the Internet.

There will have to be some other examination, to determine literacy.

IBM was ahead of its time, when it instituted "entrance exams" for prospective employees. Not trusting a transcript, that's what you do. Make a separate filtering step. The few former IBM people I've run into, will not tell you what goes on in that exam.

Paul

That's an important and useful skill. Teaches you how to read for comprehension, how to extract what the author meant, and how to restate it more concisely.

There are a number of links to the history of the Query keyboard than debunk the idea.

Just one of these with a greater 'clue':

But that cannot be true. E and R, the second most common letter pair in English, are next to one another. T and H, the most common of all, are near neighbours. A statistical analysis in 1949 found that a QWERTY keyboard actually has more close pairs than a keyboard arranged at random.

Another urban myth is that it enabled salesmen to impress customers by rapidly typing ?TYPE WRITER QUOTE? from the top row. It?s a nice idea ? and it does seem unlikely that these letters would appear together by chance ? but there is no historical evidence for it.

Perhaps a more convincing though prosaic reason is that the keyboard is simply a semi-random rearrangement of the original piano-style keyboard.

We?ll probably never know. A century after Sholes finalised the keyboard, historian Jan Noyes of Loughborough University published a lengthy analysis concluding: ?There appears ? to be no obvious reason for the placement of letters in the QWERTY layout.

And, equally, there is no reason to change it.

There is if you want efficiency, but the investment would be huge, in terms of hardware and the human side of relearning a skill.

It is said you could get more than a 10% increase in typing rate for a fast touch typist if you had a more efficient layout.

In my case, it was the way the school worked. They had the old fashioned notion that 'arts' and 'science' were so different that no-ne could do both.

There were different sixth form groups afor arts and sciences. And they were timetabled against each other.

Gosh, 10%, eh? That'll *really* get 'em going.

On 12/04/2021 22:06, Paul wrote: ... snipped

I'm an ex-IBMer who started at the Hursley lab as a so-called "experienced grad" in 1982; there were several interviews but no entrance exam.

Back in the days of 'O'-level maths, the exam (JMB) consisted of two 3 hour papers, each marked out of 113. Pupils were not expected to get above 100 and the numbers were used directly as percentages. So 90/113 on one paper and 80/113 on the other, got you 85% - yes, a very odd idea, but that was how it worked.

In the mocks, a classmate scored something like 108/113 and 98/113, but was only given 99% ... because "You are not allowed to score more than

Don't forget, for *that* type of troll that hypothetical 10% would be

Cheers, T i m

That seems likely. However, the Use of English exam was for everybody. In fact, in my school the highest mark - 98% - went to somebody in the science stream.

Back in the day - and its still slightly true today - everyone had English they spoke at home and English they were taught at school.

Standard RP 'upper middle class' English, which, though mocked, was

And there is a world of difference between a different lilt (Welsh people speaking English), different pronunciation - Mancunians saying 'uz' instead of 'us' - or a different language altogether, like Glaswegian....

(I remember my Norfolk grandfather refused to accept the French invaders pronunciation. The car lived in the 'garridge', not a poncey 'garage')...

I wish I had taken the Cambridge Council to court for the (pre printed) parking ticket for 'parking in a PREscribed place'

Air controller to first airliner "What height are you at?" "I am at thirty thousand feet" Air controller to second airliner "And What height are you at?" "I am at thirty, too.."

Oops! Which is why they speak a slightly modified _standard_ English with numbers spelt out.

I had one 'A' level maths paper where I did get 101%. Max marks were 256, but it was percentaged out of 250 (for easier calculation). I got 252 and a classmate 254.

I think that the typewriter layout *was* dictated by the mechanical design, but that's lost in the mists of time.

What emerged was something that ArtStudents? who argue endlessly about which standards are best, fail to understand completely in their complete lack of exposure to RealLife?. Namely that it doesn't matter

Doesn't explain why it isn't ABC...

If you are referring to USS, it hasn't been final salary for a while - instead it's now "career average", which is fairer and weeds out the anomalies (such as just before retirement salary jumps, and perhaps even late career drops in salary point).

There do seem to be some funding issues but they are not being ignored; and debate mostly seems to involve USS, universities, and the unions arguing how much needs to be paid in, and by whom.

#Paul

Since I've only posted on the relevant subject in the sub-thread I'm certainly not the troll, nor do I have a massive chip on my shoulder.

If you feel differently please explain.

Perhaps you feel the definition of a troll is someone who posts facts or attributed claims you'd rather they didn't? Most people have a different definition.