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April 16, 2003
Modern Careers
One of my old arguments about the fallacy of meritocracy in affirmative action arugments centered around the fact that most tenured professors did not themselves take the SAT or ACT tests. They applied to college the old fashioned way, with essays. I myself applied to a paltry three colleges, one of which was a state university. It was the state university that cared only for the numbers. The two more prestigious joints required some paragraphs out of me.
It occured to me several minutes ago that while I dig the old-fashioned methods for college admissions, despite my soft spot for racial preferences in the context of integration, there are some newfangled ways that make the old outright silly. One of these has got to be in the realm of publishing.
The particular event was looking up sort in my Korn Shell book. sort, is a unix command that does sorting and a few more things. I should be looking it up in a unix manual, but I don't have one. Instead I am relying on my index. An index in this context is that part of the back of a book, you remember books don't you, in which certain key words are listed with references to the pages in the book where they can be found. In the Korn Shell book there is a mistake.
My curse was against an idiot software program, not against a person. But what if it actually was a person who made the index to that book. In fact, 20 years ago certainly all indices were written by people. There are probably lots of people in the publishing industry today that got their start writing indices.
It's almost inconcievable that such a task would be done today by a college educated human, in America anyway.
Posted by mbowen at April 16, 2003 09:32 AM
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Comments
Two points of correction:
"One of my old arguments about the fallacy of meritocracy in affirmative action arugments centered around the fact that most tenured professors did not themselves take the SAT or ACT tests."
I'd guess the majority of tenured professors are in the 60-50 age bracket, which means they DID most likely take a mass test (SAT or ACT test) to be admitted to college, and another for graduate school (GRE or similar). So that argument doesn't fly.
"It's almost inconcievable that such a task [writing an index] would be done today by a college educated human, in America anyway."
I was never a professional indexer, but I did about 15 indices over 5 years for a small publishing house. The indexes produced by software programs (like the Microsoft Word one) is only as good as the person doing the coding. IF it is the author, it is usually bad--an author is too close to the work to be successful. A good index makes a work so much more valuable.
Posted by: weezee at April 21, 2003 07:32 PM