(no subject)

[fpb]

One person I met on someone else's LJ called Sarah Palin a Nazi. This person, luckily, is already banned from my LJ.

Another, at the same time, showed a picture of an eleven-year-old girl with an AK-47 and thought it cute. This person also suggested that the ability to use such implements should be a test of citizenship.

Needless to say, I defriended this person on the spot. I try to understand Americans, but there is a limit.

Comments

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

The problem of constructing a test so that it will test only for the exact quality you're trying to measure and not some ancillary quality that you've unconsciously presupposed is a truly difficult one.

I first became aware of the problem when I was taking a foreign-language test with a section that supposedly tested our listening comprehension, but in fact was testing our ability to effectively chunk the incoming material in order to keep from overflowing the seven registers of short-term memory. However, we got no practice during class in that skill, so most of us ended up struggling with overflows because the sentence we were supposed to listen to and translate mentally was too long for our short-term memory when handled as single words. At first we'd have the later words force the first words out, but when we tried to solve it by concentrating on hanging onto the first words, we'd lose the last part of the sentence because it had no room to go into. So no matter which "solution" we used, we'd be asking the instructor to repeat the sentence multiple times, and they'd assume it was a lack of comprehension on our part rather than issues of short-term memory management. They didn't even realize there was a problem because they had developed their ability to chunk the incoming information until they did it unconsciously, without even realizing that a skill was involved.

And that's a problem in developing a test to measure a relatively objective quality. Trying to develop a test that will measure something so elusive as the qualities that make a responsible citizen may well be impossible.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And that is why we acknowledge citizenship in all people born in the country or applying honestly to be part of it.

(Incidentally, in Italy it is unconstitutional to deprive anyone of citizenship. While I can see the point for natives, I think the provision ought to be altered for foreign-born citizens - what, for instance, about enemy spies getting citizenship under false pretences?)