One In Ten Americans Thinks HTML Is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection 255
sandbagger writes "It looks like technical writers won't be unemployed any time soon. According to a recent study reported on by the LA Times, 11% of Americans thought HTML was a sexually-transmitted disease. The study, by coupon site VoucherCloud, involved 2,392 men and women 18 years of age or older. 27% thought 'gigabyte' was a South American insect, and 23% thought MP3 was a Star Wars robot. The participants were not told that the study was specifically looking into their knowledge of tech terms. They were presented with both tech and non-tech terms and were asked to choose from three possible definitions. 18% identified 'Blu-ray' as a marine animal, and 15% thought 'software' was comfortable clothing."
Could it be (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Could it be (Score:5, Funny)
Kardashians? Weren't they in Star Trek?
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I always thought Garak was awesome. Never did find out exactly why he was exiled though.
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There's actually a fairly good (for a media tie in) novel written by Andy Robinson, the actor who played Garak, about his past called A Stitch in Time [amazon.com]. The series of novels set in post-series Deep Space Nine have been good overall, but unfortunately they've slowed down (hopefully not stopped!) coming out so they could make room on the release schedule for drek related to the recent movies.
Try the seafood platter! (Score:5, Funny)
It's not that hard. One set are vaguely reptilian, have misshapen heads and an unjustified sense of superiority. The others invaded Bajor.
[drabadabaTISH!]
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Also, one set is fictitious and actually interesting, the other set we WISH were fictitious.
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The others invaded Bajor.
They lawfully occupied it. You Federation shills are so transparent in your efforts it's not even funny. You preach about peace, transparency, and freedom from oppression, while secretly engaging in the same tactics you publicly abhor [memory-alpha.org].
(and suddenly this comment got way more serious and allusory than I intended)
nobody watches the Kardashians (Score:2)
The viewership for "keeping up with the kardashians" (2.5M) means 99.964% of people have NOT seen it.
Actually, as far as I can tell, nobody watches anything.
Even a "wildly popular" event like the Oscars (44M viewers) was NOT seen buy 99.4% of the world.
Re:Could it be (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it might be asking a bit much to know SEO. But USB? Even my dad, a Luddite if there ever was one, knows what USB is. He will probably say "that flat plug at the side of my keyboard", meaning the USB connector of his laptop, but at the very least he'll identify it as "something that belongs to that infernal $expletive piece of crap".
People use USB. Daily. If they have some kind of computer, they will most likely have either some kind of dongle that connects them to their mobile internet, a mouse that uses it, a thumbdrive or other storage device. People use Blu-Ray players to play their videos.
Oddly, though, I bet if you ask them about VHS, they will probably identify it without fail as "that video recorder cassette". The older ones will also certainly know what an 8track is (at least if they're in the US, less so in Europe). Both of them also being technical terms. I think it would be interesting to research why earlier "tech terms" were far more widely known than modern ones.
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Oddly, though, I bet if you ask them about VHS, they will probably identify it without fail as "that video recorder cassette". The older ones will also certainly know what an 8track is (at least if they're in the US, less so in Europe).I think it would be interesting to research why earlier "tech terms" were far more widely known than modern ones.
WTF does VHS stand for? I have no idea, and I'm a nerd who often knows acronym expansions and who has owned probably a dozen VHS decks. As it turns out, it means Video Home System. That is not a technical term, it's a marketing name invented by JVC (Which I already knew to mean Japan Victor Corporation!)
I think it would be interesting to research whether earlier "tech terms" were far more widely known that modern ones. Do you really think the average person even knows what FM and AM are?
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I think it would be interesting to research whether earlier "tech terms" were far more widely known that modern ones.
That would be interesting.
Do you really think the average person even knows what FM and AM are?
Frequency Modulation, Amplitude Modulation. And trust me, I'm no hardcore geek/nerd/maker type. Don't solder don't know what a flip-flop or NAND gate is, don't do Amateur Radio, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc etc.
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I think it would be interesting to research whether earlier "tech terms" were far more widely known that modern ones. Do you really think the average person even knows what FM and AM are?
It would be useful to see the actual survey questions. You wouldn't expect a lot of people to know that AM and FM are abbreviations for amplitude modulation and frequency modulation, but I would guess that most people would associate the terms with radio as opposed to, say medicine or arts & crafts.
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VHS originally meant Vertical Helical Scan.
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They just plug it in to the only place that it fits.
Au contraire, mon frere. The USB connector as found on the modern memory stick (A?) fits perfectly into an RJ45 network jack. My netbook has a USB port right next to the network port and I have, many times, plugged a USB stick into the network port by mistake. And it is usually a realization "why hasn't this thing recognized the stick?" that reminds me to look at what I'm doing.
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It fits there width wise, but even tech-stupid people would know that its not a snug fit,
Yes, it is a rather good fit. Width-wise it's spot on. And the nice little springy contacts from the RJ45 hold it in pretty well. It feels no looser than the normal USB socket.
The problem is, there ARE no "puzzle pieces" (keys) that don't match up when plugging in the wrong hole. And if your USB socket (or plug) has a loose internal connector bit you can actually put the plug in rotated 180 degrees. The contacts won't meet up, of course. I have a battery for USB that has this problem and I have to double
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Not knowing Blu-Ray is akin to not knowing what a car is.
That is ridiculous. Cars are ubiquitous. Blu-ray, not so much. There have been 2.5 million Blu-ray players sold in the United States. Based on my own personal experience, a fair chunk of those were bought to replace a broken one. On the other hand, there are about 128 million passenger cars and 74 million light trucks currently in use in the US. 95% of US households own at least one car, and many own multiple cars. Only 26% of American homes have a Blu-ray player. Most Americans consider the automob
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There have been 2.5 million Blu-ray players sold in the United States. ... Only 26% of American homes have a Blu-ray player.
There's something wrong with your numbers here -- there were about 115 million households in the U.S. in 2010. The sources I can find with a quick Googling say the number is more like 40 million Blu-ray players.
I do agree that trying to compare not knowing Blu-ray to not knowing what a car is is a really bad comparison. There is no segment of society that has not had personal experience with cars. There are lots of people who will have never seen or used a Blu-ray player.
Not so sure about technical writers jobs... (Score:2, Insightful)
Those Americans who don't know IT terminology are surely not interested in learning it, so I see no job openings for technical writers just yet.
Fake "survey" is fake (Score:5, Insightful)
Could this any more obviously be a viral scam? No.
And nor could Slashdot any more obviously be a shadow of its former self.
Re:Fake "survey" is fake (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fake "survey" is fake (Score:4, Insightful)
The poll is obviously false as it contains gross underestimates of the number of Americans who believe stupid things.
Yeah, given that half of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, which sounds like a much more substantial educational deficit to me, I'd expect 10% of them to get HTML right and not wrong.
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Well, given that 77% of Americans believe in the existence of angels, I don't know what anyone expected.
Re:Fake "survey" is fake (Score:5, Funny)
Well, given that 77% of Americans believe in the existence of angels, I don't know what anyone expected.
I believe in Angels. They play baseball in Los Angeles.
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Well, given that 77% of Americans believe in the existence of angels, I don't know what anyone expected.
I believe in Angels. They play baseball in Los Angeles.
They had a pretty mediocre season last year. Maybe you should become a Belieber instead.
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Only when they're playing Dodgers away. Angels' home field is in Anaheim. Since 2005, they've billed themselves as the "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim", 'cause Anaheim isn't such a marketable name.
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I don't believe in Angels. I KNOW they play baseball in Los Angeles.
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It doesn't say only 10% got the question wrong, it says 10% of them chose that answer. I think it's safe to assume that far more than 10% of the public don't really know what HTML is, but they might at least guess that it has something to do with computers.
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(In case you missed it, Im referring to you're asinine assumption that anyone who believes in some form of Creator is an ultra-conservative, anti-science, knuckle-dragger. The world is not that black&white)
I am confused with this comment. Did the OP said that? Or was it your assumption? To me, I do not see the implication to what you said. I am seeing the implication of those who believe in certain things (Earth is less than 10,000 years old) and will not open their eyes to new knowledges (technologies). I guess some may see the same implication as you are seeing.
However, I still see that the survey is inadequate and unqualified to be any useful survey. The method of survey is bad, the credential of those who
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It's also a survey of Vouchercloud's own userbase, a group of people who are quite likely to insert random or spurious answers to a survey so that they can click through to their free coupon.
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Looking at their social media sites, it looks like they run these surveys (on Surveymonkey) and put out the corresponding press releases constantly. Usually in exchange for being entered into a prize draw for a gift card or something.
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You sounds pretty upset. Brace yourself, 'cause you're gonna be *really* pissed when they post it again in 2 days.
Slashdot Polls (Score:5, Insightful)
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14% of Slashdot users believe everything means CowboyNeal.
Demographics (Score:2)
The article doesn't mention if/how the wrong answers correlate to age or poverty. If you're old enough that computers are still a strange new thing, or poor enough to never have had access to one outside the public library, it's not surprising you wouldn't know those terms.
Those who have used it (Score:5, Funny)
One In Ten Americans Thinks HTML Is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection
Those who have used it know that it's much worse
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Those who have used it know that it's much worse
You mean the fact that (cue the single geek in a basement stereotype) it's a sexually prevented disease?
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And they even missed the sex part!
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And they even missed the sex part!
That's why its worse. It's mot pleasure followed by pain - it's just pain!
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Sorry, but you're clearly thinking of CSS here.
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
20% of Americans have a sense of humor.
Or are bitter and jaded (Score:4, Interesting)
I know that when I am being data mined I am very likely to pick the funny or ironic answer to any poll. The less intelligent the dumbest option is, the more likely I am to select it. My data is valuable and if you aren't gong to pay a fair price, and you intend to use it to subvert my happiness, I am not likely to go quietly to the slaugter.
I remember some movie where a guy lands in a Gulag and is being forced to make mitten liners. He learns from one of the other guys to sew them shut across the fingers and then hide the sabatoged ones by slipping them into the "already inspected" pile. It is sabatoge and it's faster than making the proper stitch so it's easier to meet the quota.
Lots of people maliciously answer polls and such, or so I suspect, which is why they are such a terrible instrument of governance and polity.
And P.S. if you don't limit people to thinking about tech, well there are _many_ blue species of sting and mant rays, so contextually they might have a point on answering some of those questions. Its that whole ability to read past typos that humans are so gifted with.
So conclusion? Polls suck, they suck slightly more than the pollsters conducting them, um-kay?
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This just in (Score:3)
Re:This just in (Score:5, Funny)
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... and the other half don't know the difference between average and median.
And the other other half are tiresome pedants, but this is Slashdot, so that figure becomes all but the upper vigintile.
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... and some can't spot a joke when its virtually signposted for them,
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...actually, most of those surveys use a baseline distribution from before the period they want to study as their definition for "average", "first quintile", whatever, so even for a symmetric distribution you can have more or less than 50% on a given side of the average.
Re: Or 93% don't know what's a browser (Score:2)
Don't be surprised [youtube.com]
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And 4/3 of all people don't understand fractions.
USB (Score:5, Informative)
FTA:
12% said "USB" is the acronym for a European country. In fact, USB is a type of connector.
USB is actually a serial data interface. The connector is just one part of the spec.
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How could people be confused by that?
I mean... It's clearly waaay too small to carry people!
Unless it's the bus for the orphanage.
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If I accidentally connect pin 1 to 4 would it be a short bus?
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If I accidentally connect pin 1 to 4 would it be a short bus?
Only for that special 10% of people who took the survey!
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't think you get the joke, or rather you are the punchline. There's a video of someone going around asking "Is Obama a Keynesian?", Keynesian economics being the type of economics Obama favours. People assume the speaker means "Kenyan", per the Birther stupidity, and assert "No, he's an American from Hawaii". The fact is he is an American who is also a Keynesian.
Science/tech press releases: PR gold (Score:3)
Sci/tech press releases are like the autocue in Anchorman, you can put any old bollocks up there and the mainstream media will uncritically print it as news because it's a lot cheaper than having an actual science/tech department big enough to fill that section of the paper/website.
Shenanigans! (Score:2)
That number's way too low.
Unreliable research (Score:2, Insightful)
Those people where given three options, how many of those just filled in something randomly? If they all filled it in randomly because they could not be bothered to think about it 1/3 would have answered STD. So in my opion this research shows 1/3 of americans are to lazy to think about questionaires so they filled in something random.
If it had been an open question and people wrote STD on their own, then maybe it meant something.
We get it. People are stupid (Score:2)
I guess it's okay and even amusing to do polls which demonstrate specific knowledge weakness among the people of the US. What's not funny, however, is to show people are actually becoming more stupid than ever before. The cause or the fault, I'm sure has many sources, but people are increasingly ignorant.
Saying this much is already enough for some people to become angry. But when people start throwing around suggested causes such as "no child left behind" or other "lowering the bar" measures, people star
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The real problem with polls like this is that people such as youself take the results seriously. These polls do not show that people are dumb and getting dumber. There is no incentive at all to answering correctly, or punishment for answering incorrectly. Therefore, many people who get these polls are going to answer incorrectly because they think the purpose of the poll is to datamine them, or the poll has no useful purpose at all, or the poll is just clickbait. Many other people will answer randomly b
How much of the population is over 60? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know significant numbers of the over 60 population who avoid and ignore all things digital save for their satellite TV receivers. And the only reason they have those is because cable wasn't available in their area.
Yeah, sure, I could laugh and point at the "dumb Americans", but it's not dumb Americans -- it's dumb people, and we've no shortage of them around the world. After all, as George Carlin pointed out: Think about how stupid the average person is, and remember that half the population is dumber than that.
Besides, as many have already pointed out, this whole article is clearly a slashvertisement to give eyeballs to a piece of shit coupon site.
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Wait a minute! Where's this "coupon site" people were talking about? This one is an LA Times article. They may be ad supported, but they're hardly one of the shady coupon distribution sites. Did the article get re-linked to a more reputable source?
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Ah. I get it. The coupon site sponsored the "research."
Well, if they did their research by calling their own customers, no wonder we got the low end of the IQ scale responding. :P
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So, your assertion is that people who save money buy using coupon sites are automatically on the low end of the IQ scale? Interesting.
HTML (Score:3)
One in Ten Americans Thinks HTML is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection
To be fair, from an IT geeks perspective that is kind of true. To be precise, web pages written in HTML can be, and frequently are, carriers for a multitude of electronically transmitted infections.
sure im buying it (Score:2)
i've seen plenty of legacy markup code that i wouldn't want touch without protection.
Not my problem. (Score:2)
Sherlock Holmes had no room in his head for information that was not relevant to his work.
Why should a geek expect a layman to remember the meaning of acronyms that he almost never encounters in everyday use?
Web forums like Slashdot are notoriously informal and inconsistent in the mark-ups they will accept. AOL and other IMs simply presented the user with a toolbar of options. Bold, Italic, Insert URL and so on.
proving that... (Score:4, Insightful)
So now the question is (Score:2)
How are we going to inform the other 90% of the dangers of HTML? I am sure they also don't understand how dangerous PHP can be, and don't want to vaccinate their daughters against it.
They have a vaccine for that now? (Score:2)
Thanks goodness! I know a guy who took a hit of that PHP stuff once, and junped out the window thinking he could fly....
Blu Ray? (Score:3)
I always thought Blu Ray was a pr0nstar - whether he has HTML or not is unclear, but with his skillz he needn't worry about being replaced by MP3 any time soon.
77% couldn't identify what "SEO" means... (Score:2)
Long before it had anything to do with improving your website's Google ranking, "SEO" referred (and still does) to a type of heavy duty rubber electrical cord. S=Severe Service, E=Elastomer (rubber) insulated, O=Oil Resistant.
So does this mean that IT folks who only know the other definition are as "ignorant" as the general population?
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ask them to find North America.
Give them some credit. North America is hard to find. All tucked away down there.
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Multiple Choice Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously these were multiple choice questions. So you cannot use the data like this. 10% do not actually think HTML is a STD, they just have no idea what HTML is.
Bad article; Author is a d-bag (Score:2)
I don't see what the news is here. A small percentage of people don't understand tech jargon. Why is that surprising?
I think we all enjoy a little schadenfreude when people display their ignorance, otherwise Fail Blog and blonde jokes, and the like, would not be so popular. But this article is going out of it's way to try to paint an entire nation of people as woefully ignorant when in fact only a small percentage of them are simply unfamiliar with technical terms. There are people out there with PhDs a
It's not that bad... (Score:2)
It's true, it's true ... (Score:2)
Re: heh... (Score:5, Funny)
HTML is an accessory fruit. (Score:2)
The sad truth is that HTML is just an accessory fruit for delivering other seeds of ideas, good and bad. Most of those ideas are capable of hosting infections, particularly DRM, computer viruses, and the kind of porn you wish you could unsee.
Re: heh... (Score:5, Funny)
It's okay... 10% of geeks think STD is some kind of internet protocol...
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But you can only get it from carrier pigeons.
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It should read, Of LA Times readers XX% think,,,,.
The Times didn't conduct the survey; it was only reporting on a survey done by vouchercloud. Perhaps someone should conduct a survey on Slashdot posters' reading comprehension.
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Or perhaps not. The results could cause serious depression.
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You left out the thing that the hillbilly own's.
Aargh, look what I did, it's catching!
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So corsets are hardware?
I prefer it is a set of a core. A core is not necessary to be hardware...
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