Thursday Thoughts

See the trick is, you're quite possibly reading this somewhere tomorrow where from your perspective you presume it was en-titled, then written accordingly. So while it may not be Thursday somewhere (I gave up after a while and a few Friday loudmouth soups), I'm close enough.

That constitutes what may regularly occur in what I aspire to be a semi-regular blog event at grassroots-oracle - Thursday Thought. Anyone who'se seen or read any of my presentations possibly recognise my admiration of alliteration - that's why I chose Thursdays ;-)

As with my occasional Friday Funny, They may be about something going on in the Oracle world, probably not technical, potentially something completely random, could be a little science-ish, let's see how it develops - but I'll attempt to keep it brief.

Something regular, something different, hopefully interesting to pause your occasional day.

Today I thought I'd mention Steven Feuerstein on a topic neighboring ethics.

Thanks to what I'm sure must be that wonderful phenomena that is the bell curve - interactive, competitive websites such as the PL/SQL Challenge, must weed out those people that make it a less than scientific reflection of the informative and interesting data that is PL/SQL skill, awareness & use.

à la - having separate accounts to pre-read an calculate the true answer to achieve unrealistic answer times.

Every quarter a collection of the top competitors in those three months face off in a timed competition of a number of questions. I think Steven's installing a very interesting net in an attempt to catch those who perhaps don't deserve to be there, and make more room for those that do. Eliminate those outliers...

A simple rule

If the performance on these qualifier quizzes is substantially worse than the player's performance during the quarter  (... then eligibility kicks in)

As I mentioned in my response to his announcement, I support the move and think it will also improve the general integrity of the quiz. I'm sure Steven's had a good time to practice the techniques to allow them to evolve into criteria intelligent enough to catch the right ones.

I wonder what other techniques website administrators use to discard the relative undesirables, in the varying technologies and genre?

Here endeth today's Thursday Thought.