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I heard about this guy walking every street in New York. Google doing the same (to the whole world that is) would be quite amusing :D

I can't wait to see them do country sides here in Norway...

Socal action? Here ya go.

I don't hate Microsoft. Why would I?

Because they are a criminal monopoly that stifles compition.

Or maybe you have had to administer an Exchange 5.5 server back in the day.

If one of you decides that switching to the Mac is a good idea, it really donesn't make my preference of computers any better.

Actually, more people buying a Mac does make a difference. Economies of Networks says that if there is a larger installed base then the value of each individual purchase is greater. Why? Because a larger installed base means a greater chance of more software development, more forums to discuss the platform, more user groups and a host of other network effects.

Therefore, more people buying Macs DOES improve the value of your Mac. That's the whole reason why so many people buy Windows -- because of it's huge installed base. Therefore, although users can perform the same task on a Mac, Windows has a higher perceived value (to some people).

Yeah, I'm sure their accountants haven't done any research at all into what will make them more money. They surely should take the advice of some random joe on Slashdot, who I'm sure owns at least two or three national newspapers, and knows what he's talkin' about.

Right, because clearly all their Wise Men have already found the key to running an online news operation profitably. Which is why they are casting around for a new strategy, right?

Feel free to read up on the newspaper business sometime and see just how at sea these people really are when it comes to online/"new media". Here's a few links to get you started.

• The Migration (by Jay Rosen of NYU Journalism School)
• Tipping point (by pro journalist Jeff Jarvis)
• The Abandoned Newspaper (by pro journalist Tim Porter)

There are a lot of people in journalism today running around without a clue as to What's Coming Next. Don't assume that just because someone works at the New York frickin' Times that they're immune.

Now having said all that, I'll repeat that YOURadio is big news and good news for a few reasons: First, it is big media recognizing that it's time to listen -- and do more than listen: Let the people speak. It is big media recognizing the value of citizens' media. Second, it is an admission that the old, one-size-fits-all, top-down, one-way models of programming are broken and the audience can do it better. Third, it an admission that the old business models are soon to break and that the people can provide more talent for less than the old talent could. It's nothing less than the economic salvation of old media... if old media is smart enough to financially support citizens' media and not just exploit it. What's important is that a big media company knew it was time to stick some dynamite up the alimentary canal and push the plunger. It is the tipping point.

Are you talking about the ex-call-dude-turned-conservative-"reporter" or the guy who was paid by the Bush administration to support the No Child Left Behind act?

He may have been, but I think he also may have been talking about Karen Ryan.

I would submit that "The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its authoritarian and elitist characteristics" could be interpreted as suggesting that it should be emphasized to students early on that science and mathematics are not handed down on stone tablets on high, but rather developed over time and accepted due to their repeatability. This could be done by an early introduction of the set theory basis for counting and the development of mathematics (possibly leading to exposure to Goedel's theorem by early middle school), and an emphasis on the experimental nature of science. In other words, science is not "This is the theory, because Einstein said so", but "This is the theory, because it comes closest to reliably describing what we see when we do this, this, or this, so that's what we're calling true until someone has a better explanation. Can you find one?"

(As an aside, I'll note that this is not far from how the school district I went to inculcated math and science to my class.)

Similarly, if there are in fact insights that "feminist, queer, multiculturalist and ecological critiques" have to offer to science, and if such alleged insights can stand up to the science's base criterion of being verfiable by repeatable falsifiable experiments, then by the spinning of Einstein's corpse, they OUGHT to be incorporated. (I think they're more likely to be shown to be full of horseshit, but I'm willing to watch the experiments...)

Of course, this isn't what the paper is getting at in any way, as the post modernist feminists would doubtlessly claim that "verfiability by repeatable falsifiable experiment" is an oppressive tool of the patriarchal established heirarchy, and the paper's postmodernist authorial voice itself would probably classify the requirement as part of the "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony". So, your choice of quotes isn't ideal. In fact, I think a much better example is:

It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

The bones I pick with Post-Modernism are more theoretical and practical - theoretical in that I find the basic premises and notions of pomo to be flawed, it's politically reactionary (Habermas has a great paper on that from the early 1980s) and, to parphrase Sokal, "I don't see how any of this helps the working classes."

My practical irritation is that far too much pomo writing argues by assertion and does so using language that is, at best, obfuscatory, hence the amusement of the Pomo generator.

Now, if you want to do yourself a big fat favour, go here and read up on the sokal affair, before you stick your foot any farther down your throat.

Actually, if you read WMSCI's mission, it looks randomly generated too:

The purpose of WMSCI 2005 is to promote discussion and interaction between researchers and practitioners focused on disciplines as well as different areas.

So CS might have problems, but you cannot argue that based on WMSCI.

Also note The Sokal Hoax, a nonsense paper submitted to, and accepted by, the publication Social Text in 1996.

...now have something in common. They've both been Sokaled.

"Impostures Intellectuelles", anyone? (link)

Looks like Sokal All Over Again

So, this doesn't come close to the sucess of Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity which got into a peer reviewed journal.

Don't forget Mazieres and Kohler's great submission as well, "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List"

And yes, the people editting such a journal of nonsense should be relieved of their teaching duties, offices and probably their salaries as well.

And yes, the people editting such a journal of nonsense should be relieved of their teaching duties, offices and probably their salaries as well.

Ned Seeman's NYU lab produced algorithmic self-assembling Wang tiles for cumulative XOR computation a couple of years ago. The application was inspired by suggestions by Winfree that their then-current system, could accomplish the computation. And it has. Glad to see Winfree continuing to explore this cutting edge.

There have been several experiments with fake papers:

A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies

Physics hoaxers discover Quantum Bogosity

I don't know of that professor and grad student, but Alan Sokal did something like this a few years ago, and published a paper on the influence of quantum mechanics on something related to sociology in one of the most respected sociology journals (of course the article was 100% pure bullshit, just using the right terms). Turns out they didn't much appreciate it.

Coming from a more hard-science background, I tend to dismiss social sciences as not being real science, but mostly a stupid rewriting of simple facts. While I know my view is quite extreme, this guy just confirms it: (from TFA) "In sociology, we want them to learn the terms,"

If they grade their students based on their ability to spurt some inintelligible mumbo-jumbo, they're a bounch of clowns. And if his software does really go beyond that, maybe he chose the wrong career option and he should be doing some CS work on Natural Language...

Still, not as good and subtle as the Sokal Affair, aka the "Social Text Affair" (in 1996), see http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/

Dang right she is.

Nice catch.

She is Rehnquist's flunky, no wonder.

postmodernism is the philosophy that produced the professors who educated/indoctrinated the New Games Journalists. it is a philosophy championed by some of the greatest intellectual frauds in history -- evil geniuses who conjured up an entire school of thought with smoke and mirrors. they attracted legions of followers (your professors) and became revered thinkers. then a physicist by the name of Alan Sokal came along and gave these impostors one of the biggest intellectual beatdowns of all time. you can read about it here.

once upon a time, i was a young and impressionable intellectual. i had professors that dazzled me with fancy vocabulary and talk of "critical analysis" and "theory". it's hard to unplug yourself from their matrix, but it can be done.

now i walk around my university like a bad ass. i look straight at former professors as they walk by, sheepishly avoiding eye contact with me. they're TERRIFIED of me, because i'm a walking indictment of their life's work. when they sleep, they have nightmares about me humiliating them in front of their students. don't believe me? mention Sokal's name to your lit professors sometime and see what happens.

i wish i could sit down with you for a while and re-teach you all the things you think you know. please, please, please read this short essay by Richard Dawkins.

then join me in fighting the real revolution.

lick my paranoia.

dude, don't show up late to the debate and start asking why everybody's pissed off. New Games Journalism is a real movement being spread by a small but determined group of emo hippies. they're numbers grow every time they get slashdot recognition, which is why it's on non-retards like myself to stamp-out this little insurgency it brings down the government.

if it were just a bunch of emo hipsters sitting around writing poetry and playing bongo drums all day i would leave them alone, but the SYSTEM that produced these emo hipsters has it's tentacles in practically every major university in the US. it's this system that i'm fighting against, not just the NGJ weiners.

i know you think i'm crazy, but that's because you haven't read this essay by richard dawkins.

No, YOU better look at the facts again, and you'll that Microsoft got off on several crucial findings of law:

3. Microsoft is found not guilty of bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows

4. Microsoft is found not guilty of attempting to monopolize the Internet browser market

The "tying" charge was then dropped by the government.

You're obviously one of those people who doesn't let facts get in the way of their poorly formed opinions, but next time try a little harder not to look like an AC idiot, In other words, don't believe what your read on slashdot.

But to think that Google will automagically give you the right information is just rediculous.

Well, sure, but to think that conventional print methods will automagically give you the right information is just ridiculous. Just because something shows up in a book or an article doesn't mean it's correct.

To which people will say "What about peer review?" Well, sure, that's lovely and helpful, but to think that peer review will automagically provide you with the right information is just ridiculous. Look at Bellesiles, who received the Bancroft Prize for his book, Arming America, only to be eventually revealed as a fraud. The plagiarism of historians like Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin went unnoticed for years. Alan Sokal took the piss completely out of the peer-reviewed Social Text in a greatly entertaining fashion, and so on.

Regardless of the method by which you obtain sources, there's no automagic wand you can wave and be assured that those sources are accurate. That's why the more important it is that the information is accurate, the more diligence *you* need to undertake in order to ensure that. If it's a 5th-grade book report, going to the Brittanica or Wikipedia is probably just fine, but if you're looking on how to build a building that won't fall down, you use more reliable methods of scholarship.

I'm not sure how the existence of Google or Wikipedia changes this simple fact of epistemology.

Here's a google cached article (no cache)with more detail on the legal questions and a bit more about what the Jenkins Act is. It was a federal act which obligated state-line crossing cigarette sales to be taxed in the state where they were shipped to.

Kos isn't the first to discuss this concept, its actually been bandied around quite a bit in Journalism circles over the past few months. (Kos is a Political Blogger, not a journalist by trade.) Jay Rosen in his blog http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/ has written quite extensively on the subject.

If you want to read the full article, you need a subscription to FORTUNE magazine. Specifically, you need to enter the mailing address where your subscription is delivered.

By the way, I have it on good authority that NYU's Bobst Library, at 70 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012, subscribes to a whole bunch of periodicals.

glad I could help

If for no other reason, this hoax is important because it points to the deep cultural divide between the Sciences and the Humanities.

Sokal's hoodwinking of the editors and readers of Social Text is more complicated than the real split between what C. P. Snow termed "The Two Cultures" of humanites and science. The issue is in fact complicated enough that it does not compress into anything nearly attractive as the sensational claim that postmodern intellectuals don't know their anuses from a hole in the ground. Still, I'm going to try to point out ways that the popular reading of the Sokal affair ignores some important features of the events which led to the publication of Sokal's article as well as some important questions regarding the final signficance of the debate.

To start, one of the features regarding Sokal's hoax and also GLARINGLY ABSENT from the wikipedia entry is the initial efforts by Social Text's editorial board to have Sokal revise his article. Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins respond to Sokal's hoax in a subsequent issue of Lingua Franca (news of Sokal's hoax was published in May/June 1996 and Ross and Robbins' response in July/August 1996). That response does not seem to be available on the web, but from what I remember it details the dodgy back-and-forth of Sokal and Social Text's editors about publishing the article. Sokal refused to conduct any of the revisions and so the editors of Social Text--perhaps a touch too eager to have a scientist speak on matters normally of interest only to postmodern humanities scholars--published the article without revisions. As Jack Slater would say: "Big mistake."

In other words, the editors of Social Text smelled that the fish was bad, but ate it anyway. It wasn't so much that the article was considered a good one as much as the editors wanted the prestige of publishing a credentialed scientist's views regarding postmodernism, even if those views were a bit cranky.

The issue becomes much more complicated than Sokal's cheer of "egg on your face" circulated by the popular media (especially the web). For one, the editors of Social Text to this day maintain that Sokal's article does in fact have some good points, especially to the extent that it raises problems of authority and validity regarding how disciplines like science produce what is taken as knowledge and fact.

Some of Robbins' articles regarding the aftermath are available on the web, such as his "On Being Hoaxed" and a later article entitled "Anatomy of a Hoax. Both were originally published in separate issues of Tikkun"

The real points of this Sokal affair, in my opinion, are 1) a bad editorial decision was made by editors of a humanities journal, 2) Sokal's unethical trick is now enshrined and will probably be his greatest claim to fame as a "physicist," and 3) the primary tenets of postmodernism remain unchanged because it is too easy to see how culture and dogma shape what people perceive as truth, something that is true not only in religion, philosophy, and cultural studies, but also to some extent in the sciences.

A final real question which tends to get ignored is what would have happened if Sokal had waited a year or two before revealing his hoax. Would a humanities academic have given the lie to the nonsense? I'm guessing the answer is yes, but given the tendency to cull a quick headline from a very complicated series of events, such a question and many others simply get ignored.

So this is what the editors from Social Text are doing now that nobody reads their publications anymore.

</remove tounge from cheek>

Basic idea: Sokal is a physics professor at NYU, and he got fed up with left-wing sociologists writing pseudo-scientific gibberish, so he wrote a hilarious nonsensical article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was published in a trendy lit-crit journal. Needless to say, when the hoax was revealed it created quite a stir in philosophy and lit-crit circles.

Basic idea: Sokal is a physics professor at NYU, and he got fed up with left-wing sociologists writing pseudo-scientific gibberish, so he wrote a hilarious nonsensical article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was published in a trendy lit-crit journal. Needless to say, when the hoax was revealed it created quite a stir in philosophy and lit-crit circles.

I think parent is thinking of the Sokal hoax, in which Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, wrote a completely non-sensical physics paper and submitted it to Social Text, the leading journal of postmodern pseudo-intellectuals. Social Text accepted the paper and published it, thereby demonstrating their complete ignorance of modern science, which they purport to understand and be in a position to critique. Sokal then exposed their foolishness in a piece in Lingua Franca (sadly defunct). He has links to the hoax article, his Lingua Franca article, the statements by the editors of Social Text, and much other material here

I think parent is thinking of the Sokal hoax, in which Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, wrote a completely non-sensical physics paper and submitted it to Social Text, the leading journal of postmodern pseudo-intellectuals. Social Text accepted the paper and published it, thereby demonstrating their complete ignorance of modern science, which they purport to understand and be in a position to critique. Sokal then exposed their foolishness in a piece in Lingua Franca (sadly defunct). He has links to the hoax article, his Lingua Franca article, the statements by the editors of Social Text, and much other material here

Or maybe modern art is a big joke, like some recent literary criticism.

This is getting rediculous. Posters should now be required to setup a mirror before they link to these small websites. At least use coral or mirrordot or something, thats what they are there for.

Sokal

Use Coral http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/. This is exactly the kind of application that it was designed for. Everyone wins, bigger video file sizes, lower bandwidth use. Just link your videos with ".nyud.net:8090" appended.

Hopefully this isn't a redundant post, but don't have time to read through all the comments today.

What's wrong with Xvid? It plays on Windows and Linux (and other things).

If you're concerned about bandwidth, why not Coral Cache things?

Its obvious that applications should work completely differently in a Zoomable User Interface. The separation between applications and the interface blurs, and at best disappears.

Now learn to stop saying ZUIs are a new interface paradigm. They're not. But we definitely should have them instead of the current WIMP desktop. Pssst, Avalon is a good environment for building a ZUI desktop. Yes, MS research has been doing related work around ZUIs and interaction design.

It only takes a pslit second to append the ".nyud.net:8090" suffix to content links to make sure that the content is more readily available.

(see Coral CDN for details..)

Quick, easy and very well implemented (also makes sure that we dont /. the hell out of their servers)

--
This is not a sig

"Distributed Sloppy Hash Table"; already deployed in a big app; see Coral.

There's also a form (codenamed "dancing hashtable") which shifts nodes around in such a way that nodes with mutual low latency to each other have low distance metrics, but I won't cover it here because it isn't published yet.

Top Ten Ideas of '04: "Content Will be More Important than its Container" http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2005/01/01/tptn_cntr.html

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2005/01/15/berk_pprd.html

More Undercurrent: Action in Greensboro on Open Source Journalism http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2004/12/18/grns_nr.html

Greensboro Newspaper Goes Open Source: A Follow Up http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2004/12/21/grnsbr_flw.html

Top Ten Ideas of '04: "Content Will be More Important than its Container" http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2005/01/01/tptn_cntr.html

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2005/01/15/berk_pprd.html

More Undercurrent: Action in Greensboro on Open Source Journalism http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2004/12/18/grns_nr.html

Greensboro Newspaper Goes Open Source: A Follow Up http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2004/12/21/grnsbr_flw.html

Top Ten Ideas of '04: "Content Will be More Important than its Container" http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2005/01/01/tptn_cntr.html

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2005/01/15/berk_pprd.html

More Undercurrent: Action in Greensboro on Open Source Journalism http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2004/12/18/grns_nr.html

Greensboro Newspaper Goes Open Source: A Follow Up http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthi nk/2004/12/21/grnsbr_flw.html