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This is not too different than what Questia has been doing for years. I'm sure Amazon's service is more polished and integrates better with their reader, but this concept isn't new by any stretch of the imagination.

We're essentially talking about an online library for a premium.

Nobody's "playing" with DNA much less the "very foundation of life," whatever that is.

Not the GP, but Biosphere: irregularly shaped envelope of the earth's air, water, and land encompassing the heights and depths at which living things exist. [...] Disruption of basic ecological activities in the biosphere can result from pollution.

Our glorious leaders are playing with that a lot, lately.

What amazes me is not how many idiots don't understand science, it's how many scientists don't understand idiots - i.e., they keep on very carefully and rigorously inventing stuff for ruthless (or outright sociopathic) alphas whose decision tree process is pretty much "will doing X make me more powerful than doing Y?"

Sadly, we get caught up in making the shiny toys almost as much as the alphas get caught up in exploiting them.

Except that has nothing to do with calculator use

Seriously, calculator use in Canadian schools is at least common as it is in the US, and they're outperforming the US alongside Japan and Korea. Think about what you say before you say it.

Teachers as a demographic of college graduates represent the lower half of the GPA pool.

Citation needed. I've heard this sor of allegation many times, but every time I try to look it up, I find counter-data:

"More important than the high school grades, though, the study also tracked one group of students over their college careers from 1979 to 1983. The college grades of this group also showed no differences between potential teachers and others. As sophomores, those who planned to teach had an average college GPA of 2.88; those who planned to do something else came in at 2.87." -- http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=2368DB6068831EED5083CA8B0BCA0C46.inst3_1a?docId=5000446952

"Kevin Rask, an economics professor at Wake Forest...after reviewing the records of more than 5,000 students, who graduated from an unnamed elite liberal arts college in the Northeast from 2001 to 2009", found that education majors had the highest GPA, and chemistry majors, the lowest. -- http://moneywatch.bnet.com/saving-money/blog/college-solution/5-best-and-worst-college-majors-for-top-grades/1878/ (How much is this is due to unqualified students seeing chemistry as a good career choice, and how much is due to grade inflation on the "soft" side of campus, is of course a legitimate topic; but that's not the proposition you put forward.)

As Boortz has said, sending your children to a government school in the U.S. is tantamount to child abuse.

Handing them over to a church school or a corporate school is inherently better? It is to laugh.

No, ablution of patents is best. Many proponents of patents have stated how important patents are to innovation, but where are the economics studies supporting this? While a number of economics studies have concluded there are negative impacts of patents, where are those that claim there are positive impacts? As noted in Ars technica's article Study: free markets superior to patent monopolies the debate has made it's way to Science magazine. To cite one example, in The Patent Paradox Revisited: An Empirical Study of Patenting in the U.S. Semiconductor Industry, 1979-1995, in "Rand Journal of Economics, Vol. 32, 2001", based on studies by Yale and Carnegie Mellon "R&D managers in semiconductors consistently reported that patents were among the least effective mechanisms for appropriating returns to R&D investments".

Falcon

I am not sure you understand what 'well documented' means. I couldn't find the citation page, and I couldn't find a page where he talks about things like learning reading, which is probably one of the easiest of any to investigate. Now, for comparison, the literacy rate in the US is 99%.

If we look back in the 1800s, figuring out the literacy rate is harder because official statistics weren't taken like they are today, and they tend to be slanted towards richer people, but one estimate from a Rhode Island town's records puts the estimate of literacy at around 40%. I would love to see how your guy figures out the literacy rate, but I couldn't find it.

I do agree there are lots of things wrong with the US schooling system, but one thing it does generally well is teaching kids how to read.

Here in Australia we have a concept known as "A fair go" -AKA- "A fair suck of the sav".

I genuinely belive you have been mislead by political muck rakers, if you have the courage to entertain self-scepticisim then give Holdren a fair suck of the sav by reading the book in question, or at least use it to put the quotes from your link in context.

Don't get me wrong here I'm not trying to debate your political views or defend Holdren's views. You asked for someone to defend Holdren and I did by pointing out he also has rights under your admirable founding documents.

I'm an old fart, I learnt critical thinking the easy way (ie: early in life), at about age 20 I read a book by James Randi that totally demolished my firmly held belief in the paranormal. Politicians use many of the same phycological tricks that magicians use, since then I have found that going to the source on any issue often results in political enlightenment.

Since the bulk of parent post is lifted in its entirety from National Review Online's "Goldberg File" editorial of May 24, 1999, I will work from that source rather than the parent post.

First thing worth noting: TFA starts with this lead-in paragraph:

ENLIGHTENMENT SPIN: THE GALILEO MYTH
The Washington Times reports a very nice story this morning. Catholic scientists, or scientists who are Catholic, whatever makes you more comfortable, are trying to combat the notion that the Church is anti-science. "The Galileo incident has made the Church a whipping boy," Thomas P. Sheahen of the Catholic Association of Scientists and Engineers told the paper.

Goldberg is playing off of this article: Catholic scientists look to bridge theory, theology: Hope to bring morality into largely atheistic disciplines, written by Larry Witham. I haven't read the article since it requires me to register fro a FREE trial on web site I have no other interest in. The lead in to the article talks about how the Catholic Church has admitted that it screwed Galileo over, and how some Catholics feel that their beliefs are being unfairly persecuted as anti-scientific, when all they really want to do is inject some non-rational qualities into scientific investigations, like "morality".

I've got serious problems with anyone attempting to inject "morality" into scientific inquiry: science has developed its own set of professional ethics, which is quite adequate for science's distinctly limited goal of explaining how things work, without involving itself with why they are the way they are, or whether a thing is good or bad or blessed or evil. Those are important questions, they just are not scientific questions. Trying to bring morality into science is rather like describing the smell of different colors. But that's a general thing, not specific to the question at hand, which is whether the Catholic Church actively persecuted Galileo for his new method of seeking the truth, or whether the Church simply lacked the moral fiber to stand up to members of the academic community who demanded that the Church shut Galileo's mouth.

A real problem with attempting to work with Goldberg's article is his insistence on describing Galileo's contemporaries as "other scientists". That word did not exist in Galileo's time, nor were there any cognates that were remotely close to what we today call a scientist. With the exception of Galileo and a few others who were forging a new form of acquiring knowledge through empirical methods, most knowledge was acquired and transmitted by scholasticism. The appropriate term for Galileo's contemporaries would be "scholastics". They work with authorities, such as Aristotle, and with dogma, to extend accepted belief systems to cover new situations and corner cases. Scholastics are very important in certain fields of knowledge, for example, in the history and use of Tarot, or extending biblical concordances. But they are not scientists.

In Galileo's time, scholasticism dominated higher education, Church training, and the preparation of that day's equivalent of civil service. All of these institutions recognized Galileo's approach to knowledge as a threat, including the Church.

The article, poorly written as it was, does in fact support my understanding of the events of Galileo's life: the Church, as an institution, persecuted him for his empirical approach, despite the fact that he had friends in very high positions within the Church. The Church was right in fearing Galileo's ideas, since his approach questioned the authority that the Church had wielded for centuries, and that brought about the fall of the Church as the dominant political and financial power in Europe, with its replacement by nation states that understood how to implement new technologies and were increasingly oriented to improving the mundane situations of its citizenries.

So one book concerning so-called outliers references one study that finds no relation between IQ and academic success. And no study has found the opposite? (I'll answer the last question for you: the correlation of IQ to academic success is well established through 100 years of empirical research. Do a Google Scholar search.)

Keep in mind that correlation to achievements in school was the validator Alfred Binet used when developing his original test questions; his interest was in mental age, though, so he didn't do a longitudinal study (others have, and have found IQ to be fairly stable).

Has the one referenced study been replicated? Otherwise, you're talking anecdotal evidence here.

I'll give you that IQ isn't an extremely strong predictor, but then there are loads of other factors that influence academic success, such as "work drive" (although others have found that cognitive abilities (i.e. IQ) were by far the best predictor of school achievement), and of course the fact that many high-IQ people are so intellectually lazy and arrogant that they turn out stupid. IQ is, of course, only an indicator and not a direct objective metric of "intelligence".

one

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This is a common misconception. Think about a society were there is no tea or car (somewere in africa). Do you think their children would choose tea set and car toys based on gender?

Have the pirates been killing anyone? Not to my knowledge ....

Sadly, this is incorrect:

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21842522-1702,00.html
http://article.wn.com/view/2008/10/23/Pirates_to_kill_crew_on_arms_ship_if_NATO_ships_attack/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1572236/Somali-pirates-threaten-to-kill-tanker-crew.html

They can and do kill people. And if this is allowed to continue, more and more people are going to die. On both sides.

I'm merely saddened your plan doesn't involve fixing any of Somalia's real problems. Just killing offenders.

My plan only addresses the short term issue: The piracy. That has to be dealt with immediately. Unchecked piracy will only result in the loss of more lives and cause economic problems on a world-wide scale.

Dealing with the political issues in Somalia is a more complex issue that lacks an immediate solution. I wish I could venture a good plan, but I do not understand the dynamics of the situation well enough to produce one. It's not like Somalia hasn't been receiving foreign aid:

By some
reckonings, no other country save Israel has
received such high levels of military and
economic aid per capita; certainly no country
has less to show for it. Even before its collapse
into protracted civil war and anarchy in 1990,
Somalia had earned a reputation as a graveyard
of foreign aid, a land where aid projects were
notoriously unsuccessful, and where high levels
of foreign assistance helped to create an
entirely unsustainable, corrupt and repressive
state.

What do they do with our foreign aid workers? Why, they kidnap and kill them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/world/africa/06briefs-6FOREIGNAIDW_BRF.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081105/wl_afp/somaliaunrestreliefkidnap_081105183945
http://www.patronusanalytical.com/files/Somali%20Aid%20Worker%20Murdered.php
http://www.pr-inside.com/somali-aid-worker-killed-witnesses-say-r904499.htm

What would you have us do? I'm all for finding a peaceful solution if one can be arrived at. But as of this moment, there is an immediate problem people are dying or being threatened with death.

Food for thought: Isn't it interesting how the pirates can't afford food, but can always afford assault rifles? Perhaps there is more to their Robin Hood image than meets the eye.

Oral tradition != telephone game. The telephone game occurs after just a few minutes with a small group of people. Oral tradition is a large group activity over many generations so your initial comparison is wildly off base. As my Star Wars example indicates, someone will fix a mistake in oral tradition.

Citation

The Communications Act of 1934 (see above) reserves the electromagnetic spectrum for the People. NASA has no legislative authority to control communications in space, as Russia, China, Japan, and any other sovereign states operating in space will insist.

What are they thinking? Sounds like NASA is truly out of missions.

At the risk of a big ol' karma hit (which I'm sure I can afford), let me just say that almost anyone can look through slashdot comments and come up with the exact same thing written.

Indeed. 8^)

The phrase itself goes back to 1997, too.

This is how I understand it but what would I know, I'm only a physicist who specialises in radiobiology.

Do you have any peer reviewed science to back up your assertions

Where do you assume this is physically hardwired?

That is specious and presumptious at best, and intellectually dishonest at worst.

As far as I know there have existed a number of socieities that have been quite permissive of pedophiles and in some cases made it socially expected.

This hardly indicates a hard-wired aversion.

It IS social conditioning of the strongest kind. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but you are inventing science to support your moral argument, which is disingenuous.

Ok, now lets actually address what you SAID.

statistics show paedophilia charges and convictions are on the rise.

The only thing that is "obvious" is that media reports of these charges are on the rise.

Please cite statistics that show charges and convictions are on the rise. Or you can simple let me illustrated that you are ignorant of the facts and are simply pontificating on moral grounds with your "epidemic" "on the rise" claims

Here, let me do it for you

Statistics show a decline in child abuse and neglect
The decline in child sex abuse cases
national child abuse and neglect statistics continued to decline
Child-Abuse and Neglect Cases Decline for Fifth Year, HHS Says ...
national child abuse and neglect statistics reported by states continued to decline
Statistics Show Decline in Child Abuse
national child abuse and neglect statistics reported by states continued to decline
total decline of 39% in identified sexual abuse cases over a 7-year period
New Child Maltreatment Statistics Show Continuing Decline
Department of Justice: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE CASES FALL 31 PERCENT OVER SIX YEARS
he hotline has seen a 24 percent annual decline in child abuse reports

I'm sorry, that's just the first two pages out of about 40 in my google search.

Speaking of head in the sand...

Stewed

Seriously, what other country disparages its "intellectual elite"?

The People's Republic of China (early on)

Actually not, the Chinese Nationalist Party was started by Dr Sun Yat-sen who is known as "the Father of the Chinese Revolution." At first both Mao and Chiang Kai Chek were members of the Nationaist Party. But anyway, it was during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 when intellectuals were persecuted. Prior to that, both Mao and Chou En-lai were encouraging those intellectuals who left China to return. It was in 1956 that Mao gave his "Let a Hundred Flowers bloom and a Hundred Schools of Thought contend" speech.

>>Except the US did not catalyze the rise of the Nazis (while, thanks to Pat Buchanan-types, the US sure sat back and watched them grow!)


You might want to read some REAL history, intead of the redneck propaganda they tout in your public schools:

http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-s emitism/ford1.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holoca ust/IBM.html
http://aolsvc.bookreporter.aol.com/reviews/0609607 995.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Henry_Ford _and_Nazism

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=23193426
http://www.answers.com/topic/appeasement

OK, the poms are more to blame for the last two, but they had already become a puppet regime of the Americans by then and Chamberlain could not have signed the Munich pact without the discreet endorsement of your government.

Bear in mind that British appeasement of Germeny ended when the Labour party came to power, the same people you hate as "commies".


>>>While the US did engender the Mujahadeen rebels in Afghanistan, it did not engender Al-Quada

Use spellchecker, it's Al Qaeda or Al-Qa'ida (using the standard phenomes characteristic to the Semitic family of languages).

Know your enemy before trying to defeat them.

And yes, Americans did engender Al-Qaeda. They existed back then too, and were it not for stinger missiles supplied by your country to their leaders, the Russians would have crushed Afghanistan like a bug. Were it not for that western-sympathising idiot Gorbachev and his obsession with weakenening Soviet power with all that Perestroika nonsense, Iran would be a puppet government under Soviet control, Afghanistan would be broken, there'd be no 9/11 today, and all nuclear technology would be in the hands of countries run by stable SANE people, intead of mad mullahs who will paint moons and stars on warheads and USE THEM!!!

Trying to cross the Mexico-US frontier

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4152307. stm
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=645992

I use Questia. My main goal in using eBooks is research. I use the system to verify references and look up original source material. I like text based ebooks because I can quickly grab quotes and make notations about the things I read.

Researching online turns reading from a passive to an active engagement...so I really am not that annoyed by reading on a computer screen.

I wonder how much they will take off with the regular (aka non-geek) population.

I've turned several historians onto the product and they love it. Well, that is non-Socialist researchers. Socialists hate Questia because it is an evil creation of the industrial military complex. Questia charges a subscription fee. The internet should be tearing down the market, not building it up.

BTW, Personally, I disagree with the premise behind the OneReader Project that we need to have one master eBook format and a universal reader. I believe that things work better when there are competing formats and competing ideas on the table. I believe in an evolutionary processes rather than having centrally controlled processes. The competing formats might look like eBabble, but that is the nature of human freedom and human diversity. A world with only one format of eBook is the same as a world with only one language. The diversity adds spice and creativity.

This belongs in the company of
"The Effect Of Country Music On Suicide" and
"Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping"
---
The Ig Nobel Home Page

Questia does somthing similar--they've digitized ~60,000 books, chosen by a panel of librarians for their scholarly value (mostly liberal arts titles), and allow full-text searches of the entire library. Questia is marketed as a tool for writing research papers--the service keeps track of what books you've looked at and will automatically build a bibliography and do your citations for you in the format of your choice.

They use an indexing system similar to Google's to keep full-text searches of the library in the sub 1 second range, and the whole thing is pretty slick. Searches are free, and they show the book, publishing info, and the page number of the search result. To actually see the text, though, you have to be a subscriber.

Footnotes and citations are live-linked to their referenced sources, if those sources are in the Questia library, and every book is stored in XML, which keeps the original pagination (including illustrations). A neat side-effect of the XML tagging is that you can search for implicit things (like themes or genre or subgenre) as well as explicit things (keywords). Questia spent the better part of two years securing the rights of each and every book on the service, but it really is a cool idea.

Disclaimer--I worked for Questia for a couple of years, although I left in 2001.

Questia's "47,000 books and 375,000 journal, magazine, and newspaper articles"

Questia's online library already has 45,000 books digitized and indexed for full-text scanning, along with 350,000+ journal, magazine, and newspaper articles.

The Questia online library at www.questia.com already has 45,000 non-fiction books digitized and indexed for full-text searching, along with more than 350,000 journal, magazine, and newspaper articles. While there aren't any computer tech books in the collection, there is plenty in the liberal arts and social science areas.

Pooua: "I think you are wrong."

Then why do you have a picture of the ISS on your home page?

Technically, that's not a picture of the ISS; it is a picture of Space Station "Freedom."

Leaving the technicality aside, I have the picture for the ideals it connotes. I have always supported space exploration, and I even favor a space station. What bothers me is the uselessness of the current station, and the severe cost over-runs that likely will render the station useless for several years. Even before the station launched, many scientists questioned its usefulness, but now that such things as the centrifuge and enlarged crew compartments have been cut, even the station's proponents have largely stopped talking about meaningful science from the project.

Really, I can not belive the ignorance and downright stupidity of your posts.

Those who couldn't hear the music thought those who danced were crazy.

Equating socialism with terrorism??? Really, give me a break.

Why do you find the idea so difficult to believe? The Arab world is entirely Socialistic, despite its religious orientation. Iraq, itself, its ruled by the Ba`th Arab Socialist Party, of which Saddam Hussein is the Party Leader. Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, Socialists were the primary instigators of civil unrest, and, even today, it is likely that any group that encourages civil unrest or hostility has Socialistic leanings.

You might want to have a look at:

Arab Socialism. [Al-IshtirakIyah Al-Arabiyah] (Romanized Form): A Documentary Survey

Saying that the US is better than any other country in the world based on vacations to a handful of countries which lasted two weeks or less??? Again, give me a break.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that I have no other exposure to the dimensions of other countries than just my own brief visits.

If you can name a greater nation than the US, please make your case for it. Otherwise, your sneering is nothing more than your own shock at meeting a different idea.

[snip]

If you're interested in the most massive digitization project in the history of the world, check out Questia. Questia is positioning themselves to offer access to a tremendous amount of information, starting early 2001. From the web page: "Questia is building the first online service to provide unlimited access to the full text of hundreds of thousands of books, journals and periodicals, as well as tools to easily use this information." The web page also says they will start with 50,000 of "the most valued volumes in the liberal arts from the 20th and 21st centuries" and then build to 250,000 titles over the next couple of years. Granted, it's not the LoC, but it's a step in the right direction.