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Perhaps, trying to do better in a cyber war ought to have a higher priority, than consolidation?

The rest of the article is scary too:

Huge Implications for Data Center Sector
The government data center consolidation has huge implications for the fortunes of system integrators, data center service providers (especially in northern Virginia), and cloud computing platforms optimized for hosting government apps.

Yes, Silicon Valley's support for Obama's candidacy was not in vain...

• Promote the use of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers;
• Reduce the cost of data center hardware, software and operations;

Oh, again, the "greenness" goes before the cost. Hey, I have this $100 fan, that uses 1/3 less electricity, than the $10 fan from my polluting competitor. Per the Administration's instructions, you must buy my equipment...

I'm working on a related system to what he describes towards the end of the article -- something that is a partnership between the individual musician and a the computer, to amplify musical creativity, for the Android Smartphone. It's almost ready to release...

People at IBM Research in the past (a decade ago) also did some things also to amplify musical creativity using computers, but unfortunately did not get as much support as they deserved:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/musicsketcher/
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_seminar.nsf/pages/sem_abstract_186.html

As David Cope says, part of our musical future may well be more about a partnership.

It's been said, "the woods would be pretty quite if no bird sang there but the best". The real reason to do music is because humans are musical creatures, however they want to express it.

The whole issue of "fame" or "income" is linked to dysfunctional social systems and dysfunctional economic systems. The real issue is that we need a "basic income" for everyone to reflect a human right to draw from the industrial material and informational commons, especially because more and more human labor is becoming worth less and less due to increases in automation, better design, and limited demand (as humans get enough stuff and move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualization which often can be done fairly cheaply). More ideas I helped put together here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
And here:
"Ideas for a brickfilm and video games to help avoid a Caprican future"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/cf4ee7f45d631838#

I think we are seeing that now with health care. Much human labor is no longer valuable enough in the USA to earn the money to pay for health insurance -- even as some very few medical specialists who practice medicine or make medical devices (including medical robots) can command vast sums of money for their expertise. Of course, we don't need that many more medical specialists (even if more might be nice), so there is no easy solution to that since we don't need everyone to be a doctor or medical robot maker; so, ultimately, the government will have to intervene more in a dysfunctional marketplace, once the populace moves past the secular religion of "The Market as God".
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
Capitalism won't work well unless wealth is widespread, and that means the government has to step in and keep money flowing. Otherwise, the rich just put excess money into a "Casino economy" of derivatives and currency speculation that has little relation to the real world. See:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

As robots can do more labor, whether creative as in putting together music or physical as in putting together food:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv7VUqPE8AE
we will need a completely new economic ideology if we are to survive the irony of real starvation amidst theoretical robot-produced abundance.

People have been talking about this since 1964 and even before:

Thanks. I've enjoyed our dialogue.

On your point, while I like the metaphor, we are not talking about real tapeworms. We are talking about human beings with a certain culture and a certain ideology that make them act like tapeworms. And we are talking about others who help them to be parasites through ignorance or not thinking they have options. How many kids join the military due to the "economic draft"?
http://www.workers.org/us/2005/economic-draft-0303/
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/War_Peace/Economic_Draft.html

And sure, many parasites got these wars going precisely so they could get a bit of the action, one dollar in their pocket for ever thousand dollars of tax payer money wasted. A key idea here:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

A good sci-fi book on this broader theme of abundance and war is James P. Hogan's 1982 novel "Voyage from Yesteryear".
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear

As he points out there, the tapeworms as you mention will not get much support if everyone else has abundance. Besides, in a word of abundance, if some "lunatic" wants to build self-replicating space habitats on the Moon, why worry about it? There would be plenty of energy and stuff to go around, and it might provide some amusement.

So, ask yourself, why do people want to be tapeworms? And why do others go along with their plans?

I think key issues are "ignorance" and "want":
"A Christmas Carol: Ignorance and Want"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6MFN8yiVc0

But it is precisely abundance from the internet and robotics that may end ignorance and want.

So then, we are left mainly with the issue of mental illness to have people causing wars. Adequate vitamin D from supplements or sunshine can help relieve a lot of that too:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml

More resources for families could help relieve some of it too:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene
"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail--but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."

Hitler wanted to be a painter for example:
"Adolf Hitler painting may have hung in Sigmund Freud's surgery"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7221058/Adolf-Hitler-painting-may-have-hung-in-Sigmund-Freuds-surgery.html
Would he have turned to politics if he had not had to worry about selling his paintings?

Will the world always have a problem with bullies and the mentally ill who hoard w

You're right, it is somewhat different, but that is how I see part of the link to this camera issue. I am conjecturing that the school staff did not think they were doing anything wrong based on their religious beliefs. Perhaps to their credit, if this was not something prurient, they thought they were upholding the better part of a perceived obligation to be a child's parent and do a difficult thing that needed to be done. This is only creepy and gross and insane if you don't agree with a schoolish religious world view. As Gatto says here:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""

So, that is what is perhaps happening here. The school is just trying to do what schools do, only even better, using technology. They are adapting technology others hoped would be liberating and using it to further imprison children. In general, the internet has become a race between transitioning to a better society through abundance, understanding, and community versus being weighed down by chains of technology that allow a police state to easily profile all its citizen based on previous communications. Freedom -- use it or lose it.

Compulsory schooling has gotten worse in that respect over the last few decades, with pressures on it from all directions, whether political correctness, zero-tolerance, liability fears, and reflecting a general climate of fear that has been growing in this country (despite the real evidence showing, say, crime went down in most areas). But it seem quite likely that students learning to leave their rights at the door of the school (or worse, as alleged) has contributed to growing police state aspects in the USA. And, essentially, it is a main part of Gatto's thesis that, as a society, the USA has traded a high degree of liberty, self-reliance, and solid education for some form of dumbed-down apparent material security for many.
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
(A material security which is rapidly eroding for many:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/jobless-america-future )

I especially like Gatto's example here of the hypocrisy of it all (hypocrisy being all too common sometimes when religion is involved):
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"""
Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
"""

You wrote: "That is shifting the burden of proof. What evidence does Gatto have that Rockefeller denied a belief in a Creator or afterlife?"

That's a good point. And Gatto talks in general about a group of individuals with materialist values. You may be quite right to question how they are lumped together.

One thing on Rockefeller:
http://www.reformation.org/john-d-rockefeller2.html
"""
Or is Mr. Rockefeller true to himself in both roles? Does he believe that money is a paramount duty, a sort of higher law justifying law-breaking, falsehood and extortion? Does he believe that the good his gentler self can do by charity, and his wise bequests to hospitals and to colleges with the money thus obtained more than balances the harm its accumulation works? That is, does the end justify the means, in Mr. Rockefeller's opinion, so that he can, unflinchingly face his own record and say, "I am right." Is it the inner consciousness of his own righteousness that keeps him silent before a sneering public?
It may be so. Or it may be that Mr. Rockefeller is one of those double natures that puzzle the psychologist. A man whose soul is built like a ship in air-tight compartments - to use the familiar figure - one devoted to business, one to religion and charity, one to simple living and one to nobody knows what. But between these compartments there are no doors. The life that goes on in compartment one has no relation to compartment two, has no influence upon it. Each is a solitary unit. It is an uncanny explanation; but it may be the true one.
"""

I think that is why Gatto is probably correct to say that someone like Rockefeller believes in materialist values -- because of the majority of his deeds, not his words. But it is hard to make a simple conclusion, because, according to the religion of capitalism, if we let Social Darwinism work its magic, everyone will be better off materially, and so have more time for spiritual pursuits, and any intervention in the market will bring disaster for all.

The question of ultimate ends is, ultimately, a religious one, as Einstein suggests. People can most likely legitimately disagree on all aspects of that. In a democratic society, we try to come to some consensus about the aspects of those that affect our daily life in positive ways to take communal action in various ways. It's a very messy thing. :-)

Yes, I feel it fair to call schooling a secular religion, along with a "scientism" that is often connected with it. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_religion
"Secular religion is a term used to describe ideas, theories or philosophies which involve no spiritual component, yet possess qualities similar to those of a religion. Such qualities include such things as dogma, a system of indoctrination, the prescription of an absolute code of conduct, and unquestioning devotion to a higher authority. The secular religion operates in a secular society by filling a role which would be satisfied by the Church, or another religious authority. Social philosopher Raymond Aron notably uses the term to refer to Communism. Likewise, philosopher of science Michael Ruse has made use of the term in discussing evolution theory. Similarly Thomas Frank suggests that the free market has become a secular religion in the United States."

So, in that sense, Rockefeller had another God he worshiped:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
"""
A FEW years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice

You said: "there's no shortage of crappy or crazy teachers in the school system."

OK. And so why should parents want to have such people adopt their children for much of their waking time?

As for the history of schooling, as another source, here is as short summary:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm

I know how you can feel as you probably do. I used to think and feel the same things. It has taken years of unlearning the explicit and implicit lesson of schooling and other aspects of our society to see beyond those reactions. It will be a long path -- years. One post or a handful is not going to move you beyond that.

Yes, historically, modern schooling did come out of Prussia, and, for that matter, has a lot to do with two world wars coming out of that area too. We need both good facts and good reasoning tools to reach good conclusions. The history of education is a complex thing interwoven with politics and economics.

And next you then say most parents have no regard for the welfare of their own children, and if they had money to use to take care of their children, they would not. Have you thought that maybe many parents have a tough time taking care of their children because they are poor? And, if everyone around them also got US$20K per child per year, maybe their neighbors could also lend a hand for the few parents who were really dysfunctional. Besides, if we had a decent universal health care system in the US, parents who were that dysfunctional would be getting the other help they need. If you look at a recent article on unemployment, you can see that much of the social dysfunction we see in the USA is connected to employment and wealth issues:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/jobless-america-future

Do you have any evidence to back up all your suggestion that most parents would give their children a crappy education? Are they really getting a non-crappy education if they live in a poor area? Do you have any first hand knowledge of homeschooling? Have you even researched any of that? Are you holding yourself up as an ideal product of schooling if you have not researched those things but are making such strong comments on them?

Have you at least glanced at books like these by academic historians?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People's_History_of_the_United_States
(Granted, schooling and the presentation of history is improving some since those were written, in part in reaction to those books.)

A starting point, based on research studies, consider:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting. Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children - particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children - when obviously mos

Diamonds are not valuable. Retail diamonds are sold at ten times their value. Here's a great (but old) article about diamonds. The $3000 ring she wants from the jeweler? You'd be lucky to get $500 for it from any place that would buy it from you (and not because it's used).

Science and technology are not 'pop' subjects, despite however many Mythbuster episodes you've seen.

Why not? Given the constant bemoaning of state of science and technology education and the lack of interest in it, I would have thought fun projects and that fact that the Ardrino was featured in a mainstream magazine, that would be good news. But I guess not. We should maintain the status quo.

But yeah, go back to your pithy dismissive one or two line comments, hipster attitude. By the way, how is that working out for you? That's just super.

If kids are animals in that sense, why are so many homeschoolers at the same age so well behaved? No group is perfect, of course, just an alternative thing to consider that the environment may be causing a lot of behavior problems.

Other aspects of the solution, as a care package of healing-related links. :-)
    "Treating Disease With Vitamin D" (anyone like a school child spending most of their time indoors is at risk)
        http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
    "Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and
Community in a World Gone Crazy"
      http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
    "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals"
        http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
    "Albert Einstein on: Religion and Science"
        http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
    "A wombat talks about a global mindshift"
        http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
    "The Orchid Child"
    http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene

From the last: "Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people."

Bullying will always be with us, but we can reduce it by having a better society with happier and more fulfilled individuals. Wi-Fi on school buses empowering children to do self-directed learning using networked computers is a big step forward in many ways, even if there are downsides as well (vitamin D deficiency from not walking outdoors, obesity from sedentary behavior, some media content is candy or even toxic, and it displaces other good things like face-to-face interaction, relationships with nature, hands-on hobbies, helping others physically, and so on).

"HE has short hair and a long brown beard. He is wearing a three-piece suit. One imagines him slumped over his desk, giggling helplessly. Pushed to one side is an apparatus out of a junior-high science experiment: a beaker containing some ammonium nitrate, a few inches of tubing, a cloth bag. Under one hand is a piece of paper, on which he has written, "That sounds like nonsense but it is pure on sense!" He giggles a little more. The writing trails away. He holds his forehead in both hands. He is stoned. He is William James, the American psychologist and philosopher. And for the first time he feels that he is understanding religious mysticism. "

Right here. Although I expect ot see lots of posts here rated "5", which completely miss the difference between a drill and a war game.

As far as I know, nobody has accused Pat Robertson of making up the devil pact story.

Rather, the criticism has been that he has taken a 200 year old myth, cited it as fact, and used it to imply that 150,000 Haitians deserved to die.

Even if the devil-pact myth is true, Robertson is a colossal hypocrite for suggesting that the entire population of Haiti is guilty of the sins of their forefathers. If that's the case, then Pat Robertson really ought to shut up and start worrying about all the evil things his own forefathers have done. I'm not suggesting that Pat Robertson's forefathers in particular are any more evil than yours or mine, but if you're going to judge people by the actions of all of their ancestors going back to 1791, then watch out, because by that definition, we're pretty much all guilty.

If you add up the total number of your direct ancestors going back N generations (where N=1 means your parents), you get a total of 2^(N+1) - 2 people. It's been 219 years since 1791, which means for most people, there have been 10 or so intervening generations (probably several more than that considering people used to start having children a whole lot earlier in life than they do now). Going back 10 generations, you end up with 2046 total ancestors. That's an awful lot of people to have to worry about, especially considering those people most likely came from all walks of life, numerous races/nationalities/ethnicities, all different levels of wealth, education, and on and on. So no matter how much one might protest that one's own forefathers were "good, hardworking people" or any nonsense like that, chances are at least one of those 2046 people did something truly evil at one time or another.

Yes, the 2^(N+1) - 2 number is only theoretical, since it assumes that each one of your ancestors, in turn, had their own unique set of ancestors (i.e., no marriages between cousins, etc). But for N=10, it's probably not too far off.

And keep in mind, this is assuming that the "sin" washes off after 220 years or so. If you go back 40 or 50 generations, you find that we are all descended from the same ancestors, which means we are ALL, without exception, equally "guilty". So really, it doesn't even matter if the Haitian devil pact story is true or not. Either way, Robertson has proved himself to be not only a moron, but a total hypocrite as well.

It is possible that some of this vitamin D deficiency disaster could have been prevented with more information sharing. As I wrote here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005081.html
"""
Ryan pointed out to me the University of Wisconsin has patents related to Vitamin D. So, were people perhaps denied Vitamin D as an example of a public institution being funded by public dollars privatizing research results? Same as I can't easily see that study above on the web. ...
I don't know for sure, but I'd suspect most of this research is funded at least in part by public dollars.
I'm assuming, because the University of Wisconsin says they make a lot of money still from Vitamin D, that lawsuits might start flying if someone else starts using Vitamin D therapies without a license for various illnesses?
Is it possible this is a case of the patent system linked to profit-oriented non-profits damaging the health of billions of people globally? Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
If the global health care costs of treating all the diseases that have been suggested related to Vitamin D deficiency each year in whole or in part were totaled up, from flu through cancer to schizophrenia, it might total in the trillions of dollars per year in costs.
If people were somehow getting less Vitamin D because of the societal consequences of patents (including competitivenesses among researchers, but also making techniques to costly to use or delaying their widespread adoption), it is possible the the consequences of proprietary knowledge from just this one issue might have cost our global society many trillions of dollars and untold personal suffering. Enough money to fund endless researchers making more free knowledge. Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin got a little bit bigger.
Obviously, I'm all for the Vitamin D researchers at the University Wisconsin as well as other universities getting all the resources they need to do good work. But, there may be a huge problem here with public funding strategies for research. The proprietary approach to research knowledge may literally have been costing trillions of dollars a year (in current dollars) for decades taken across the globe. For the past fifty years, at two trillion a year in excess medical costs, this might add up to US$100 trillion in excess medical costs due to such medical knowledge being proprietary and researchers not cooperating more.
Of course, then the huge public health bills are used to justify *increasing* the proprietary aspects of medical knowledge to create more artificial scarcity -- which is a tremendous and sad irony.
"""

Here is one study of the cost to Western Europe of vitamin D deficiency, and it does not even included costs for excess mental illness:
"Estimated benefit of increased vitamin D status in reducing the economic burden of disease in western Europe."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19268496
"""
Vitamin D has important benefits in reducing the risk of many conditions and diseases. Those diseases for which the benefits are well supported and that have large economic effects include many types of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, several bacterial and viral infections, and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Europeans generally have low serum 25-hydroxyvit

I like the one suggestion above, to just go and ask. Few organizations are as mired in bureaucracy as the head offices of NGOs. It's the field offices that may be able to come up with some work on the spot.

Short of that, get a tan. Sorry, but there's no such thing as "intellectual day labour" - most jobs that use education require you to mesh in with a team, with an office environment, with a set of clients and problems. It takes a week, minimum, often a month, to be productive enough to pay back the hours spent showing you around, introducing you, briefing you.

If you want a great story about the fun of dealing with NGOs, try this 3-screen Atlantic article on the lady who had the terrific idea of a co-op of Afghan farmers that would produce essential oil from their pomegranates for use by "The Body Shop" and others for high-end soaps. It involved purchasing, at first, a single hand-cranked seed-oil press.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/afghans

My favourite bit on page 2 - asked to fill in a 14-screen spreadsheet with numbers on "production coefficients", the "equipment procurement, loan-repayment summaries, sales figures, labor costs, packaging and shipping costs, and cash-flow statements. It took me two weeks, full-time, just to fill in the cells with real numbers. And I have a master's degree from a U.S. university. I began to wonder how Afghan entrepreneurs would ever be able to negotiate such requirements." Presenting it to them at the end of the two weeks, she's told, the "...agribusiness team greeted the spreadsheet with a snort. "We don't need anything like that. He just loves to cook up these spreadsheets," they remarked of their colleague."

As this article at The Atlantic points out, the NY Times makes more money from subscriptions than from advertising. If they can get enough money from subscribers then they don't need to worry about page rank, hits, click-throughs, etc.

What if I don't want to be part of the risk pool? What if I'd rather have the money my employer is going to spend on health insurance in my paycheck instead? The mandate is unpopular specifically because it takes away our freedom of choice.

Besides which, costs won't go down. Costs aren't going up because we don't have everybody in the same risk pool. Costs are going up because we've built a system that requires the involvement of several different layers of bureaucracy (public and private) before a simple bill for an office visit can be paid. Costs won't come down until people realize the absurdity of a system that uses insurance (a product designed to protect against catastrophe) to pay for routine expenses.

Can you imagine a system wherein your car insurance paid for oil changes? What about one where your homeowners insurance paid to shovel your sidewalks in the winter? Do you think that such a system might cost more than paying for those services out of your own pocket?

There's a really good article in The Atlantic that looks at this problem. A problem that has been completely ignored during the debate about health care in DC. Give it a read, it'll be well worth your time.

FiveThirtyEight provides fantastic political coverage, largely based upon statistical analyses. Although the site became a bit more editorialized after the 2008 election, Nate Silver acknowledges his biases up front, and almost always provides rock-solid data to back them up. He's also been responsible for bringing down a few fraudulent pollsters.

Speaking of political commentary, Andrew Sullivan is certainly an interesting beast. His tangents about Sarah Palin are a bit silly, although his general political commentary tends to be spot-on.

Bad Astronomy is an all-around fantastic science blog.

Jason Kottke's blog has very little original content, although his content selections are impeccable, reminding me of what Slashdot used to be. He's good at his job in the same way that NPR is good at what it does.

There are more excellent music blogs than I can even possibly begin to enumerate. These have helped launch a mini revolution in the music industry. Although mainstream pop is still the same recycled garbage as it always was, the alternative music community is thriving, and occasionally some of the good stuff does trickle up into the mainstream.

BLDGBLOG is a great read for armchair architects. Infrastructurist is a great read for armchair civil engineers.

FlowingData is a fascinating read about data visualization.

Want to look good at work? Read this.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few good ones. Google solicited the reading lists of a few experts. Their recommendations are generally quite good.

An interesting article from The Atlantic discusses a new view of children with genetic dispositions to "flawed" personality traits, such as ADHD. Much of it is based on a long-term study of a captive colony of rhesus monkeys.

In the barest of nutshells: while many children are like dandelions, and could survive and even prosper in any environment (poor, lousy parents, bad schools, etc.), others are like orchids. Raised in the wrong environment they become screw-ups. Raised in the right environment they thrive, and the traits that are considered flaws become strengths, even allowing them success beyond their dandelion brethren.

A good read even if you think they're wrong. One nice takeaway from the rhesus monkey study: in the long run, bullies never win.

Oh, I see. Prices being dependent upon supply and demand is just a "theory". I can tell already that this is going to be a fun discussion.

Las Vegas is a good example. High density condos were built on the strip (overbuilt actually), driving down values of the surrounding suburban homes.

High density housing projects are notorious examples. They are no longer built for exactly this reason, so that there is no obvious dead zone of crime and poverty surrounding them, for working citizens to turn into a political issue. It still exists, of course. It just isn't as noticeable.

I can point directly to a neighborhood I used to live in. It evolved as a mixed development of single-family homes and small apartments due to lack of zoning. Landlords who owned a few houses next to each other could tear them all down and build a small apartment complex, making lots of money in the process. The apartments attracted crime and poverty, immigrants and drug dealers. As a result, rents for the surrounding single-family homes were the lowest in the city. A guy I went to college with actually purchased a two bedroom house in the neighborhood, while still in school.

Bruce points out that the no fly list only gets checked when you purchase the ticket, and your ID isn't checked when you actually use it. For example, bad guy steals a credit card and buys a ticket under a fake name. That gets him a valid ticket and avoids the no fly list

Next, the bad guy takes a boarding pass and modifies it in photoshop to show his real name, and uses that fake boarding pass along with his real id to get through airport screening. Security checks if his id matches the name on the boarding pass, but they never check the computer to see if the name is on the no fly list or even if the boarding pass is valid.

Finally, the bad guy can rip up the fake boarding pass and use the real boarding pass purchased with the stolen credit card at the gate and gets on the plane. Notice throughout the whole process, nobody checked if the bad guy's id against the no fly list?

One of these days, when I have enough time before a plane flight, I'm going to follow the letter of the rules while showing off (in a non-threatening manner) how easily they can be worked around

You don't even have to work around the list of things you can't carry on board; items on the list get missed all the time. Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic had an article from last year detailing all the things he's managed to sneak onto planes, including pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, bottles of Fiji Water, and box cutters. He's even brought two cans' worth of beer through security by wearing a Beerbelly under his clothes and walking it through the metal detector. And this in spite of the fact that he was selected for secondary inspection at the time he was wearing it.

He's also tried forging and printing out his own boarding pass (with help from Bruce Schneier) and getting through security with it, with similar results:

I would try to pass through security with no ID, a fake boarding pass, and an Osama bin Laden T-shirt under my coat. I splashed water on my face to mimic sweat, put on a coat (it was a summer day), hid my driver's license, and approached security with a bogus boarding pass that Schneier had made for me. I told the document checker at security that I had lost my identification but was hoping I would still be able to make my flight. He said I'd have to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor arrived; he looked smart, unfortunately. I was starting to get genuinely nervous, which I hoped would generate incriminating micro-expressions. "I can't find my driver's license," I said. I showed him my fake boarding pass. "I need to get to Washington quickly," I added. He asked me if I had any other identification. I showed him a credit card with my name on it, a library card, and a health-insurance card. "Nothing else?" he asked.

"No," I said.

"You should really travel with a second picture ID, you know."

"Yes, sir," I said.

"All right, you can go," he said, pointing me to the X-ray line. "But let this be a lesson for you."

In China people are not allowed to own many properties and resell them over and over again contributing to speculative expectations that any bit of land should be worth millions.

Do you know anything about China -- or its real estate market?

Okay. Can do.

"Last I checked, the browser technology (specifically Javascript) available now wasn't even conseived in 1944."

Not as such, but Vannevar Bush was getting close. Does microfilm count as prior art?

The media has propagated this view of science, because journalists could never hack the subjects themselves, and they just want to get their own back on those people who could do it.

It's even worse, they deliberately misrepresent science because they think that's their job:

Blumberg: Trumping up FOXP2 as yet another star gene in a series of star genes (the "god" gene, the "depression" gene, the "schizophrenia" gene, etc.) not only sets FOXP2 up for a fall; it also misses an opportunity to educate the public about how complex behavior - including the capacity for language - develops and evolves.

Wade: I'm a little puzzled by your complaint, which seems to me to ignore the special dietary needs of a newspaper's readers and to assume they can be served indigestible fare similar to that in academic journals. []

As for missing an opportunity to educate the public, that, with respect, is your job, not mine. Education is the business of schools and universities. The business of newspapers is news.

source via languagelog

Interesting how eager people are to believe Eschenbach without any "auditing".

Anyway, check this comment and this comment in the McArdle thread before jumping to conclusions.

"the homogenization process is a fully automatic statistical treatment for 7000 stations - it has no biases for higher or lower temperatures. The homogenization is based on the records of the nearest 5 stations, which can have a higher or lower temperature so treatment is not biased. Darwin 0 has a higher adjustment due to higher temperature records in the neighboring stations. In the cases where the "neighbors" of the 7000 stations have lower temperatures, there is an automatic downwards adjustment.

"In fact, handpicking adjustments for individual stations, which is what Eschenbach suggests for Darwin 0 in 1941, would be a method far more prone to temptations to bias the result desired."

Interesting how eager people are to believe Eschenbach without any "auditing".

Anyway, check this comment and this comment in the McArdle thread before jumping to conclusions.

"the homogenization process is a fully automatic statistical treatment for 7000 stations - it has no biases for higher or lower temperatures. The homogenization is based on the records of the nearest 5 stations, which can have a higher or lower temperature so treatment is not biased. Darwin 0 has a higher adjustment due to higher temperature records in the neighboring stations. In the cases where the "neighbors" of the 7000 stations have lower temperatures, there is an automatic downwards adjustment.

"In fact, handpicking adjustments for individual stations, which is what Eschenbach suggests for Darwin 0 in 1941, would be a method far more prone to temptations to bias the result desired."

their conclusions are similar because they're actually all using the same raw dataset.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

They just all apply their own "adjustments" which is why they vary slightly. The above link is a good introduction to how well these "adjustments" work. Here's a good article questioning if the scientists didn't "adjust" so their numbers would match the other publications:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/climategate_was_data_faked.php

I don't think anyone is faking data to deceive, but it's entirely possible people are saying "here's what everyone else found, if I don't find similar I'll be shunned."

I can link too:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/climategate_was_data_faked.php

My link is better than yours! It does not rely on group think and manipulated data! Thhpt!

If they so drastically manipulated data from Australia, what else have they done... this is why access to raw data is so vital, and why things that are based on raw data we cannot see simply cannot be trusted (especially given the penchant from the emails we have seen to shut out people going off-message).

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to shed even more light on the disturbing revelations from the data and code (which matter far more than the emails).

Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies.'

That would be a good thing, because "hard science" is not a single anthropomorphic entity but a collection of disparate opinions, equations, experiments and hypotheses. Ideal scientists are skeptics, willing to change their minds to follow the evidence, but actual scientists are flawed human beings subject to the same cognitive failures as you and I. The Feynman quote from this Megan McArdle column illustrates it well:

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.

Since the goal of the scientific method is greater understanding, how is it a bad thing for the general public to have a greater understanding of it? Scientists are not high priests. When ordinary people set aside their blind "faith in science" in favor of a more realistic understanding of what it takes for a hypothesis to survive in the shark tank long enough to be called a theory, it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing.

I think I may be using "linguistic prescriptivism" in a slightly different, more general sense than you have in mind.

Yes, and one completely disconnected from the actual practice of the thing.

People always try to distinguish themselves as social superiors, it's what we (including linguistically-educated people quick to jump in with cries of "there's no so thing as "correct" English usage! Language is fluid!") do. People also try to get others to share their views about art, music, and morality, and tend to like more those who do so. I fail to see what the problem with that is. The only difference is that the issue of morality has tended to get wrapped up with the power of the state, so views on that one have more consequences (not to say that issues of language and culture don't have significant sociological implications).

No, there are more differences here. In your comparison here, language falls somewhere in between art/music and morality. People are far, far more likely to assume a gustibus non disputandum attitude about art and music than about language. If you don't like a certain form of music, you might get called tasteless or a philistine at worse. If you speak a non-standard dialect, on the other hand, you will have people say that you are illogical and mentally deficient, or even worse. Especially if dialect in question is AAVE; inner-city black children have been matter-of-factly said to not have language at all in some academic circles.

In any case, if I find one form of the English language more aesthetically pleasing than another, why shouldn't I prefer that it become dominant?

You can prefer all you want. The problem starts when you bully other, less educated people than yourself into bowing to your preferences as superior for spurious reasons--which is what actually happens in practice.

However, the gap between is and ought remains as wide as it ever was, and my reasons for preferring certain forms of English are mainly based on aesthetics and tribalism, not some imagined sense of the practical superiority of one form over another (with the vehement exception of the Oxford comma).

But you see, "cuz I say so" is a pretty bad reason to demand that other people talk and write in the way you say they should. It's one virtue is that it is at least honest--a typical prescriptivist will cover it up with piles and piles of bullshit about "logic" and "aesthetics" and "clarity" and "avoidance of ambiguity" and on and on and on.

As James Fallows asks in The Atlantic Are we naked in the cloud?

But the reader's point is less about the ins and outs of this ruling than about the broader legal/privacy implications of storing information "in the cloud." When you're working in Google Docs, as opposed to using a spreadsheet or document that lives on your computer, have you essentially surrendered custody and control of that information? What if you rely on online "cloud" systems -- Carbonite, SugarSync -- to back up or sync your files? Have you given up custody of those files too?

The answer he supplies is "yes" you have given up custody.

Saline solution is allowed, so just label your water bottles "saline" and you can bring them through security, even if it's multiple large bottles. You probably want to wait to drink any of them, though, until you're out of their sight!

Here's a direct link to The Atlantic magazine article, one of the sources for the article I wrote, linked above: Does the Vaccine Matter?.

Evidence of bias in estimates of influenza vaccine effectiveness in seniors(abstract) Lisa A. Jackson 1 *, Michael L. Jackson 1, Jennifer C. Nelson 2, Kathleen M. Neuzil 3, and Noel S. Weiss 4 ,International Journal of Epidemiology, full text in PDF. Does the Vaccine Matter? is a good lay article on the matter.

This is an influenza virus we're talking about. There are plenty of studies showing that getting vaccinated for influenza is completely pointless.

Please read this story in The Atlantic.

That article was NOT saying that the flu vaccine is pointless, it was making the case for further study of it's effectiveness, especially among older people and those with compromised immune systems. Even if the flu vaccine has no effect on the death rate there is still some advantage to reducing the number of people who get sick, miss work, and are generally miserable from the flu.

This is an influenza virus we're talking about. There are plenty of studies showing that getting vaccinated for influenza is completely pointless.

Please read this story in The Atlantic.

From page 2:

The history of flu vaccination suggests other reasons to doubt claims that it dramatically reduces mortality. In 2004, for example, vaccine production fell behind, causing a 40 percent drop in immunization rates. Yet mortality did not rise. In addition, vaccine “mismatches” occurred in 1968 and 1997: in both years, the vaccine that had been produced in the summer protected against one set of viruses, but come winter, a different set was circulating. In effect, nobody was vaccinated. Yet death rates from all causes, including flu and the various illnesses it can exacerbate, did not budge.

That magical polio vaccine, which is now being given in Nigeria in the form of a nasal spray (just like the current influenza vaccine being given out now) has mutated and been responsible for causing the current outbreak there.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-08-14-nigeria-polio_N.htm

Everyone who got the polio vaccine in the US has been exposed to SV 40, one of many viruses in vaccines that have been found to cause cancer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvsXrVkjyz4

When you get a vaccine you are getting many unknown viruses, proteins and random DNA fragments that are grown with the vaccine in whatever substance is used. There has never been a study of long term effects on what these can do to you.

Doctors in Germany have been warning about this.

The nutrient solution for the vaccine consists of cancerous cells from animals and "we do not know if there could be an allergic reaction".

But more importantly, some people fear that the risk of cancer could be increased by injecting the cells.

The vaccine - as Johannes Löwer, president of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, has pointed out - can also cause worse side effects than the actual swine flu virus.

Wodrag also described people’s fear of the pandemic as an "orchestration": “It is great business for the pharmaceutical industry,” he told the ‘Neuen Presse’.

Swine flu is not very different from normal flu. “On the contrary if you look at the number of cases it is nothing compared to a normal flu outbreak,” he added.

But please fearmonger about the plague and polio without looking at any associated risks with getting vaccinated for everything that may make most people sick for a few days.

Because no effective vaccine for malaria has been adopted for clinical use? Just saying . . .

But on the same note, I've read some interesting articles that proposed that flu vaccines do absolutely no good whatsoever. For example: Atlantic article

Yeah.

Alex Jones and The Atlantic Monthly , noted wingnut, anti-globalist conspiracy rag:
"Yet in the view of several vaccine skeptics, this claim is suspicious on its face. Influenza causes only a small minority of all deaths in the U.S., even among senior citizens, and even after adding in the deaths to which flu might have contributed indirectly. When researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases included all deaths from illnesses that flu aggravates, like lung disease or chronic heart failure, they found that flu accounts for, at most, 10 percent of winter deaths among the elderly. So how could flu vaccine possibly reduce total deaths by half? Tom Jefferson, a physician based in Rome and the head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected international network of researchers who appraise medical evidence, says: "For a vaccine to reduce mortality by 50 percent and up to 90 percent in some studies means it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That's not a vaccine, that's a miracle." "
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200911/brownlee-h1n1

I guess if you are not a pro-ball cheerleader, you have nothing to worry about:
Washington Redskins Cheerleader Desiree Jennings Permanently Disabled From Flu Vaccine
http://video.najoomi.com/videos/0VMRWLgF8V8/Washington-Redskins-Cheerleader-Desiree-Jennings-Permanently-Disabled-From-Flu-Vaccine.html

http://loudountimes.com/blogs/loudoun-lowdown/2009-10-13/loudoun-lowdown-nicholas-graham-flu-shot-desiree/

http://video.aol.co.uk/video-detail/cheerleader-with-dystonia-from-flu-shot-may-have-it-all-in-her-head/2264303090

http://video.aol.co.uk/video-detail/update-on-washington-redskins-cheerleader-crippled-for-life-after-being-vaccinated/1581295953

http://www.huliq.com/8059/87650/nfl-cheerleader-suffers-irreversible-dystonia-after-flu-shot

I know the new loans are not as cheap, but thats because some idiot decided having non-direct loans and promising a profit to everyone who serviced them. Doh!

Yeah, this happened because of an unfortunate overlap between the interests of the banking industry and the "free market uber alles" crowd - we got roped into a system where the federal government basically bribed private lenders to give student loans, and then the private lenders just kept all that subsidy money and didn't even make the loans cheaper. It's worth mentioning that there's a bill in Congress to cut out the middleman by just having the gov't lend directly to students. It's a money saver for taxpayers, and should also result in cheaper loans to students. But the banking industry is fighting tooth and nail to stop it.

Note that the story only suggests that the vaccine doesn't help the elderly and weak. They even admit this themselves in a q&a:

"One of the most compelling arguments for flu vaccination is to provide herd immunity. In other words, by keeping young healthy people from getting sick it is believed that we can slow the spread of the disease to others. That could help to protect those who can’t benefit from a vaccine due to a weak immune system. Studies in nursing homes suggest that there is benefit to the elderly when caretakers are immunized along with residents."

from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910u/h1h1-qa

I think they're being dishonest when they conflate two claims:

* the vaccine may not help the elderly and weak

with

* the vaccine has no value (a much stronger claim and one that they don't make a good case for).

Herd immunity is pretty much the whole point of mass immunization. Ignoring that make them guilty of exactly what they accuse the other side of. Not pretty....

Part of the research I've read recently claims we have no solid definition of the mortality rate of the "flu". The problem is unless you take a culture and analyze it in a lab, you can't tell if the disease is really influenza or one of a hundred or so others that cause similar symptoms. But people who report to their doctor about symptoms aren't always lab tested to see exactly what they have. It'll get noted as "the flu", when it may not be influenza at all, skewing all the statistics.

The article I was reading in Atlantic Monthly makes the claim that people who die from flu-like symptoms aren't always lab tested, either. Thus, the mortality rates for "the flu" may have little to do with influenza.

While we as a society have had great success with vaccination campaigns against diseases like the measles, mumps, rubella, polio and small pox, the same can't convincingly be said about influenza.

Do you really think hospitals would get away with charging $40 for dressings (the line item from my recent visit to the ER) if people actually saw that bill and had to pay it?

Are they dying of blood loss? If so, they'll pay $40,000 if they have it.

If you believe the free market has any role in the health care system, you might want to learn something about how it works.

I know plenty about how the health care system works and it isn't anything remotely close to a free market.

I'm sorry, I was unclear. I meant that you should try to gain a basic understanding of free market economics, not the healthcare system. And really, you should.

Go read this article in The Atlantic and educate yourself. I think you'll find it informative.

I find it very interesting and fairly informative. However, it lacks a sense of global perspective. Thank you for your contribution, though.

in which case costs would go way down

What are you basing this assumption on?

the insurance companies are the problem

That's a very liberal way of looking at the problem but it doesn't begin to even scratch the surface of the problem.

Unfortunately it looks like there's not even going to be a public option

Good. Replacing private sector bureaucracy with public sector bureaucracy is no solution at all.

only madatory insurance. Big boon to the insurance industry, nada for ordinary people.

Mandatory insurance doesn't represent a "boon" to the insurance industry. The argument behind mandatory insurance is to get healthy people in the risk people so the average cost of premiums comes down. I don't happen to agree with the notion of the Government taking away my freedom of association but to say that the mandate represents a "boon" to the insurance industry is missing the point.

I'd say huge salaries paid to top insurance company executives is another big reason.

Then you'd be missing the point yet again I'm afraid. You could confiscate the profits of every single health insurance company in this country and you'd only be able to pay for four days of health care for the American people. The health insurance companies themselves are not the problem. The structure of the underlying marketplace is the problem.

Think about it. Would you expect your car insurance to pay for your gasoline and routine maintenance? That'd be pretty stupid, wouldn't it? So when then do people expect their health insurance to pay for routine physicals? Why is it necessary to put that layer of bureaucracy between the consumer and the cost of the product being consumed?

Go read this article. I had it featured in my journal for awhile. It talks about the structure of our health care system and explains a lot of these concepts better than I can.

You need it to live, therefore providers can charge pretty much whatever they'd like.

No, providers can charge whatever they'd like because you have no idea what the service actually costs and people have no incentive to argue with them over the price because they aren't paying it to begin with. Do you really think hospitals would get away with charging $40 for dressings (the line item from my recent visit to the ER) if people actually saw that bill and had to pay it?

If you believe the free market has any role in the health care system, you might want to learn something about how it works.

I know plenty about how the health care system works and it isn't anything remotely close to a free market. Go read this article in The Atlantic and educate yourself. I think you'll find it informative.

Based on his views, a stronger case can be made for Israel to be extremely nervous about Iran developing nuclear weapons.

There is still much to debate regarding the tactics the US should take in negotiating this situation, both generally and specifically. But certain facts on the ground should be cleared up first.

The "full price" you're describing doesn't include the cost of damage to human health and the environment from mercury and other heavy metals, acid rain, greenhouse gases, mountaintop removal, smog, etc.

Some *small* part of that cost is included now via regulation, requiring cleaner smokestack technology e.g., which the utilities pass on to customers. But much of it is *not* regulated or otherwise included in the price the end-user pays.

In the meantime, conservation has paid proven dividends in California:

Efficiency and decoupling have helped California to consume electricity far more thriftily than the rest of America. At the time of the 1973 oil shock, California used about 17 percent less electricity per person than the country at large. Since then, as Rosenfeld likes to point out in a chart that has been dubbed âoethe Rosenfeld Curve,â per capita electricity use in the nation has increased by about 50 percent to about 12,000 kilowatt-hours annually. Meanwhile, over that same period, per capita electricity use in California has remained absolutely flat at about 7,000 kilowatt-hours per year. That means the average Californian today uses about 40 percent less electricity per year than the average American.

James Sweeney, who runs Stanford Universityâ(TM)s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, has calculated with Anant Sudarshan, a colleague, that much of that difference can be explained by factors such as Californiaâ(TM)s temperate climate, less heavy industry, and even smaller-sized households. But, Sweeney says, the stateâ(TM)s policy decisions still account for a substantial amountâ"roughly one-fifth to one-fourthâ"of the gap in electricity usage between California and the nation. The focus on efficiency has produced huge savings: though per kilowatt electricity rates are higher in California than in most other places, consumers pay lower electricity bills because they use so much less power than people elsewhere. A few years ago, the California Energy Commission calculated that the stateâ(TM)s efficiency efforts had preempted the need for 24 large-scale power plants and saved state consumers $56 billion.

Rosenfeld says the past generationâ(TM)s gains indicate the state can improve its energy intensity (the amount of energy required to produce each dollar of GDP) by about 30 percent every decade. âoeEfficiency,â he says with a twinkle, âoeseems to be a renewable resource.â

And there is the initial lesson from Californiaâ(TM)s energy experience: efficiency is the foundation of any effort to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. As California has learned, the most cost-effective way to replace coal or natural gas or petroleum isnâ(TM)t to rely on solar or wind or biofuels; itâ(TM)s to squeeze more work out of less energy.

Not to add to what is sure to be an offtopic flamewar, but IQ tests are certainly not culturally biased. Unless, of course, you think logic, math, and spatial recognition are culturally biased.

Spatial cognition has been shown to be culturally variable; check out the work of Stephen Levinson on language and spatial cognition. It is possible to design spatial reasoning tests that are culturally biased in that regard; e.g., the Queensland Test was designed to raise the score of Australian Aborigines relative to Australian Whites.

In fact, there's just nothing culturally neutral about getting somebody to sit down to answer an intelligence test. Read the New Yorker's article on the controversy about the Pirahã and ask yourself, in the end: how would you administer an IQ test to this tribe, and would the results be more indicative of their "intelligence" or of their cultural differences to us?

To paraphrase William Labov: if you want to figure out how intelligent somebody is, you have to enter the appropriate social relationship with that person. IQ tests simply fail this; they presuppose that everybody is a well-mannered urban European middle-class authority-fearing white-coat-deferring sit-downer, who is just delighted to sit down and perform decontextualized, pointless intellectual exercise on command.

Many historians regard Abraham Lincoln as one of the best presidents the United States has had.

Turns out he had many characteristics of a depressed individual, which perhaps would have given him clearer insight into the issues of his day.

1. Pure political activism on the part of someone at Flickr/Yahoo. Remember Citizen, Dissent is Patriotic... unless Democrats are in charge then you must Doublethink; To Question the State is Treason.

When have Liberals/Democrats ever tried to silence dissent? I thought such actions only occurred under evil Republican administrations?