I'm not so sure she believed much in non-reciprocal altruism. This is a very difficult concept to mesh with rational self-interest. What distinguishes ones sympathetic or non-reciprocally altruistic feelings from, say, a hedonistic desire to eat a lot of chocolate cake (which Rand didn't support, even though those hedonistic feelings are also natural and unavoidable)?
"third party" = "wasted vote" mathematically, too, with our electoral system (unlike one that uses instant runoff voting and/or a parliamentary system where minor parties can still be part of a coalition).
I'd rather not try to change people's minds away from what is true.
You have two choices: become one of the two parties, or reform the voting system to one that does not make you throw your vote away when voting for a less prominent party.
Yes, I did, and I didn't see any "backing up". They back up the non-controversial claims they make by citing papers that demonstrated the same thing, but they add basically nothing on their own.
For example, the "Oligopoly" section points gives data on publication in high-profile journals, but the data does not include any metrics that might be relevant to their claims about specific and possibly non-obvious negative effects such as the Winner Effect. They reference herding in economics, and cite a paper on collective thought about molecular cascades, but don't link the collective thought to journal publications specifically as opposed to the sense in the whole field.
The Artificial Scarcity section only references the publication rates at Nature and Science, and doesn't explain why the scarcity is artificial or real (i.e. real competition for attention, which is in scarce supply). They state, for instance, "Low acceptance rates create an illusion of exclusivity based on merit", but do not support that this is an illusion--certainly *something* is exclusive, and if it is *not* merit-based, they ought to show why it is not.
So they certainly cite lots of stuff, it's just that what they cite isn't all that relevant to the most notable claims they make. Thus, I don't see how to distinguish this paper from a statement of opinion.
But I did just realize that this is published as an "essay". Fine--for an essay, the level of rigor is tolerable. (It's not that well-reasoned an essay, even, but it is at least passable.) So that this was published doesn't really reflect badly on PLOS Medicine as I originally claimed. I just don't see why we should believe it.
That this article got published in PLOS Medicine is a data point saying that the publication model for PLOS Medicine is flawed. That's about it.
The authors don't bother to back up any of their assertions. If there is a winner effect, for example, the most prestigious journals should have the highest rate of publication of junk results, whereas lower-ranked journals should be more accurate. So, is this true? Did the authors bother to look, or even to think about and discuss it?
Also, does "overpayment" correspond to "poor quality science" or to "only slightly more cool than the rejected paper, on second thought"?
Now, it is more true in the medical sciences that positive results are published that claim to show p0.05, but are one of a dozen similar studies 11 of which have not shown an effect (i.e. overall there was no significant finding). But this recognition has nothing to do with bidding per se; it's not that the journals are picking the high tail of a distribution of value so much as that they're seeking statistical significance without controlling for the number of times that the study was done.
And as the summary says (which is actually better than the research article itself, IMO), there are a number of other problems.
There are certainly ways that one might seek to improve scientific publishing. But this seems almost entirely off target and/or ill-supported to me.
An engagement ring is something that tells her female friends about his social status and commitment to her. It's not frivolity except inasmuch as all social status markers are--which is to say it is functionally frivolous, but you'd better be willing to accept the negative consequences if you don't conform.
To respond further, the original post wrote: "Because evolution teaches what science has concluded with all of the current evidence that they have."
I said it wasn't because, in all honesty, we have additional evidence from human history (in the form of world religions) that do have something to say about the matter and science ignores it....
There are three possibilities: 1) Religion is right. 2) Science is right. 3) They're both right. If science ignores possibilities #1 and #3, that might be science but they might never get the right answer--and what good is that?
Why do world religions count as evidence of how the current set of life came to be?
Also, it's not that the ideas from religions have been ignored--they're just blatantly contradictory with the physical evidence. (At least if you base the ideas on any sort of parsimonious interpretation of the religious text and doctrine.)
Try matching up, say, the order of events in Genesis with the order as inferred from fossil records and from phylogenetic trees from sequence comparisons.
So possibilities #1 and #3 are out. (And why did you leave out possibility #0, that they're both wrong?)
I'm confused. Aside from it being over five years later, from a company that is not going out of business, how are either of these better than the Transmeta processors?
The one with an iPod dock only tells the iPod the title of songs so you can buy them later.
Not too useful if you want to time-shift something that isn't a song. And since you could just go buy the song in the first place and have it at any time you wanted it without even waiting for the radio to play it, if you're interested in time-shifting it's probably not for songs.
Researchers--good ones, anyway--generally don't have a problem focusing. Having an overarching theme just makes it easier for them to focus on the problem that you want them to work on.
Also, research doesn't need to involve a solution. Much of the best basic research usually involves just wanting to know how something works. (Once you understand, then you can come up with applications and devise solutions using the new findings, but that's often the &D part of R&D.)
If you recognize that there is no such magical line--just differential selective mating and hybrid infertility that eventually reaches approximately zero--then there are plenty of speciation events that have been caught in the middle. Again, talkorigins.org lists a pile of these. Macroevolution has been caught at pretty much every stage between no speciation and complete segregation, and though the 100 or 200 years (when people have been paying enough attention to collect sufficiently accurate data--not 2000 (what are you thinking?!)) are a very short time to observe much change in reproductive isolation, changes have been observed (see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html).
Thus, mathematically, we would represent evolution as L=T+M+E, where all are variable.
I think something like L(T,M,E) would make more sense. The + operator normally signifies addition, if you want to use it mathematically. If you want to use it analogically, fine, but then don't call it mathematical.
Intelligent design has been proven over and over again, just as natural selection has been. However, you will not ever find intelligent design proven in nature. The very definition and requirement of intelligent design, that of intelligent input, immediately takes it out of the realm of nature.
This depends very much on your definitions. One can draw such a line, but when explaining small sharp stone objects, you spend a lot more time thinking about fracture patterns, radiocarbon dating, and so on, than you do about some "nature" vs. "not" line.
Intelligent design is thus what would be considered supernatural
Depends whether the intelligence is natural. We generally don't call finding a flint arrowhead a supernatural event.
If there are those who believe that "God" was the intelligence behind [the origin of life] in the beginning, then that's their prerogative. The origin of the original intelligence used to form life is something that cannot ever be proven, and is thus forever in the realm of belief and religion.
This paragraph has a bunch of problems.
First is the hopefully unintended implication that there must have been an intelligence, when that is what's in question. As you may have pointed out--I can't quite tell--there are mechanisms that do not require an intelligence which are adequate to cause evolution.
Second, while in one sense it's the prerogative of anyone to believe whatever they want for any (or no) reason, it's laudable to believe things on the basis of evidence, and to have the strengths of one's beliefs in proportion to the strength of the evidence (so you are appropriately prepared to change if new evidence comes in which warrants the change). In particular, if one has compelling evidence that an intelligence is responsible for life, one still ought to have good evidence that the God of Christianity is that intelligence before simply believing it. For instance, if one also believes that Genesis is divinely inspired, one should reconcile statements in Genesis with knowledge of early life.
Third, science is generally not in the business of proving things in the strong sense, and in the weak sense I don't see why one needs to assume that the original intelligence is necessarily out of grasp. For example, if life on Earth was intelligently seeded by Zogyians, the Zogyians might have left behind an instruction manual explaining what they did and how, and also explain their own origin in a compelling way (e.g. prove the logical necessity of Zogyian existence, demonstrate that Zogyians spontaneously generate under conditions in the early universe, or whatever).
Calling theory as fact is contemptible to anyone who truly holds to the tenants of scientific method.
Good grief. What is a fact besides a theory that seems highly reliable? Scientific theories are often a lot more reliable than those statements that are labeled as "fact" in colloquial usage. So what's the problem?
Both sides are shameful and willingly neglect and ignore the data and proofs of the other side. Someone who is truly being scientific will consider the data of all views, both factual and theoretic.
There's certainly a lot of exasperated ignoring of already-demonstrated-invalid ID arguments among non-ID folks. But if you think anything from that camp has been routinely ignored, you might want to point it out. As I've mentioned elsewhere, www.talkorigins.org and Behe's Empty Box are pretty good sources for non-IDers paying plenty of attention to IDers arguments and data.
That wasn't the issue. The issue was whether beneficial mutations were fixed in the population. They are.
If you want to read more about the evidence for the common ancestry of life, there are plenty of sources available. www.talkorigins.org might be a good place to start.
We also have 232 years of experience showing that the current system essentially enforces a two-party system (with a couple of short-lived exceptions).
Lots of parties have tried and failed to make a significant impact (except to hurt their own causes) over the years. I'd say it's time to try changing the voting system instead. Difficult, yes, but it hasn't been demonstrated to be repeatedly impossible.
But this change--to IRV or Condorcet or some other alternative voting system--must be made if you want your "there are other candidates out there" line to mean more than "please throw your vote away".
With our system as it is, if you don't at least make second place, you're irrelevant except as a spoiler, so that people who vote for you are likely to get even less of what they want. Not a good way to build support.
There are plenty of well-documented examples of bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. That, in the context the bacteria are in, is beneficial and passed on.
There are a bazillion other examples, but this is the most obvious and trivial. Because not only can you do experiments like that in the lab, it tends to mess up your *other* experiments if you assume that a strain of bacteria will forever be antibiotic-sensitive.
I was speaking of internal interfaces, not user interfaces.
However, if all of your internal interfaces are powerful and clean, it makes it a lot easier to make the UI the same way--because it just hooks directly into underlying powerful, clean functionality, instead of being a nightmarish remapping exercise.
There are still plenty of ways to break a UI even if you have a good underlying architecture. But it won't hurt to have a good foundation.
I haven't the foggiest idea about good reading material for the mapping-it-all-out level.
Personally, I've found mental exercises of the "how many things can you do with a paperclip" type to be at least as useful as the books I've read on the subject.
If you haven't read Code Complete (by McConnell) and/or Refactoring (by Fowler), doing so will help, as keeping some of those things in mind when going to the implementation level will help you choose data structures and libraries (or will help you avoid ones that violate too many principles). But they're hardly a tutorial on the subject.
One of the most useful principles I've found for making "good" software is to design very clean, very powerful interfaces. Focusing on "modularity" often puts the focus in the wrong spot, namely on the center of the module. The point is that the details there *shouldn't matter* because you can abstract away all sorts of fiddly detailed functionality.
It is difficult to make clean and powerful interfaces, however. You really have to understand the nature of the problem you're trying to solve in order to pick the most natural groups of functionality. Very often, if you're trying to get something done in a reasonable amount of time and don't need to maintain the code for that long (though beware--you'll find yourself using, a decade later, programs that you thought you'd rewrite "next month"), it's better to code something quick and specific.
The cleanliness of an interface basically boils down to how little information you can pass to it, and how little information you need from it, in order for it to do what you want; and to what extent all information and data goes through explicitly defined interface elements (e.g. an interface in Java). (Here I'm drawing a distinction between data, e.g. the content of a character stream, and information, which is "hey, there's a character stream here, go work on it".)
The power of an interface basically boils down to how many different high-level operations can be constructed from mixing and matching components of the interface. For example, compositing operations tend to be powerful (e.g. take A, take B of the same type, perform some operation to produce C of the same type from A and B).
There are lots of other generally useful strategies, but I find this one of the most overlooked, especially by otherwise really talented coders (who can tend to make interfaces more complex because they are talented enough to work with something that complicated).
I wasn't setting goalposts in order to play a parlor game--though if I did, I did ask in the context of coming in with large amounts of money and that making the difference (which here it did not). Rather, it was to see what kind of examples came up, if any, and to see if they were worrying or not.
You don't want to run a game where you look for roughly equal numbers of cases with or without monetary interests, since if anything like half the papers that are accepted are accepted for financial reasons (beyond the generic "we need to publish articles since we are in the publishing business", which still allows you to control quality if you pick carefully) the peer review system is in horrible trouble.
The game played should be one where you figure out whether it's common or not relatively quickly.
Very good! The two examples are quite instructive. First, there is *no demonstration of financial pressure*. You showed examples of not keeping out stupidity, period. These are not examples of well-paying stupidity getting in where impoverished stupidity is rejected.
And, on the one hand, you have an example of a cultural studies journal. Cultural studies is not an exceedingly specialized discipline; its research methodology and modes of analysis are reasonably accessible. The fact that Sokal got his paper published--in a reasonably prestigious journal, no less--suggests that cultural studies are not actually science, or at least that the subfield that Sokal was parodying was pretty widely ignored as useless or irrelevant.
On the other, you have a paper in an arcane branch of an arcane subfield of physics being accepting an incomprehensible paper into a relatively prominent journal. These areas of physics are rather inaccessible, and this suggests to me that the useless-or-irrelevant explanation is somewhat more likely. Or it may be that that particular branch of theoretical physics is not science given that it's almost hopelessly untestable.
So, fair enough, on the edges of what is considered science, you find stuff that is at best questionable and at worst not science at all, and you can publish nonsense there if you try and have no particular financial backing. This is not particularly troubling to me, nor does it show that the journal process doesn't work in general--only that it is not utterly immune to all the regular problems with human endeavors (just reasonably resistant).
If you would like to demonstrate that financial motives bias the choice of papers, please provide two examples.
Or, if you would like to demonstrate that this phenomenon is worrying for science in general, please provide examples like those above which were published in a field that is clearly a science (i.e. has heavy contact with experiment and falsification).
When I review papers, I complain about poorly defined terms. And I've gotten complaints, too. Sometimes missing definitions get through; some fields may be worse than others, also. But you don't want someone defining "pi" as "the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle"--anyone with ordinary mathematical knowledge should know this. Likewise, you don't want people spelling out deoxyribonucleic acid, or explaining that epsilon is a very small quantity that may be taken arbitrarily close to zero. It's a waste of time to type it and to read it. So there's a balance between not explaining that by c_alt you mean the ratio of the sum of correlation scores under assay 1 to assay 3, and explaining that by "Morris water maze" you mean a submerged platform in a milky pool that mice have to find by memory and has been used endlessly in learning and memory evaluations for the past two decades. Two different standards for the same quantity is the kind of thing that reviewers should catch and insist upon. (Peer review is useful, but definitely could stand some improvements.)
And there are diminishing numbers of journals that are actually distributed in paper form. They do tend to be of higher quality than the PDFs, especially in the figures, but otherwise they are a waste of space, hard to acquire, and generally aren't used much unless one is browsing (which is still easier on paper media, though once you want to search at all, electronic media win).
It's a user interface for experts. For us, it works pretty well. Deliberately abbreviated? Efficient! Obscure? Not to me! Smidgeon of new information--well, yeah, I knew the older stuff already and I want the new stuff as soon as it's known, and if I don't know the older stuff I want the references so I can go check the data to make sure it means what you've said it means.
Oh, I wish this were the case in my field. Everyone insists on Word documents, even with the sketchy typesetting, the insane amounts of work needed to make it even legible after changing data sets, the questionable equation support, and so on. Then again, I'm in a field that doesn't expect all that many equations, nor do they expect automated recomputation of data into figures. Oh well.
It is elitism, but not financial elitism. It is intellectual elitism, mixed with a dose of what's trendy.
The journals do a good job, for the most part, at keeping out well-paying stupidity. If your article is genuinely bad, you'll have a hard time getting it published anywhere high-profile. Really--you can come in with as much money as you want, and you still won't be considered relevant. If you disagree, please provide at least two examples.
If your article is relatively bad (but on an absolute level at least decent), then it can still get published if you're well-known, if you're working in a hot area, and if you submit to a high profile journal that cares about such things (e.g. Science or Nature). This is unfortunate, but this is an aspect of human nature that is really hard to keep under control.
There are certainly parts of the peer review process that are less than ideal--reviewers don't take the time to understand what they're reviewing, or they have an emotional reaction to something that seems to undercut their fond hopes for how something will turn out and make stupid, picky attacks on a paper, or they realize that they're about to get scooped and so ask for every pedantic little thing so they gain more time for their own work. But even with these flaws, the process does a pretty good job at rejecting junk; it just rejects a little too much non-junk, too, or at least makes the process more painful than necessary.
Still, for humanity to reliably accumulate knowledge, we need a mechanism that rejects almost all obvious junk, and the scientific journals are the ones who are still doing a pretty good job of that.
Some of the secondary uses--e.g. evaluating whether an assistant professor should get tenure--are overblown, but you can't blame the journals for that. That's not why they exist (although it does encourage people to use them more); they exist to provide a peer review mechanism (for profit). If another *good* peer review mechanism appears, it could supplant journals, but none have yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure she believed much in non-reciprocal altruism. This is a very difficult concept to mesh with rational self-interest. What distinguishes ones sympathetic or non-reciprocally altruistic feelings from, say, a hedonistic desire to eat a lot of chocolate cake (which Rand didn't support, even though those hedonistic feelings are also natural and unavoidable)?
"third party" = "wasted vote" mathematically, too, with our electoral system (unlike one that uses instant runoff voting and/or a parliamentary system where minor parties can still be part of a coalition).
I'd rather not try to change people's minds away from what is true.
You have two choices: become one of the two parties, or reform the voting system to one that does not make you throw your vote away when voting for a less prominent party.
Yes, I did, and I didn't see any "backing up". They back up the non-controversial claims they make by citing papers that demonstrated the same thing, but they add basically nothing on their own.
For example, the "Oligopoly" section points gives data on publication in high-profile journals, but the data does not include any metrics that might be relevant to their claims about specific and possibly non-obvious negative effects such as the Winner Effect. They reference herding in economics, and cite a paper on collective thought about molecular cascades, but don't link the collective thought to journal publications specifically as opposed to the sense in the whole field.
The Artificial Scarcity section only references the publication rates at Nature and Science, and doesn't explain why the scarcity is artificial or real (i.e. real competition for attention, which is in scarce supply). They state, for instance, "Low acceptance rates create an illusion of exclusivity based on merit", but do not support that this is an illusion--certainly *something* is exclusive, and if it is *not* merit-based, they ought to show why it is not.
So they certainly cite lots of stuff, it's just that what they cite isn't all that relevant to the most notable claims they make. Thus, I don't see how to distinguish this paper from a statement of opinion.
But I did just realize that this is published as an "essay". Fine--for an essay, the level of rigor is tolerable. (It's not that well-reasoned an essay, even, but it is at least passable.) So that this was published doesn't really reflect badly on PLOS Medicine as I originally claimed. I just don't see why we should believe it.
That this article got published in PLOS Medicine is a data point saying that the publication model for PLOS Medicine is flawed. That's about it.
The authors don't bother to back up any of their assertions. If there is a winner effect, for example, the most prestigious journals should have the highest rate of publication of junk results, whereas lower-ranked journals should be more accurate. So, is this true? Did the authors bother to look, or even to think about and discuss it?
Also, does "overpayment" correspond to "poor quality science" or to "only slightly more cool than the rejected paper, on second thought"?
Now, it is more true in the medical sciences that positive results are published that claim to show p0.05, but are one of a dozen similar studies 11 of which have not shown an effect (i.e. overall there was no significant finding). But this recognition has nothing to do with bidding per se; it's not that the journals are picking the high tail of a distribution of value so much as that they're seeking statistical significance without controlling for the number of times that the study was done.
And as the summary says (which is actually better than the research article itself, IMO), there are a number of other problems.
There are certainly ways that one might seek to improve scientific publishing. But this seems almost entirely off target and/or ill-supported to me.
An engagement ring is something that tells her female friends about his social status and commitment to her. It's not frivolity except inasmuch as all social status markers are--which is to say it is functionally frivolous, but you'd better be willing to accept the negative consequences if you don't conform.
OK, fine, I was scored as a troll.
To respond further, the original post wrote: "Because evolution teaches what science has concluded with all of the current evidence that they have."
I said it wasn't because, in all honesty, we have additional evidence from human history (in the form of world religions) that do have something to say about the matter and science ignores it....
There are three possibilities: 1) Religion is right. 2) Science is right. 3) They're both right. If science ignores possibilities #1 and #3, that might be science but they might never get the right answer--and what good is that?
Why do world religions count as evidence of how the current set of life came to be?
Also, it's not that the ideas from religions have been ignored--they're just blatantly contradictory with the physical evidence. (At least if you base the ideas on any sort of parsimonious interpretation of the religious text and doctrine.)
Try matching up, say, the order of events in Genesis with the order as inferred from fossil records and from phylogenetic trees from sequence comparisons.
So possibilities #1 and #3 are out. (And why did you leave out possibility #0, that they're both wrong?)
I'm confused. Aside from it being over five years later, from a company that is not going out of business, how are either of these better than the Transmeta processors?
The one with an iPod dock only tells the iPod the title of songs so you can buy them later.
Not too useful if you want to time-shift something that isn't a song. And since you could just go buy the song in the first place and have it at any time you wanted it without even waiting for the radio to play it, if you're interested in time-shifting it's probably not for songs.
Researchers--good ones, anyway--generally don't have a problem focusing. Having an overarching theme just makes it easier for them to focus on the problem that you want them to work on.
Also, research doesn't need to involve a solution. Much of the best basic research usually involves just wanting to know how something works. (Once you understand, then you can come up with applications and devise solutions using the new findings, but that's often the &D part of R&D.)
If you recognize that there is no such magical line--just differential selective mating and hybrid infertility that eventually reaches approximately zero--then there are plenty of speciation events that have been caught in the middle. Again, talkorigins.org lists a pile of these. Macroevolution has been caught at pretty much every stage between no speciation and complete segregation, and though the 100 or 200 years (when people have been paying enough attention to collect sufficiently accurate data--not 2000 (what are you thinking?!)) are a very short time to observe much change in reproductive isolation, changes have been observed (see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html).
Thus, mathematically, we would represent evolution as L=T+M+E, where all are variable.
I think something like L(T,M,E) would make more sense. The + operator normally signifies addition, if you want to use it mathematically. If you want to use it analogically, fine, but then don't call it mathematical.
Intelligent design has been proven over and over again, just as natural selection has been. However, you will not ever find intelligent design proven in nature. The very definition and requirement of intelligent design, that of intelligent input, immediately takes it out of the realm of nature.
This depends very much on your definitions. One can draw such a line, but when explaining small sharp stone objects, you spend a lot more time thinking about fracture patterns, radiocarbon dating, and so on, than you do about some "nature" vs. "not" line.
Intelligent design is thus what would be considered supernatural
Depends whether the intelligence is natural. We generally don't call finding a flint arrowhead a supernatural event.
If there are those who believe that "God" was the intelligence behind [the origin of life] in the beginning, then that's their prerogative. The origin of the original intelligence used to form life is something that cannot ever be proven, and is thus forever in the realm of belief and religion.
This paragraph has a bunch of problems.
First is the hopefully unintended implication that there must have been an intelligence, when that is what's in question. As you may have pointed out--I can't quite tell--there are mechanisms that do not require an intelligence which are adequate to cause evolution.
Second, while in one sense it's the prerogative of anyone to believe whatever they want for any (or no) reason, it's laudable to believe things on the basis of evidence, and to have the strengths of one's beliefs in proportion to the strength of the evidence (so you are appropriately prepared to change if new evidence comes in which warrants the change). In particular, if one has compelling evidence that an intelligence is responsible for life, one still ought to have good evidence that the God of Christianity is that intelligence before simply believing it. For instance, if one also believes that Genesis is divinely inspired, one should reconcile statements in Genesis with knowledge of early life.
Third, science is generally not in the business of proving things in the strong sense, and in the weak sense I don't see why one needs to assume that the original intelligence is necessarily out of grasp. For example, if life on Earth was intelligently seeded by Zogyians, the Zogyians might have left behind an instruction manual explaining what they did and how, and also explain their own origin in a compelling way (e.g. prove the logical necessity of Zogyian existence, demonstrate that Zogyians spontaneously generate under conditions in the early universe, or whatever).
Calling theory as fact is contemptible to anyone who truly holds to the tenants of scientific method.
Good grief. What is a fact besides a theory that seems highly reliable? Scientific theories are often a lot more reliable than those statements that are labeled as "fact" in colloquial usage. So what's the problem?
Both sides are shameful and willingly neglect and ignore the data and proofs of the other side. Someone who is truly being scientific will consider the data of all views, both factual and theoretic.
There's certainly a lot of exasperated ignoring of already-demonstrated-invalid ID arguments among non-ID folks. But if you think anything from that camp has been routinely ignored, you might want to point it out. As I've mentioned elsewhere, www.talkorigins.org and Behe's Empty Box are pretty good sources for non-IDers paying plenty of attention to IDers arguments and data.
As a soci
That wasn't the issue. The issue was whether beneficial mutations were fixed in the population. They are.
If you want to read more about the evidence for the common ancestry of life, there are plenty of sources available. www.talkorigins.org might be a good place to start.
We also have 232 years of experience showing that the current system essentially enforces a two-party system (with a couple of short-lived exceptions).
Lots of parties have tried and failed to make a significant impact (except to hurt their own causes) over the years. I'd say it's time to try changing the voting system instead. Difficult, yes, but it hasn't been demonstrated to be repeatedly impossible.
But this change--to IRV or Condorcet or some other alternative voting system--must be made if you want your "there are other candidates out there" line to mean more than "please throw your vote away".
With our system as it is, if you don't at least make second place, you're irrelevant except as a spoiler, so that people who vote for you are likely to get even less of what they want. Not a good way to build support.
how do you know it's a lie?
Y'might want to google "Behe's empty box", or check out www.talkorigins.org.
There are plenty of well-documented examples of bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. That, in the context the bacteria are in, is beneficial and passed on.
There are a bazillion other examples, but this is the most obvious and trivial. Because not only can you do experiments like that in the lab, it tends to mess up your *other* experiments if you assume that a strain of bacteria will forever be antibiotic-sensitive.
I was speaking of internal interfaces, not user interfaces.
However, if all of your internal interfaces are powerful and clean, it makes it a lot easier to make the UI the same way--because it just hooks directly into underlying powerful, clean functionality, instead of being a nightmarish remapping exercise.
There are still plenty of ways to break a UI even if you have a good underlying architecture. But it won't hurt to have a good foundation.
I haven't the foggiest idea about good reading material for the mapping-it-all-out level.
Personally, I've found mental exercises of the "how many things can you do with a paperclip" type to be at least as useful as the books I've read on the subject.
If you haven't read Code Complete (by McConnell) and/or Refactoring (by Fowler), doing so will help, as keeping some of those things in mind when going to the implementation level will help you choose data structures and libraries (or will help you avoid ones that violate too many principles). But they're hardly a tutorial on the subject.
One of the most useful principles I've found for making "good" software is to design very clean, very powerful interfaces. Focusing on "modularity" often puts the focus in the wrong spot, namely on the center of the module. The point is that the details there *shouldn't matter* because you can abstract away all sorts of fiddly detailed functionality.
It is difficult to make clean and powerful interfaces, however. You really have to understand the nature of the problem you're trying to solve in order to pick the most natural groups of functionality. Very often, if you're trying to get something done in a reasonable amount of time and don't need to maintain the code for that long (though beware--you'll find yourself using, a decade later, programs that you thought you'd rewrite "next month"), it's better to code something quick and specific.
The cleanliness of an interface basically boils down to how little information you can pass to it, and how little information you need from it, in order for it to do what you want; and to what extent all information and data goes through explicitly defined interface elements (e.g. an interface in Java). (Here I'm drawing a distinction between data, e.g. the content of a character stream, and information, which is "hey, there's a character stream here, go work on it".)
The power of an interface basically boils down to how many different high-level operations can be constructed from mixing and matching components of the interface. For example, compositing operations tend to be powerful (e.g. take A, take B of the same type, perform some operation to produce C of the same type from A and B).
There are lots of other generally useful strategies, but I find this one of the most overlooked, especially by otherwise really talented coders (who can tend to make interfaces more complex because they are talented enough to work with something that complicated).
I wasn't setting goalposts in order to play a parlor game--though if I did, I did ask in the context of coming in with large amounts of money and that making the difference (which here it did not). Rather, it was to see what kind of examples came up, if any, and to see if they were worrying or not.
You don't want to run a game where you look for roughly equal numbers of cases with or without monetary interests, since if anything like half the papers that are accepted are accepted for financial reasons (beyond the generic "we need to publish articles since we are in the publishing business", which still allows you to control quality if you pick carefully) the peer review system is in horrible trouble.
The game played should be one where you figure out whether it's common or not relatively quickly.
Very good! The two examples are quite instructive. First, there is *no demonstration of financial pressure*. You showed examples of not keeping out stupidity, period. These are not examples of well-paying stupidity getting in where impoverished stupidity is rejected.
And, on the one hand, you have an example of a cultural studies journal. Cultural studies is not an exceedingly specialized discipline; its research methodology and modes of analysis are reasonably accessible. The fact that Sokal got his paper published--in a reasonably prestigious journal, no less--suggests that cultural studies are not actually science, or at least that the subfield that Sokal was parodying was pretty widely ignored as useless or irrelevant.
On the other, you have a paper in an arcane branch of an arcane subfield of physics being accepting an incomprehensible paper into a relatively prominent journal. These areas of physics are rather inaccessible, and this suggests to me that the useless-or-irrelevant explanation is somewhat more likely. Or it may be that that particular branch of theoretical physics is not science given that it's almost hopelessly untestable.
So, fair enough, on the edges of what is considered science, you find stuff that is at best questionable and at worst not science at all, and you can publish nonsense there if you try and have no particular financial backing. This is not particularly troubling to me, nor does it show that the journal process doesn't work in general--only that it is not utterly immune to all the regular problems with human endeavors (just reasonably resistant).
If you would like to demonstrate that financial motives bias the choice of papers, please provide two examples.
Or, if you would like to demonstrate that this phenomenon is worrying for science in general, please provide examples like those above which were published in a field that is clearly a science (i.e. has heavy contact with experiment and falsification).
When I review papers, I complain about poorly defined terms. And I've gotten complaints, too. Sometimes missing definitions get through; some fields may be worse than others, also. But you don't want someone defining "pi" as "the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle"--anyone with ordinary mathematical knowledge should know this. Likewise, you don't want people spelling out deoxyribonucleic acid, or explaining that epsilon is a very small quantity that may be taken arbitrarily close to zero. It's a waste of time to type it and to read it. So there's a balance between not explaining that by c_alt you mean the ratio of the sum of correlation scores under assay 1 to assay 3, and explaining that by "Morris water maze" you mean a submerged platform in a milky pool that mice have to find by memory and has been used endlessly in learning and memory evaluations for the past two decades. Two different standards for the same quantity is the kind of thing that reviewers should catch and insist upon. (Peer review is useful, but definitely could stand some improvements.)
And there are diminishing numbers of journals that are actually distributed in paper form. They do tend to be of higher quality than the PDFs, especially in the figures, but otherwise they are a waste of space, hard to acquire, and generally aren't used much unless one is browsing (which is still easier on paper media, though once you want to search at all, electronic media win).
It's a user interface for experts. For us, it works pretty well. Deliberately abbreviated? Efficient! Obscure? Not to me! Smidgeon of new information--well, yeah, I knew the older stuff already and I want the new stuff as soon as it's known, and if I don't know the older stuff I want the references so I can go check the data to make sure it means what you've said it means.
Oh, I wish this were the case in my field. Everyone insists on Word documents, even with the sketchy typesetting, the insane amounts of work needed to make it even legible after changing data sets, the questionable equation support, and so on. Then again, I'm in a field that doesn't expect all that many equations, nor do they expect automated recomputation of data into figures. Oh well.
It is elitism, but not financial elitism. It is intellectual elitism, mixed with a dose of what's trendy.
The journals do a good job, for the most part, at keeping out well-paying stupidity. If your article is genuinely bad, you'll have a hard time getting it published anywhere high-profile. Really--you can come in with as much money as you want, and you still won't be considered relevant. If you disagree, please provide at least two examples.
If your article is relatively bad (but on an absolute level at least decent), then it can still get published if you're well-known, if you're working in a hot area, and if you submit to a high profile journal that cares about such things (e.g. Science or Nature). This is unfortunate, but this is an aspect of human nature that is really hard to keep under control.
There are certainly parts of the peer review process that are less than ideal--reviewers don't take the time to understand what they're reviewing, or they have an emotional reaction to something that seems to undercut their fond hopes for how something will turn out and make stupid, picky attacks on a paper, or they realize that they're about to get scooped and so ask for every pedantic little thing so they gain more time for their own work. But even with these flaws, the process does a pretty good job at rejecting junk; it just rejects a little too much non-junk, too, or at least makes the process more painful than necessary.
Still, for humanity to reliably accumulate knowledge, we need a mechanism that rejects almost all obvious junk, and the scientific journals are the ones who are still doing a pretty good job of that.
Some of the secondary uses--e.g. evaluating whether an assistant professor should get tenure--are overblown, but you can't blame the journals for that. That's not why they exist (although it does encourage people to use them more); they exist to provide a peer review mechanism (for profit). If another *good* peer review mechanism appears, it could supplant journals, but none have yet.