I may be missing something, but this is probably a very GOOD thing for wikipedia. The best place for information in any given field is professional peer reviewed journals in that field. The publication rates in the most prestigious journals are demoralizingly low; some journal rejection rates for 1st submissions are upwards of 95%. Manuscripts that are eventually published often go through several rounds of detailed revision between the authors, editors, and reviewers. And once the article is published it's wide open to be scrutinized by other professionals who can then publish critiques and in some cases even necessitate corrections or retractions of the original publication. Again, these are all good things; it's no where near perfect, but things that humans do, and perfect don't belong in the same sentence. Over time this is a relatively good filtering device for archiving information.
A rough estimate of how many people successfully publish in these journals would probably be less than the percentage of the population that have PhD's, MD's or other professional degrees usually possessed by at least one of the authors of a peer reviewed publication. Someone is more than welcome to go get the stats and get a good estimate; my point is simply that it's a small number of people. This is also a very good thing.
The less likely some idiot is to post things like Ted Kennedy is dead; or the fewer Scientologists......well, never-mind I won't go there;) As far as I can tell; the basic structure of wikipedia still allows any one to contribute. Hopefully, over a relatively short period of time; if you contribute somethings stupid, it should be gone, and replaced with referenced material by the smaller number of people who have the integrity to research and think before they have the audacity to say something to millions of people.
End of (my first ever) rant; go ahead, tear me apart;)
I suppose all this is true right now. But this company is obviously investing a lot of money and research, very early on, in developing an infrastructure to get people into space. I wonder what will be going on after another 15 to 20 years of this;)
@ TGV - Agreed; well on the first part of point two (... that's just me being nice to the poster). If anything, the concept of "default" is a discovery, not an invention as the post claims. If you look at biological and cognitive systems you see "defaults" everywhere...instincts, reflexes, prepotent responses... are all terms used to describe "default" behavior or functioning in biological systems; and they've been around since before the 60's... or so I've been told;)
I couldn't agree with you more. Silly humans! Here we go again, playing with nature like we know everything. Between nuclear weapons, our utter hatred and abuse of our own planet, and stuff like this, it amazes me that we haven't managed to destroy ourselves already.
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Thanks for making the point in such a polite way, I was going to tell Carolyn Oliver to go do it herself if she thinks it's so easy ; - )
I may be missing something, but this is probably a very GOOD thing for wikipedia. The best place for information in any given field is professional peer reviewed journals in that field. The publication rates in the most prestigious journals are demoralizingly low; some journal rejection rates for 1st submissions are upwards of 95%. Manuscripts that are eventually published often go through several rounds of detailed revision between the authors, editors, and reviewers. And once the article is published it's wide open to be scrutinized by other professionals who can then publish critiques and in some cases even necessitate corrections or retractions of the original publication. Again, these are all good things; it's no where near perfect, but things that humans do, and perfect don't belong in the same sentence. Over time this is a relatively good filtering device for archiving information. A rough estimate of how many people successfully publish in these journals would probably be less than the percentage of the population that have PhD's, MD's or other professional degrees usually possessed by at least one of the authors of a peer reviewed publication. Someone is more than welcome to go get the stats and get a good estimate; my point is simply that it's a small number of people. This is also a very good thing. The less likely some idiot is to post things like Ted Kennedy is dead; or the fewer Scientologists......well, never-mind I won't go there ;) As far as I can tell; the basic structure of wikipedia still allows any one to contribute. Hopefully, over a relatively short period of time; if you contribute somethings stupid, it should be gone, and replaced with referenced material by the smaller number of people who have the integrity to research and think before they have the audacity to say something to millions of people.
End of (my first ever) rant; go ahead, tear me apart ;)
I suppose all this is true right now. But this company is obviously investing a lot of money and research, very early on, in developing an infrastructure to get people into space. I wonder what will be going on after another 15 to 20 years of this ;)
They should just give it all to Virgin Galactic. In a couple of months these guys will probably be sending NASA advertisements for an international spaces station commuter shuttle (filmed on location in space). http://www.virgingalactic.com/ http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/31/1359243/White-Knight-Two-Unveiled?art_pos=1
@ TGV - Agreed; well on the first part of point two (... that's just me being nice to the poster). If anything, the concept of "default" is a discovery, not an invention as the post claims. If you look at biological and cognitive systems you see "defaults" everywhere...instincts, reflexes, prepotent responses... are all terms used to describe "default" behavior or functioning in biological systems; and they've been around since before the 60's ... or so I've been told ;)
This is interesting and I don't mean to be cynical, but neuroscience is at least 10 years behind cognitive science and psychology. I can't wait until they can use all their fancy technology to tell us something psychologists and psychophysicists don't already know :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_Embedded_Cognition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition
I couldn't agree with you more. Silly humans! Here we go again, playing with nature like we know everything. Between nuclear weapons, our utter hatred and abuse of our own planet, and stuff like this, it amazes me that we haven't managed to destroy ourselves already.