News Editor Paul Tackett has been working days and nights, on top of his usual job, to set up most of the day’s pages in a layout program called Scribus.
Paul Tackett, our newseditor. He's been our Scribus hero of the week. Our Ben Franklin man of the week.
Man of the month, really. Putting together the paper on, um, learning a new software; putting together basically the whole paper.
(Emphasis added.) It sounds like they've been working for nearly a month, behind the scenes, to make the transition possible. It's still impressive, of course, since replicating an existing layout and workflow is difficult even when all the software works perfectly. But this certainly wasn't just one day's worth of work.
I believe we're in another "free" vs. "Free" situation here. The summary implies that it was an experiment to transition to F/OSS software. But the word "open source" never appears in the article.
In the associated video, they call it a "Ben Franklin" experiment and make reference to the "A penny saved..." quote. In the article the only software projects they list are Scribus, which is indeed open source, and Google Docs, which is gratis but not open source. (I have no doubt Google uses plenty of open source to run Google Docs, but it is not an open-source product from the user perspective.)
The article doesn't go into enough detail to really say much else. No doubt they ended up using lots of open source to satisfy their "free" (gratis) requirement, but I suspect they used plenty of freeware, and ad-supported stuff as well. Without much more information I don't think we can say much (positive or negative) about how well open source tools can replace proprietary tools in publishing.
Any way in which scientists can learn to better engage with the public is a good thing. However it's ultimately an uphill battle.
Allow me to uncharitably divide 'public communication' into two classes: the first is where the priority is a given result, and knowledge/truthfulness is secondary. Marketing fits into this category, as well as most political speeches and evangelism (religious or otherwise). A marketer doesn't really care if the public misinterprets a commercial, is misinformed about a product, or whatever else. The only metric that matters is number of purchases. This allows them to take advantage of a slew of human foibles (cognitive biases, emotional manipulation, logical errors, laziness, etc.), as well as misrepresent the truth, in some cases.
The second class of public communication is where one is trying to genuinely disseminate knowledge or truth. In this case engaging with the public is an uphill battle: one must try to overcome human foibles (biases, logical errors, laziness, etc.) and get people to genuinely understand the topic. Science fits into this category, but isn't the only example. Security experts trying to explain risk face the same problem, as does an accused person trying to fight off spurious claims. The fact is that deep understanding of any topic requires precise language, careful reflection, and probably some auxiliary research. In other words, it's inherently difficult to make it easily communicated.
Far too often I see recommendations about 'engaging with the public' which amount to moving the conversation from the second class to the first: dumb it down and make it sound flashy. However this produces the highly misleading (often just plain wrong) science-journalism that makes every scientist cringe. So, again, I'm all for improving how scientists present their findings to the public. However this must not be done at the expense of the truth; what is reported must be accurate and correct. And this definitely requires a public who is willing to put in the effort on their end of the communication.
Hulu Plus is not meant to replace the normal Hulu.com experience. Everything in the press release basically talks about added features that you can get access to if you're willing to pay... but there is nothing to suggest that they will get rid of the standard way of accessing Hulu: going to the website and streaming whatever episodes are on offer for free (and by 'free' I mean 'watching ads').
Now I suppose one could argue that this is just the first phase of them getting rid of the standard Hulu.com. But I think that's pretty unlikely, because what they are offering here is really not at all compelling. These are what they are offering: Hulu.com
Stream from website to computer.
Stream to any Internet-capable device or television set if you know how to do some basic config (e.g. hook up some cables).
Deal with only having access to a subset of episodes for any given show (usually only the recent ones).
You have to agree to watch ads.
Hulu Plus
Stream from website to computer.
Stream to an iPad, iPhone, or some compatible set-top boxes.
Streaming to other devices requires knowing how to do some basic config.
Access to more episodes. (But by no means an exhaustive catalog.)
Potentially better video quality than standard Hulu (but still limited by your net connection and buffering...)
You have to agree to watch ads.
You have to pay $10/month.
So... for $10/month you can get your shows on your iPad and access a few more episodes. But that's about it. This is not the compelling deal many were hoping for. With this kind of deal, Hulu.com will remain by far the more prevalent user experience. Really, people who are ready to drop money on a new set-top box or a monthly subscription or something like iPad 3G + 3G data plan + Hulu Plus subscription will probably be better served by other offerings (like buying shows on iTunes and downloading them to the device... which is probably cheaper since you can grab the shows over cheap WiFi and watch them later...).
The normal Hulu isn't going anywhere. Not with a lackluster deal like that!
When I search I want the site with the best information. Not the one that loads fastest.
Think of it another way: all things being equal, which would you prefer: a site that loads quickly, or one that loads slowly? Users overall much prefer sites that load quickly. Google knows this because they can see people's searching habits. As far as an end-user is concerned, load times are part of the metric of which sites are better than others.
That would make google search results bad right.
Only if you assume that the Google ranking metric should be "relevance of data in page" irrespective any other factors. But for the vast majority of users that really isn't the case. Take another example: how should Google rank a page that has useful content but is also serving up malware via browser vulnerabilities? Most users would agree that blocking it (effectively ranking it very low) is the right choice.
Of course, even though load times are a factor in web experience, the question becomes "What is the right weighting because content relevance and load times?" And here again it is naive to say that the "most relevant" content should be in the #1 slot. To give a contrived example, consider:
-Site A has 100% of the content you want; takes 60 seconds to load
-Site B has 50% of the content you want; takes 2 seconds to load
-Site C has the other 50% of the content you want; takes 2 seconds to load
Google could rank A first, but if they rank B and C in slots #1 and #2, then users can actually get all the information they want in a shorter amount of time. The "content per unit time" has been maximized rather than the "content in first search result". Which sorting algorithm is "best" of course will vary from person to person. Google is probably optimizing in an attempt to satisfy the greatest number of users; and is no doubt using the vast amounts of search-behavior data they have in order to optimize.
So, really, I think taking load time into account is fair. The purpose is not to have sites sorted by accuracy per se; rather it is to give users the tools they need so that they can quickly (and pleasingly) get at the content they want.
I think I would be more intelligent and better at math if I could juggle the low level concepts of the identities at hand as well as apply them to higher level problems.
True. But of course we would all be more intelligent if we were able to remember everything and be good at every mental task. The truth is that each person has a finite amount of mental capability. (And some, of course, have more than others.) It's up to us to decide how to parcel out that mental capability. (Within the limits of what our brains can do.)
So, by outsourcing the memorization of mathematical identities to technology (be it a textbook or calculator) you liberate your mind to concentrate on other things. Of course you would be smarter if you didn't have to. But our brains are limited.
And in some way, the availability of tools to relieve me of keeping a good understanding of the proofs, axioms and identities is inhibiting my ability to know them.
Yes. But is the purpose of your thoughts to reproduce axioms and identities, or to solve a problem using them? If your goal is the former (and in some cases it might be, e.g. to pass a test, build up base familiarity, or win a competition), then your time is well spent memorizing them. If your task is to accomplish something with them, then your time is probably better spent thinking about the task and out-sourcing your memory.
maybe the "important part" is that I know how to use the facts when presented to me
I think that perfectly sums up what we often refer to as "smarts" or "intelligence".
In a modern context, it's almost unfair to test a person's intelligence when you've deprived them of the intellectual infrastructure they've built around themselves. So asking a person to solve a contrived problem without giving them access to the Internet, for instance, it not an accurate measure of how intelligent that person would "really be" in the real world.
Of course you could say that letting people use the Internet or calculators isn't testing their own personal intelligence. Then again, if you ask them a math problem, are they cheating if they use a piece of scrap paper to work it out? Are they cheating if they use the symbols and tricks of mathematics that they've learned? The evolution of humankind has been one of building better and better tools to allow us to externalize computation and abstract-away mental problems so that the brain itself can concentrate on the important part of the thought-process. So language, books, symbolic mathematics, calculators, computers, the Internet... these all build up our intelligence by allowing us to out-source mental tasks (whether they be tasks like short-term memory, where scrap paper can work wonders, or large computations, where computers can help, or tedious search, where the Internet saves the day...).
Putting aside doomsday scenarios ("What if all the infrastructure fails? We won't know how to feed ourselves?"), the prevailing counter-argument is that by outsourcing we make the human at the center of the technology "dumb". Historical evidence suggests otherwise (each "outsourcing of thought" has enabled us to tackle harder problems). (Another argument goes along the lines of "you need to be smart enough to use the tech"... e.g. you need to know how to add and multiply otherwise a calculator is useless to you. This is absolutely true and so it will continue to be the case that humans need to build up skills of those sorts, including skills related to deep contemplation. But that doesn't mean that we need to strip away calculator-like tools to do that.)
And, your focus on the collective as a whole really does frame this argument in a better way. Does it matter if the human is getting "dumber" by some metric... if what he/she actually accomplishes and experiences day-to-day is actually greater and more amazing? The fact that "me+Internet" can have a detailed realtime argument with another "person+Internet" somewhere else on Earth, each of us bringing massive amounts of knowledge and computation to bear in the argument, is, in my opinion, a net gain in human mental performance, even if the solitary "me" would be useless if abandoned in a forest. And even if solitary "me" has a shorter attention span.
In some sense the argument between Pinker and Carr is a variant of the classic "nature vs. nurture" dichotomy. Of course, both Pinker and Carr are knowledgeable enough that they do not cast it so simply. Both of them acknowledge that the basic framework of the brain/mind is established by evolution, but that considerable learning/modification can occur within that framework based on experience and training.
This makes their disagreement a rather more subtle one that the media reports would have us believe. And, actually, far more subtle than either of those op-eds addresses.
The actual disagreement isn't about whether evolution establishes mental modules, or whether experience can modify the brain (both of these are well-established as being true; and both Pinker and Carr would broadly agree with these statements). The real disagreement is over assertions like when Carr says:
We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors - important skills, to be sure - but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.
One can easily grant that we are probably training ourselves to be good at fast skimming, scanning and message-processing (search engines, email, etc.). However Carr seems to be generalizing from this to assume that we are therefore spending less time on contemplation and deep thought. Pinker seems to disagree (implying that deep thought has always been a difficult activity and is probably given as much practice/attention today as it ever was). But neither one provides much evidence. In both cases they point to more tangential evidence.
Obviously an op-ed isn't the best venue for a detailed analysis of scientific literature, but the fact that there is no slam-dunk evidence presented in either leads me to believe this question is still very much unsolved. In this sense, neither of them should be quite as confident in their stated opinions.
At a minimum, we as readers shouldn't draw any deep conclusions from the flimsy evidence those two op-eds present. What I'm really concerned about is that the vast majority of readers will use the two op-eds purely for confirmation bias. Neither one presents a highly convincing case, so readers will simply focus on believing the tidbits from the article that supported their preconception.
The usual explanation given is that people were injecting unicode characters as part of trolling attempts to break Slashdot's layout. So trolls were doing things like using right-to-left control characters to spoof their comment score. See this comment, which explains the situation and links to some examples. Slashdot reacted by blocking anything not in the basic character set.
Frankly this is an unsatisfying answer. Or rather an unsatisfying solution. It seems like it wouldn't take that long for a developer to go through some of the unicode set and build a whitelist and/or blacklist that was comprehensive enough to allow us geeks to use useful symbols (currency, micro, greek letters, etc.) without allowing damaging characters.
It seems like many of Slashdot's anti-trolling features (e.g. trying to prevent allcaps or ASCII art) are somewhat misguided. Nowadays the moderation is pretty good, such that troll comments are basically buried. You may as well let regular posters with good karma post in caps or use ASCII art if that's what their post requires (e.g. posting some calculations that uses lots of symbols and few words ends up being flagged unnecessarily).
All that to say that Slashdot could presumably fix these things, but apparently they have little interest in doing so.
you (the west) hold up crack dealers and gangsters as heroes (50cent et al),
Not really. Or rather, it's nothing new. They are not being held up as "heroes" but rather are a way of marketing to the youth. The youth always want to differentiate themselves and thus need "shocking" idols/icons to rally around. In previous generations swinging hips were plenty shocking (Elvis, etc.), then suggestion of sexuality (Madonna, etc.), and nowadays kids latch onto things like "gangsters" in order to paint a "shocking" line in the sand and differentiate themselves from their parents.
However, in all cases those kids seem to grow up to be reasonably intelligent and responsible adults. You could argue that the fact that the icons have to get progressively more "intense" is a testament to our eroding values. Or, it could just be that society is becoming more liberal and interconnected, so that the "shocking bar" keeps being raised. Regardless, the vast majority of kids don't actually want to become gangsters (nor did the vast majority want to be sluts or whatever in previous generations...).
corporate psychopaths are held up as examples of "successful business leaders"
Again, nothing new. Ruthless leaders have existed for millennia. Successful ruthless leaders have always been admired for what they accomplish, though they've almost always been simultaneously despised for their tactics. In fact this is just a manifestation of the human animal's internally conflicting drives: we have an intense drive to win/compete alongside an intense drive to collaborate/socialize.
where kids see a class of people rip off their savings and retirements (bankers) and have 0 consequences
A bad example to our children, to be sure. But again nothing new. That the rich and powerful collude to protect themselves (and do so successfully) is not a modern trend.
where a celebrity class are held up as models of behaviour where you dont work but shop on your working husbands/wifes credit cards or your rich dads inheritance
There have been aristocracies of sorts (whether royal families, or the "old money" super-rich, or celebrities) across history. They are idolized largely because people dream of their power/riches, and also because the gossip they enable taps into our innate socializing behaviors.
and you are surprised there is less empathy ?
You've identified many idiosyncratic ills in our society. However I question whether there is anything novel about them. It seems to me that these arguably counter-productive human behaviors are as old as history itself.
I question the research from TFA, and I question your attempt to explain the purported trend. Every generation seems to decry the previous generation, believing that people used to be hard-working and moral, whereas the up-and-coming generation is lazy and corrupt and will ruin society. Yet every time, the new generation becomes rather similar to the old (which is both good and bad: they are just as hard-working, but they also lose their youthful idealism and never realize the reform they used to profess).
The problem is that every generation has only two points of reference: their childhood (which their faulty memories paint as being pleasant, etc.) and the current state (where kids get on their nerves). They can't accurately compare to past generations so they assume that the perceived local 'decay' is real rather than illusory. If every generation were right about how kids are worse (lazier, dumber, less moral, etc.), then how does society keep on ticking?
Highlighting the options in the url bar and hitting delete doesn't get rid of them either.
Use "Shift + Delete" while one of the items is highlighted and it will be removed. (Unless it's a bookmark, in which case you need to remove it from your bookmarks.)
In your case, you could go to stackoverflow.com, then click the bookmark icon (the little star to the right of the address bar). This will give this URL higher priority. In fact you can add tags/keywords to the bookmark while you're at it, to identify the site by a more unique word that is easier to type. Or add the tag "stack" to it so that this bookmark will be heavily associated with you typing "s-t-a-...".
This is usually enough to promote a given URL so that awesomebar will put it first. If not, you might have to type "s-t-..." and select it a few times to train the system that this URL is higher priority.
Yes, it's a bit annoying to have to train/fiddle with it. But for many of us, the amount of fiddling with the awesomebar is much lower than it once was fiddling with bookmarks and the like. The vast majority of the time, I start typing in the awesomebar and it brings me where I want (usually within two or three characters typed). There are some times when it doesn't... and this is frustrating (all the more since I've gotten used to relying on it). But, as I've outlined above, you can then manually promote the behavior you want. The awesomebar is not perfect, but it is quite useful for many of us. (Again, your mileage may vary... my main point is that many of us use it productively. If you don't like it, that's fine too. You can either begrudgingly learn to use it more efficiently, switch to another browser, or continue being annoyed by it. Your call.)
Even better, produce an unambiguous machine-readable language for law, one that can be used to make legal inferences (e.g. - is this particular act legal?). Of course, this would cause a huge mess when people realise how self-contradictory and downright logically impossible some of the law is...
The current situation, where a citizen has no hope of really ascertaining if a prospective action will be legal or not, is a huge problem. But trying to make law even more rigid and codified is not necessarily the answer. It does appeal to many in the Slashdot crowd, since we like and understand computer languages, but has numerous problems when applied to real laws.
1. The average person will have great difficulty parsing a truly unambiguous and machine-readable language. Elsewhere in this discussion some have called for just the opposite: human-readable laws, that don't require a lawyer to make sense of. Highly structured laws might make the situation even worse, where only a small group of people are able to really understand the law, which effectively makes every citizen a criminal.
2. Ultimately the real world is itself ambiguous and complex, such that you will never produce an unambiguous representation of problems/solutions therein. The laws need some wiggle-room to avoid becoming absurd in their application.
3. The problem with complex rule-based systems is that they can, and will, be gamed. In particular, it is the rich and powerful who will be most able to subvert the system, because they have the resources (the money necessary to pay people to spend time figuring it out, for instance) to find all the special deals, exceptions, and loopholes. Note that I'm not even talking about the rich and powerful rewriting the rules (though that is a problem, too). I'm talking about the fact that for a given ruleset, the rich and powerful will have the best chance to exploit that ruleset to their advantage. Thus simpler rulesets can be more fair.
I'm sympathetic to the notion of a less ambiguous legal system. But I don't think that's realistic. Instead what I think we really want is a less murky legal system. The laws should be written clearly. They should be accessible and well organized. Part of the job of the court system should be to digest legal codes and legal rulings into things that the average person can understand. For instance, they should produce a FAQ for sub-sections of the legal code, helping to guide the average citizen into understanding what things are legal or not (and why, and what sections of the legal code are implicated, etc.). The goal is for people to know where they stand vis-a-vis the law.
P.S.: The git-branches for legal changes is brilliant. It allows an auditable trail and forces the actual legal code to be a single document, rather than a piecemeal of amendments and addendums. This makes laws shorter and easier to read.
I like the concept. As hard as it is to get a law onto the books, it's almost impossible to get a law off the books. This leads to bloated and overly complex legal systems, innumerable special rules and exceptions, and so on. I also think that most laws should have time limits on them in the first place. Basically something that requires them to re-vote on the issue after X years, perhaps with a sliding scale if the law is always well-supported. (Something like 4 years, then possible 8-year extension, then 20-year extension, etc.)
I also like the idea of discouraging adding unrelated things into a bill. You don't want your pet project to be canceled just because the larger bill it was included in didn't meet a target!
There are of course potential problems:
1. Some legal changes that involve massive changes in infrastructure. Having these kinds of things be erected/deconstructed (perhaps repeatedly, as political climates for some issues can oscillate) might be even less efficient that the current situation.
2. Corporations could temporarily break a new law (or collude, etc.) in order to force it to miss a target, thereby getting legislation repealed. (But then again, this is just another variant of the already-well-entrenched "powerful companies can cause problems" issue.)
3. Issues not considered in the original objective target could arise. (E.g. an anti-pollution bill that misses its target because of a sudden environmental disaster in some other country that spreads...) Obviously the "targets" listed in laws would have to be crafted very carefully.
4. Related to #3, it is tempting to have a target in a law that is tied to the action of the law itself... but society is far too complex for this to generally be true. Laws may try to address issues of the environment, economic stability, employment, or whatever; but all of these things can be drastically affected by other things going on in society, unrelated to the law. So a very successful and well-supported law could be automatically repealed just because of a recession or other event.
As I said, I like the idea. But a blanket "measurable objective or repealed" rule might not work. At a minimum, I see no reason why laws shouldn't have an explicit statement of what the law is trying to accomplish, so that voters can more specifically assess whether the law is doing what it aims to. And we really do need better mechanisms for repealing laws.
Can you be more specific? I certainly see the negative effects of feedback in high-speed trading (volatile reactions, etc.), though there are some benefits to having all those day-traders and millisecond traders (liquidity, closing price gaps, etc.).
In the case of governance, I can't really see what kind of problematic feedback loops would be generated. Obviously some government data needs to not be open (e.g. military secrets), but having the lawmaking process open and transparent (clear, easy to access information on who supported/didn't-support a given law (perhaps even on a section-by-section basis), revision histories, public debates, etc.) seems like a good thing. Obviously there will always be some amount of "off the record" conversations between politicians (which can be bad, e.g. backroom deals; or good, e.g. frank discussions). With respect to feedback, the main danger I see is that "voter fickleness" could get amplified, where elections (and thus important lawmaking) end up turning on trivialities. (E.g. with more and more transparency and record-keeping, it's almost certain you'll eventual find a sound-bite of your opponent saying something that seems stupid or wrong or evil.)
But I would argue we're already deep into the territory where such fickleness is having an effect. Commentators and voters who have already made up their minds already have enough specious data for their confirmation biases. As such, increased information to voters is a good thing because those voters who want to actually be informed and make reasonable choices will have the ability to do so (and won't have to take the word of a commentator).
Damping effects are still necessary, of course. But the inherently long-term voting cycle serves that purpose nicely, preventing voters from changing their representative on a daily basis or on a whim. This averages out many of the spurious and pointless "scandals" while allowing data (if available!) on important issues and voting records to build. I do indeed agree that other damping effects should be considered in a transparency roll-out, but to me that is just a matter of "doing transparency right"--the case for transparency itself is quite solid.
(Incidentally, one change that I've often thought about, which would serve both transparency and damping, is that any proposed law should have to sit, unchanged, for a set period of time (weeks) before being voted on. (New changes reset the clock.) This would give the public/voters/media/commentators time to examine it in detail, identify problems, and make their voices heard to their representatives. Having representatives act as a smoothing effect for the (sometimes irrational) public can be very good... but the way in which proposed laws currently mutate so rapidly and are modified at the last minute, so that the public isn't even sure what is finally put into law, is corrosive to democratic and transparent society.)
Whether a plant experiences pain and suffering depends on your definition of it.
True enough, but I think our current best data does indeed suggest that the ability of, say, a mammal to process and store information, sensation, and memories greatly exceeds that of, say, a tree. The human conception of "pain and suffering" does indeed seem to depend on the existence of a central nervous system. While philosophically we can think about whether other complex entities (like plants) have different kinds of experiences and thus are subject to pain and suffering, I think our best data strongly suggest that animals experience "the human-like" pain and suffering whereas plants do not.
I also have an omnivore diet, and fully-agree that such a diet is both natural and historical. But "natural" does not mean "moral", and in fact a great many things that we cherish as being ethical (freedom, democracy, fairness, etc.) are in fact hard to come by in nature.
Should some people choose to eat according to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, I am happy to leave them to their choice. I am just as happy when they leave me to my choice.
The problem is that this isn't just a matter of personal choice. Our consumption has a real, long-term effect on the environment. It is reasonable for vegetarians to advocate their case, since at least part of their argument is that we could reduce our environmental impact (an argument that affects all of us).
It's part of the price paid for the convenience of eating meat.
Indeed. Unfortunately not all omnivores are willing to concede that simple point. Too many think that they have some intrinsic right to eat meat, without acknowledging that it is a luxury that causes animal suffering and environmental damage.
I'm not trying to "judge" meat-eaters (heck, I am one), but I'm trying to keep the debate logical. Everyone in modern society has lots of luxuries that have associated impacts. We need to be aware of them so that we can make reasonable choices.
Don't think that only omnivores are guilty of wishy-washy emotionally charged logic.
Certainly not. In fact a great many vegetarians haven't fully thought-out the logic of what they are doing, and are not able to defend the case very well at all.
I agree with your abstract worries. However I think that in order for morality to make any sense at all, you need to accept certain axioms and definitions. At a really abstract level, there is nothing particularly different about the collection of chemicals and reactions that make up a human, and those that make up tree... yet we all agree that a human has certain moral rights and responsibilities that the tree does not. (E.g. property rights!)
Once you've accepted that making sense of morality requires some (arbitrary, if you like) axioms, then we can debate about what those axioms should be. It seems to be generally agreed that reducing harm and suffering is a good thing, whereas inducing harm and suffering is a bad thing. One of the core vegetarian arguments seems to be that if animals can experience suffering (and data suggests they can, though obviously not in the same way as humans), then we should try to reduce that suffering (and not cause it!).
It's easy to argue that human life is more important than animal life, and hence a human is morally allowed to eat an animal to survive. It is less easy to argue that humans who have the choice of surviving off of plants or animals have a right to cause suffering to support their meat-eating luxury. Of course one could argue that our moral code requires some new axiom, which explicitly elevates humans above animals. However it seems that even most omnivores don't really agree with such an axiom (for instance if they see an animal suffering, they will try to stop the suffering, even if it causes them some amount of inconvenience). Instead, the majority of modern omnivores just eat meat because it is tasty and because the harm it causes is hidden from view.
I'm not trying to criticize omnivores... just trying to keep the debate grounded. (For what it's worth, I am a meat-eater right now.)
If you like eating meat, that's awesome. But don't use weak logic like:
all plants are living things too. Why is it more right to eat them than the good old mmmmm grilled bee
It should be obvious that the vegetarian argument is based upon a creature's capacity to experience pain and suffering. This is why there is in fact a gradation in vegetarianism: the most hard-line won't eat any animal at all, whereas some will eat some types of animals (e.g. shrimp) that they deem sufficiently primitive that they likely do not experience pain or suffering. Our best data suggest that plants cannot experience anything at all (much less pain and suffering), hence there is no moral argument against using them as a food source. (Whereas it's pretty clear that many mammals can experience pain and suffering.)
You may disagree with the argument (that's fine), but don't mis-characterize it. In fact, most people do agree with the argument, but merely set the line somewhere different (they will consider it wrong to kill other humans, and even primates, for food).
I think omnivorous humans need to stop using weak logic to defend their habits. They should just accept that their meat-eating does indeed cause environmental damage, and animal suffering, but that they consider this an acceptable compromise given the luxury that meat-eating represents. (Meat-eating is hardly the only luxury in modern society that has negative environmental consequences.) Conversely, if you just can't handle the thought that your luxurious diet causes environmental damage and animal suffering, then perhaps you should change your diet.
I suspect the point will be efficiency and convenience, which will be true for technophobes and technophiles alike.
Think of Google search. "All" it did was make finding things more efficient--but that represented a dramatic improvement in the experience of using the web. Or Gmail--we all had email beforehand, but it provided a much better interface. (Obviously not everyone will agree that the Gmail interface is good, but my point is just that lots of people do like that interface, and thus switched to Gmail.)
If GoogleTV just makes it simpler/more-efficient to watch TV, then that's a sufficient improvement. That is "the point". The idea seems to be that instead of deciding "I want to watch this show at some point, better set it to record on my DVR" or deciding "Oh, that show is starting soon, better head to my TV" or "that show I like is on Hulu, I think, let me go find it"... the GoogleTV will deal will all those details. You will just type in the name of the show you want to watch, and it will get that show for you (either scheduling the DVR, or switching to the channel, or loading the appropriate website, or whatever). This frees the user from having to navigate the arcane TV listings (which are, even in this day and age, just a numerical list!... and one that changes on occasion!), remembering which shows are on which websites, or even remembering what time a given show plays. They just tell the device "these are the shows I like watching" and it takes care of the rest.
One can immediately think of other useful things such a box could do (auto-loading the next episode if available, recommending new shows based on ones you already like, etc.). Of course these are all things that the user could do themselves with some effort. But the idea is to reduce the effort, and make the user experience better. (Really, that's what all of technology is: mechanizing labor, automating tedious tasks, hiding away complexity... in a sense these all amount to refining a person's user experience with respect to a given task/action.)
Of course I have no idea if GoogleTV will do all of this in a smooth and effective way. It might suck. But there is at least the potential to come up with something useful. Something that most people would indeed like to have...
Frankly I don't buy the "glory days of newspaper" nostalgia argument. The idea that headlines were once crafted to be deeply insightful, and informative doesn't mesh with my own recollections. I've always found headlines to be frustratingly vague. Headline writers seem obsessed with injecting puns, usually at the expense of clarity. The whole concept of a headline in print, being limited by font size and page size, means that the content is strangely constrained and thus non-optimal sentence fragments end up being used. And, finally, I think newspapers have been optimizing their headlines to be attention-grabbing (rather than strictly informative/useful) for a long time now.
In other words, the notion of a headline crafted for a non-journalistic purpose has been around for a long time. In the print era, it was optimized for what was most likely to catch/attract a reader who is walking by a newsstand. (There is a reason the headlines on print newspapers are so gigantic.) Nowadays the headlines are being optimized for what an online reader is most likely to stumble across or search for. In both cases, the headline is an advertisement for the article. It is meant to induce you to go check out the product.
As long as there is a profit motive behind journalism/news, there will be a conflict between what the distributor wants (to make money) and what the consumer wants (to be informed). That's more or less fine, since we've achieved a decent balance. But that does mean there are some inefficiencies (like infuriatingly misleading headlines).
Is it really so hard to simply go through Facebook's privacy settings yourself and consciously set them to whatever you want (as far as that's possible)?
Yes, it really is "so hard". Intentionally so. Take a look at this NY Times graphic showing all the privacy settings options that exist throughout a Facebook profile. (Or, at least, the options the NY Times was able to find.) You can see that the options behave in inconsistent ways. You can set "maximum privacy" on one page without realizing that an option at a different level over-rides this (e.g. third-party ads may still have access).
To really insure maximum privacy, you not only have to navigate this maze of options (the NY Times graphic helps to make sure you've nailed them all), but you have to repeatedly re-check your settings since Facebook can (and does) change the settings interface (and thus the default settings) from time to time. So a previously "highly private" profile can have information leak unless you are actively checking whenever there are changes.
As I said before, this is probably intentional. Facebook would prefer to have more access to data and more ability to redistribute personal data for profit. So it is to their advantage if people don't have maximally-private settings. A plugin that actually produces a clean, sane, and useful privacy settings interface can thus make it much easier to control those settings. It also points out just had bad Facebook's settings and customization pages really are: you need third-party apps and newspaper flow-charts to make sense of them.
We all have our complaints about windowing systems. It does indeed seem like we spend a fair amount of time just managing the windows (moving, resizing, etc.) rather than working. Like you, I'm pretty convinced that there has to be a better design out there. But I don't think it's the right strategy to throw-out windowing systems altogether, without a viable alternative to actually push towards. Despite all their warts, our modern GUIs are by now highly tuned and in fact do help us be productive.
There has to be a better design than a metaphor to desks and file cabinets...
I think our modern desktop metaphor isn't really mimicking desks and file cabinets in any meaningful way. Sure, the same terms are applied ("desktop", "folder", "file", etc.), but in reality the computer-objects bear little resemblance to the real-world objects. (You can't infinitely nest folders in the real world!) I think our GUI metaphors have abandoned any real-world resemblance that was slowing them down. (E.g. you can't arbitrarily resize a real-world sheet of paper on the fly, but it's easy to resize a GUI.)
I'm not sure what the answer is (mostly just thinking out loud, here), but I think our time would be better spent refining the modern GUI, rather than throwing it all away and hoping that something fantastically better fills the void. Some ideas that spring to mind:
1. Windows in a GUI are useful (e.g. to read from one and type into another) but managing all the windows is as much fun as shuffling paper on a real desk. What would help is far smarter layout algorithms. When a new window appears, its size and position should "make sense". For instance it should be in some way proportional to the amount of text within it. It should try to appear in areas that will not obscure existing content. A given document should re-open to the same position on screen as the last time you had it open (thereby taking advantage of human visual memory and habit-forming procedures). A GUI that shuffled all the windows around on you would probably be more annoying than helpful. But some amount of predictive behavior would be nice (e.g. tossing a window towards one edge of the screen could dock it there cleanly.)
2. GUIs should let users easily define tasks rather than forcing them to manually open all the windows/documents associated with a given workflow. So when I open the "banking" task, my financial spreadsheets should open (and appear with the size/position I always set them to), my Firefox window should appear in the right place with the right websites all open, my calculator app should pop open in the upper-right-hand-corner, and so on... It should be easier for users to define sets of tasks and have those states reappear when required. This all boils down to: the size, position, and state of all the windows on-screen actually conveys useful information to the user! Don't throw that information away!
3. Each app should have a hidden backend database where every command and help topic (with appropriate index terms and tags/keywords and synonyms) is stored. If you can't remember where the button or menu item for a given task is, it should be trivial to type that into a persistent "help/do-stuff" bar and have the option simply appear, ready to be clicked/invoked. For apps with tons of options (MS Word, Photoshop, etc.) this would make it trivial to find the option you want. (Just type "red eye correction" or "make sentence all caps" or whatever.) If done properly, this would also allow users to interact with applications in a faster text-command mode (anyone who has used Firefox's Ubiquity will know what I'm talking about.)
These are just the ideas that have occurred to me (repeatedly) and may not be the best ideas out there. Overall my point is that I agree we need better GUI-interaction styles... but that I think we can use the existing windowing systems as good starting points for further refinement.
If we have rules for intellectual property, we should have them for intellectual fraud too.
I disagree. Plagiarism is morally wrong, but that doesn't mean it has to be illegal. There are lots of things that are morally wrong but not illegal (e.g. cheating on your spouse). That's the way it should be: for the vast majority of things, social norms and consequences (including public outcry, shaming, damage to reputation, etc.) are more than sufficient. Laws should only be enacted in those rare cases where the public safety or public good needs more protection. To do otherwise gives the lawmakers/enforcers too much power, and tends to turn every person into a criminal. (Does it really make sense to prosecute a college student who cheats on an essay? Or is flunking him sufficient?)
Really, we have far too many laws at present, and could stand to have many repealed. (The various "intellectual property" laws could certainly stand to be pruned-down, for instance.) I see no pressing social need for plagiarism to be illegal. (Plagiarism may be part of some larger fraud, but in those cases there are already other good laws (anti-fraud, truth-in-advertising, etc.) to address the real transgression.)
It's a false dichotomy to discuss "streamlined user experience" versus "user freedom" as if one is completely at odds with the other. To provide a streamlined experience simply requires good design and sensible defaults. You don't have to lock-out the user from changing those defaults, accessing the full capabilities of the device, or repurposing the device entirely.
Of course it makes sense that vendors of locked-down solutions would spread this misunderstanding. They want to enforce consumer lock-in to their product/services stack. By convincing customers that the lock-in is actually to their benefit, they now have people effectively begging to give up their user freedoms. What bothers me is that media outlets seem not to have generally caught on to this lie. Instead they repeat the false dichotomy, as if it were a fact of nature. I guess it is because computers are still fairly misunderstood by the public at large. (By comparison, most people would not buy it if they hired an electrician who installed locks on their fusebox, telling them that they'll have to call/pay him when the fuses blow... because only then can he guarantee a proper "electrical user experience"...)
every kid in the world knows that it's a lot funnier to poke the bitchy guy, and everyone knows the best thing to counter is to just ignore.
Well you can either ignore people by giving them what they've whining to get... or you can ignore them by sticking to your principles and not budging.
Wikipedia is supposed to be a collection of solid, sourced information. It's not supposed to be "a source of solid, sourced information... except when it's funny not to be!"
So Wikipedia is trying to stick to their principles and not let an entry degenerate into something funny but ultimately confusing. The only proper way to actually maintain the entry is to explain the origin and popularization of the word (specifically, that it is a word mentioned in an xkcd comic). Their current solution, a redirect to the entry on xkcd, seems reasonable until the term gains further notability and there's something to actually write about in the entry.
now, wikipedians, chill out. IIRC, there's an entry on the wikipedia's rules saying that you can throw away all the rules if appropriate.
The problem with the "chill out" argument is that the perpetrator of every joke-edit and piece of vandalism would like Wikipedia to "chill out"--but to allow all those joke entries to accumulate would seriously harm the quality and credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Why does your joke-edit warrant the "throw away the rules" exception but all the other joke-edits do not? The fair and proper solution is to not allow joke-content, and to stick to Wikipedia's principles.
So, really, I think it is the joke purveyors (well-meaning vandals?) who should chill out, and accept that the jokes they are interested in do not warrant the "throw away the rules" exception.
Indeed. Scroogle sounds like a good idea... but it's a service that exists parasitically to Google proper. I'm not trying to imply anything unethical by using the word "parasite", but this really is a situation where Scroogle uses Google's capabilities/services without contributing anything back to Google. This is fine to the extent that Google tolerates it. But they are under no obligation to make accommodations to keep these third-party services running smoothly. TFA says "It's not as if Google needs the money" which seems rather uncharitable given that Google has put up with Scroogle's operations for many years now without any complaints or blocking attempts (that I'm aware of). And Google does need some money (they would have to shut down if everyone used their services through Scroogle...).
Scroogle needs to either adjust their service to keep up with Google's changes, or make a business case to Google for why it is in their best interest to provide a stable interface/API for third-party redistributors like them. The implication in TFA that they are somehow entitled to this interface/API/access is really silly.
Slashdot Mirror
One day?
I believe the transition took longer than a day; but they only used the 'alternate free workflow' for a day.
My evidence is that in the article they say:
(Emphasis added.) Also in the video at about 0:18 the narrator says:
(Emphasis added.) It sounds like they've been working for nearly a month, behind the scenes, to make the transition possible. It's still impressive, of course, since replicating an existing layout and workflow is difficult even when all the software works perfectly. But this certainly wasn't just one day's worth of work.
I believe we're in another "free" vs. "Free" situation here. The summary implies that it was an experiment to transition to F/OSS software. But the word "open source" never appears in the article.
In the associated video, they call it a "Ben Franklin" experiment and make reference to the "A penny saved..." quote. In the article the only software projects they list are Scribus, which is indeed open source, and Google Docs, which is gratis but not open source. (I have no doubt Google uses plenty of open source to run Google Docs, but it is not an open-source product from the user perspective.)
The article doesn't go into enough detail to really say much else. No doubt they ended up using lots of open source to satisfy their "free" (gratis) requirement, but I suspect they used plenty of freeware, and ad-supported stuff as well. Without much more information I don't think we can say much (positive or negative) about how well open source tools can replace proprietary tools in publishing.
Well put.
Any way in which scientists can learn to better engage with the public is a good thing. However it's ultimately an uphill battle.
Allow me to uncharitably divide 'public communication' into two classes: the first is where the priority is a given result, and knowledge/truthfulness is secondary. Marketing fits into this category, as well as most political speeches and evangelism (religious or otherwise). A marketer doesn't really care if the public misinterprets a commercial, is misinformed about a product, or whatever else. The only metric that matters is number of purchases. This allows them to take advantage of a slew of human foibles (cognitive biases, emotional manipulation, logical errors, laziness, etc.), as well as misrepresent the truth, in some cases.
The second class of public communication is where one is trying to genuinely disseminate knowledge or truth. In this case engaging with the public is an uphill battle: one must try to overcome human foibles (biases, logical errors, laziness, etc.) and get people to genuinely understand the topic. Science fits into this category, but isn't the only example. Security experts trying to explain risk face the same problem, as does an accused person trying to fight off spurious claims. The fact is that deep understanding of any topic requires precise language, careful reflection, and probably some auxiliary research. In other words, it's inherently difficult to make it easily communicated.
Far too often I see recommendations about 'engaging with the public' which amount to moving the conversation from the second class to the first: dumb it down and make it sound flashy. However this produces the highly misleading (often just plain wrong) science-journalism that makes every scientist cringe. So, again, I'm all for improving how scientists present their findings to the public. However this must not be done at the expense of the truth; what is reported must be accurate and correct. And this definitely requires a public who is willing to put in the effort on their end of the communication.
Hulu Plus is not meant to replace the normal Hulu.com experience. Everything in the press release basically talks about added features that you can get access to if you're willing to pay... but there is nothing to suggest that they will get rid of the standard way of accessing Hulu: going to the website and streaming whatever episodes are on offer for free (and by 'free' I mean 'watching ads').
Now I suppose one could argue that this is just the first phase of them getting rid of the standard Hulu.com. But I think that's pretty unlikely, because what they are offering here is really not at all compelling. These are what they are offering:
Hulu.com
Stream from website to computer.
Stream to any Internet-capable device or television set if you know how to do some basic config (e.g. hook up some cables).
Deal with only having access to a subset of episodes for any given show (usually only the recent ones).
You have to agree to watch ads.
Hulu Plus
Stream from website to computer.
Stream to an iPad, iPhone, or some compatible set-top boxes.
Streaming to other devices requires knowing how to do some basic config.
Access to more episodes. (But by no means an exhaustive catalog.)
Potentially better video quality than standard Hulu (but still limited by your net connection and buffering...)
You have to agree to watch ads.
You have to pay $10/month.
So... for $10/month you can get your shows on your iPad and access a few more episodes. But that's about it. This is not the compelling deal many were hoping for. With this kind of deal, Hulu.com will remain by far the more prevalent user experience. Really, people who are ready to drop money on a new set-top box or a monthly subscription or something like iPad 3G + 3G data plan + Hulu Plus subscription will probably be better served by other offerings (like buying shows on iTunes and downloading them to the device... which is probably cheaper since you can grab the shows over cheap WiFi and watch them later...).
The normal Hulu isn't going anywhere. Not with a lackluster deal like that!
When I search I want the site with the best information. Not the one that loads fastest.
Think of it another way: all things being equal, which would you prefer: a site that loads quickly, or one that loads slowly? Users overall much prefer sites that load quickly. Google knows this because they can see people's searching habits. As far as an end-user is concerned, load times are part of the metric of which sites are better than others.
That would make google search results bad right.
Only if you assume that the Google ranking metric should be "relevance of data in page" irrespective any other factors. But for the vast majority of users that really isn't the case. Take another example: how should Google rank a page that has useful content but is also serving up malware via browser vulnerabilities? Most users would agree that blocking it (effectively ranking it very low) is the right choice.
Of course, even though load times are a factor in web experience, the question becomes "What is the right weighting because content relevance and load times?" And here again it is naive to say that the "most relevant" content should be in the #1 slot. To give a contrived example, consider:
-Site A has 100% of the content you want; takes 60 seconds to load
-Site B has 50% of the content you want; takes 2 seconds to load
-Site C has the other 50% of the content you want; takes 2 seconds to load
Google could rank A first, but if they rank B and C in slots #1 and #2, then users can actually get all the information they want in a shorter amount of time. The "content per unit time" has been maximized rather than the "content in first search result". Which sorting algorithm is "best" of course will vary from person to person. Google is probably optimizing in an attempt to satisfy the greatest number of users; and is no doubt using the vast amounts of search-behavior data they have in order to optimize.
So, really, I think taking load time into account is fair. The purpose is not to have sites sorted by accuracy per se; rather it is to give users the tools they need so that they can quickly (and pleasingly) get at the content they want.
I think I would be more intelligent and better at math if I could juggle the low level concepts of the identities at hand as well as apply them to higher level problems.
True. But of course we would all be more intelligent if we were able to remember everything and be good at every mental task. The truth is that each person has a finite amount of mental capability. (And some, of course, have more than others.) It's up to us to decide how to parcel out that mental capability. (Within the limits of what our brains can do.)
So, by outsourcing the memorization of mathematical identities to technology (be it a textbook or calculator) you liberate your mind to concentrate on other things. Of course you would be smarter if you didn't have to. But our brains are limited.
And in some way, the availability of tools to relieve me of keeping a good understanding of the proofs, axioms and identities is inhibiting my ability to know them.
Yes. But is the purpose of your thoughts to reproduce axioms and identities, or to solve a problem using them? If your goal is the former (and in some cases it might be, e.g. to pass a test, build up base familiarity, or win a competition), then your time is well spent memorizing them. If your task is to accomplish something with them, then your time is probably better spent thinking about the task and out-sourcing your memory.
maybe the "important part" is that I know how to use the facts when presented to me
I think that perfectly sums up what we often refer to as "smarts" or "intelligence".
I agree.
In a modern context, it's almost unfair to test a person's intelligence when you've deprived them of the intellectual infrastructure they've built around themselves. So asking a person to solve a contrived problem without giving them access to the Internet, for instance, it not an accurate measure of how intelligent that person would "really be" in the real world.
Of course you could say that letting people use the Internet or calculators isn't testing their own personal intelligence. Then again, if you ask them a math problem, are they cheating if they use a piece of scrap paper to work it out? Are they cheating if they use the symbols and tricks of mathematics that they've learned? The evolution of humankind has been one of building better and better tools to allow us to externalize computation and abstract-away mental problems so that the brain itself can concentrate on the important part of the thought-process. So language, books, symbolic mathematics, calculators, computers, the Internet... these all build up our intelligence by allowing us to out-source mental tasks (whether they be tasks like short-term memory, where scrap paper can work wonders, or large computations, where computers can help, or tedious search, where the Internet saves the day...).
Putting aside doomsday scenarios ("What if all the infrastructure fails? We won't know how to feed ourselves?"), the prevailing counter-argument is that by outsourcing we make the human at the center of the technology "dumb". Historical evidence suggests otherwise (each "outsourcing of thought" has enabled us to tackle harder problems). (Another argument goes along the lines of "you need to be smart enough to use the tech"... e.g. you need to know how to add and multiply otherwise a calculator is useless to you. This is absolutely true and so it will continue to be the case that humans need to build up skills of those sorts, including skills related to deep contemplation. But that doesn't mean that we need to strip away calculator-like tools to do that.)
And, your focus on the collective as a whole really does frame this argument in a better way. Does it matter if the human is getting "dumber" by some metric... if what he/she actually accomplishes and experiences day-to-day is actually greater and more amazing? The fact that "me+Internet" can have a detailed realtime argument with another "person+Internet" somewhere else on Earth, each of us bringing massive amounts of knowledge and computation to bear in the argument, is, in my opinion, a net gain in human mental performance, even if the solitary "me" would be useless if abandoned in a forest. And even if solitary "me" has a shorter attention span.
This makes their disagreement a rather more subtle one that the media reports would have us believe. And, actually, far more subtle than either of those op-eds addresses.
The actual disagreement isn't about whether evolution establishes mental modules, or whether experience can modify the brain (both of these are well-established as being true; and both Pinker and Carr would broadly agree with these statements). The real disagreement is over assertions like when Carr says:
We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors - important skills, to be sure - but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.
One can easily grant that we are probably training ourselves to be good at fast skimming, scanning and message-processing (search engines, email, etc.). However Carr seems to be generalizing from this to assume that we are therefore spending less time on contemplation and deep thought. Pinker seems to disagree (implying that deep thought has always been a difficult activity and is probably given as much practice/attention today as it ever was). But neither one provides much evidence. In both cases they point to more tangential evidence.
Obviously an op-ed isn't the best venue for a detailed analysis of scientific literature, but the fact that there is no slam-dunk evidence presented in either leads me to believe this question is still very much unsolved. In this sense, neither of them should be quite as confident in their stated opinions.
At a minimum, we as readers shouldn't draw any deep conclusions from the flimsy evidence those two op-eds present. What I'm really concerned about is that the vast majority of readers will use the two op-eds purely for confirmation bias. Neither one presents a highly convincing case, so readers will simply focus on believing the tidbits from the article that supported their preconception.
The usual explanation given is that people were injecting unicode characters as part of trolling attempts to break Slashdot's layout. So trolls were doing things like using right-to-left control characters to spoof their comment score. See this comment, which explains the situation and links to some examples. Slashdot reacted by blocking anything not in the basic character set.
Frankly this is an unsatisfying answer. Or rather an unsatisfying solution. It seems like it wouldn't take that long for a developer to go through some of the unicode set and build a whitelist and/or blacklist that was comprehensive enough to allow us geeks to use useful symbols (currency, micro, greek letters, etc.) without allowing damaging characters.
It seems like many of Slashdot's anti-trolling features (e.g. trying to prevent allcaps or ASCII art) are somewhat misguided. Nowadays the moderation is pretty good, such that troll comments are basically buried. You may as well let regular posters with good karma post in caps or use ASCII art if that's what their post requires (e.g. posting some calculations that uses lots of symbols and few words ends up being flagged unnecessarily).
All that to say that Slashdot could presumably fix these things, but apparently they have little interest in doing so.
you (the west) hold up crack dealers and gangsters as heroes (50cent et al),
Not really. Or rather, it's nothing new. They are not being held up as "heroes" but rather are a way of marketing to the youth. The youth always want to differentiate themselves and thus need "shocking" idols/icons to rally around. In previous generations swinging hips were plenty shocking (Elvis, etc.), then suggestion of sexuality (Madonna, etc.), and nowadays kids latch onto things like "gangsters" in order to paint a "shocking" line in the sand and differentiate themselves from their parents.
However, in all cases those kids seem to grow up to be reasonably intelligent and responsible adults. You could argue that the fact that the icons have to get progressively more "intense" is a testament to our eroding values. Or, it could just be that society is becoming more liberal and interconnected, so that the "shocking bar" keeps being raised. Regardless, the vast majority of kids don't actually want to become gangsters (nor did the vast majority want to be sluts or whatever in previous generations...).
corporate psychopaths are held up as examples of "successful business leaders"
Again, nothing new. Ruthless leaders have existed for millennia. Successful ruthless leaders have always been admired for what they accomplish, though they've almost always been simultaneously despised for their tactics. In fact this is just a manifestation of the human animal's internally conflicting drives: we have an intense drive to win/compete alongside an intense drive to collaborate/socialize.
where kids see a class of people rip off their savings and retirements (bankers) and have 0 consequences
A bad example to our children, to be sure. But again nothing new. That the rich and powerful collude to protect themselves (and do so successfully) is not a modern trend.
where a celebrity class are held up as models of behaviour where you dont work but shop on your working husbands/wifes credit cards or your rich dads inheritance
There have been aristocracies of sorts (whether royal families, or the "old money" super-rich, or celebrities) across history. They are idolized largely because people dream of their power/riches, and also because the gossip they enable taps into our innate socializing behaviors.
and you are surprised there is less empathy ?
You've identified many idiosyncratic ills in our society. However I question whether there is anything novel about them. It seems to me that these arguably counter-productive human behaviors are as old as history itself.
I question the research from TFA, and I question your attempt to explain the purported trend. Every generation seems to decry the previous generation, believing that people used to be hard-working and moral, whereas the up-and-coming generation is lazy and corrupt and will ruin society. Yet every time, the new generation becomes rather similar to the old (which is both good and bad: they are just as hard-working, but they also lose their youthful idealism and never realize the reform they used to profess).
The problem is that every generation has only two points of reference: their childhood (which their faulty memories paint as being pleasant, etc.) and the current state (where kids get on their nerves). They can't accurately compare to past generations so they assume that the perceived local 'decay' is real rather than illusory. If every generation were right about how kids are worse (lazier, dumber, less moral, etc.), then how does society keep on ticking?
Highlighting the options in the url bar and hitting delete doesn't get rid of them either.
Use "Shift + Delete" while one of the items is highlighted and it will be removed. (Unless it's a bookmark, in which case you need to remove it from your bookmarks.)
In your case, you could go to stackoverflow.com, then click the bookmark icon (the little star to the right of the address bar). This will give this URL higher priority. In fact you can add tags/keywords to the bookmark while you're at it, to identify the site by a more unique word that is easier to type. Or add the tag "stack" to it so that this bookmark will be heavily associated with you typing "s-t-a-...".
This is usually enough to promote a given URL so that awesomebar will put it first. If not, you might have to type "s-t-..." and select it a few times to train the system that this URL is higher priority.
Yes, it's a bit annoying to have to train/fiddle with it. But for many of us, the amount of fiddling with the awesomebar is much lower than it once was fiddling with bookmarks and the like. The vast majority of the time, I start typing in the awesomebar and it brings me where I want (usually within two or three characters typed). There are some times when it doesn't... and this is frustrating (all the more since I've gotten used to relying on it). But, as I've outlined above, you can then manually promote the behavior you want. The awesomebar is not perfect, but it is quite useful for many of us. (Again, your mileage may vary... my main point is that many of us use it productively. If you don't like it, that's fine too. You can either begrudgingly learn to use it more efficiently, switch to another browser, or continue being annoyed by it. Your call.)
Even better, produce an unambiguous machine-readable language for law, one that can be used to make legal inferences (e.g. - is this particular act legal?). Of course, this would cause a huge mess when people realise how self-contradictory and downright logically impossible some of the law is...
The current situation, where a citizen has no hope of really ascertaining if a prospective action will be legal or not, is a huge problem. But trying to make law even more rigid and codified is not necessarily the answer. It does appeal to many in the Slashdot crowd, since we like and understand computer languages, but has numerous problems when applied to real laws.
1. The average person will have great difficulty parsing a truly unambiguous and machine-readable language. Elsewhere in this discussion some have called for just the opposite: human-readable laws, that don't require a lawyer to make sense of. Highly structured laws might make the situation even worse, where only a small group of people are able to really understand the law, which effectively makes every citizen a criminal.
2. Ultimately the real world is itself ambiguous and complex, such that you will never produce an unambiguous representation of problems/solutions therein. The laws need some wiggle-room to avoid becoming absurd in their application.
3. The problem with complex rule-based systems is that they can, and will, be gamed. In particular, it is the rich and powerful who will be most able to subvert the system, because they have the resources (the money necessary to pay people to spend time figuring it out, for instance) to find all the special deals, exceptions, and loopholes. Note that I'm not even talking about the rich and powerful rewriting the rules (though that is a problem, too). I'm talking about the fact that for a given ruleset, the rich and powerful will have the best chance to exploit that ruleset to their advantage. Thus simpler rulesets can be more fair.
I'm sympathetic to the notion of a less ambiguous legal system. But I don't think that's realistic. Instead what I think we really want is a less murky legal system. The laws should be written clearly. They should be accessible and well organized. Part of the job of the court system should be to digest legal codes and legal rulings into things that the average person can understand. For instance, they should produce a FAQ for sub-sections of the legal code, helping to guide the average citizen into understanding what things are legal or not (and why, and what sections of the legal code are implicated, etc.). The goal is for people to know where they stand vis-a-vis the law.
P.S.: The git-branches for legal changes is brilliant. It allows an auditable trail and forces the actual legal code to be a single document, rather than a piecemeal of amendments and addendums. This makes laws shorter and easier to read.
I like the concept. As hard as it is to get a law onto the books, it's almost impossible to get a law off the books. This leads to bloated and overly complex legal systems, innumerable special rules and exceptions, and so on. I also think that most laws should have time limits on them in the first place. Basically something that requires them to re-vote on the issue after X years, perhaps with a sliding scale if the law is always well-supported. (Something like 4 years, then possible 8-year extension, then 20-year extension, etc.)
I also like the idea of discouraging adding unrelated things into a bill. You don't want your pet project to be canceled just because the larger bill it was included in didn't meet a target!
There are of course potential problems:
1. Some legal changes that involve massive changes in infrastructure. Having these kinds of things be erected/deconstructed (perhaps repeatedly, as political climates for some issues can oscillate) might be even less efficient that the current situation.
2. Corporations could temporarily break a new law (or collude, etc.) in order to force it to miss a target, thereby getting legislation repealed. (But then again, this is just another variant of the already-well-entrenched "powerful companies can cause problems" issue.)
3. Issues not considered in the original objective target could arise. (E.g. an anti-pollution bill that misses its target because of a sudden environmental disaster in some other country that spreads...) Obviously the "targets" listed in laws would have to be crafted very carefully.
4. Related to #3, it is tempting to have a target in a law that is tied to the action of the law itself... but society is far too complex for this to generally be true. Laws may try to address issues of the environment, economic stability, employment, or whatever; but all of these things can be drastically affected by other things going on in society, unrelated to the law. So a very successful and well-supported law could be automatically repealed just because of a recession or other event.
As I said, I like the idea. But a blanket "measurable objective or repealed" rule might not work. At a minimum, I see no reason why laws shouldn't have an explicit statement of what the law is trying to accomplish, so that voters can more specifically assess whether the law is doing what it aims to. And we really do need better mechanisms for repealing laws.
Can you be more specific? I certainly see the negative effects of feedback in high-speed trading (volatile reactions, etc.), though there are some benefits to having all those day-traders and millisecond traders (liquidity, closing price gaps, etc.).
In the case of governance, I can't really see what kind of problematic feedback loops would be generated. Obviously some government data needs to not be open (e.g. military secrets), but having the lawmaking process open and transparent (clear, easy to access information on who supported/didn't-support a given law (perhaps even on a section-by-section basis), revision histories, public debates, etc.) seems like a good thing. Obviously there will always be some amount of "off the record" conversations between politicians (which can be bad, e.g. backroom deals; or good, e.g. frank discussions). With respect to feedback, the main danger I see is that "voter fickleness" could get amplified, where elections (and thus important lawmaking) end up turning on trivialities. (E.g. with more and more transparency and record-keeping, it's almost certain you'll eventual find a sound-bite of your opponent saying something that seems stupid or wrong or evil.)
But I would argue we're already deep into the territory where such fickleness is having an effect. Commentators and voters who have already made up their minds already have enough specious data for their confirmation biases. As such, increased information to voters is a good thing because those voters who want to actually be informed and make reasonable choices will have the ability to do so (and won't have to take the word of a commentator).
Damping effects are still necessary, of course. But the inherently long-term voting cycle serves that purpose nicely, preventing voters from changing their representative on a daily basis or on a whim. This averages out many of the spurious and pointless "scandals" while allowing data (if available!) on important issues and voting records to build. I do indeed agree that other damping effects should be considered in a transparency roll-out, but to me that is just a matter of "doing transparency right"--the case for transparency itself is quite solid.
(Incidentally, one change that I've often thought about, which would serve both transparency and damping, is that any proposed law should have to sit, unchanged, for a set period of time (weeks) before being voted on. (New changes reset the clock.) This would give the public/voters/media/commentators time to examine it in detail, identify problems, and make their voices heard to their representatives. Having representatives act as a smoothing effect for the (sometimes irrational) public can be very good... but the way in which proposed laws currently mutate so rapidly and are modified at the last minute, so that the public isn't even sure what is finally put into law, is corrosive to democratic and transparent society.)
Whether a plant experiences pain and suffering depends on your definition of it.
True enough, but I think our current best data does indeed suggest that the ability of, say, a mammal to process and store information, sensation, and memories greatly exceeds that of, say, a tree. The human conception of "pain and suffering" does indeed seem to depend on the existence of a central nervous system. While philosophically we can think about whether other complex entities (like plants) have different kinds of experiences and thus are subject to pain and suffering, I think our best data strongly suggest that animals experience "the human-like" pain and suffering whereas plants do not.
I also have an omnivore diet, and fully-agree that such a diet is both natural and historical. But "natural" does not mean "moral", and in fact a great many things that we cherish as being ethical (freedom, democracy, fairness, etc.) are in fact hard to come by in nature.
Should some people choose to eat according to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, I am happy to leave them to their choice. I am just as happy when they leave me to my choice.
The problem is that this isn't just a matter of personal choice. Our consumption has a real, long-term effect on the environment. It is reasonable for vegetarians to advocate their case, since at least part of their argument is that we could reduce our environmental impact (an argument that affects all of us).
It's part of the price paid for the convenience of eating meat.
Indeed. Unfortunately not all omnivores are willing to concede that simple point. Too many think that they have some intrinsic right to eat meat, without acknowledging that it is a luxury that causes animal suffering and environmental damage.
I'm not trying to "judge" meat-eaters (heck, I am one), but I'm trying to keep the debate logical. Everyone in modern society has lots of luxuries that have associated impacts. We need to be aware of them so that we can make reasonable choices.
Don't think that only omnivores are guilty of wishy-washy emotionally charged logic.
Certainly not. In fact a great many vegetarians haven't fully thought-out the logic of what they are doing, and are not able to defend the case very well at all.
I agree with your abstract worries. However I think that in order for morality to make any sense at all, you need to accept certain axioms and definitions. At a really abstract level, there is nothing particularly different about the collection of chemicals and reactions that make up a human, and those that make up tree... yet we all agree that a human has certain moral rights and responsibilities that the tree does not. (E.g. property rights!)
Once you've accepted that making sense of morality requires some (arbitrary, if you like) axioms, then we can debate about what those axioms should be. It seems to be generally agreed that reducing harm and suffering is a good thing, whereas inducing harm and suffering is a bad thing. One of the core vegetarian arguments seems to be that if animals can experience suffering (and data suggests they can, though obviously not in the same way as humans), then we should try to reduce that suffering (and not cause it!).
It's easy to argue that human life is more important than animal life, and hence a human is morally allowed to eat an animal to survive. It is less easy to argue that humans who have the choice of surviving off of plants or animals have a right to cause suffering to support their meat-eating luxury. Of course one could argue that our moral code requires some new axiom, which explicitly elevates humans above animals. However it seems that even most omnivores don't really agree with such an axiom (for instance if they see an animal suffering, they will try to stop the suffering, even if it causes them some amount of inconvenience). Instead, the majority of modern omnivores just eat meat because it is tasty and because the harm it causes is hidden from view.
I'm not trying to criticize omnivores... just trying to keep the debate grounded. (For what it's worth, I am a meat-eater right now.)
all plants are living things too. Why is it more right to eat them than the good old mmmmm grilled bee
It should be obvious that the vegetarian argument is based upon a creature's capacity to experience pain and suffering. This is why there is in fact a gradation in vegetarianism: the most hard-line won't eat any animal at all, whereas some will eat some types of animals (e.g. shrimp) that they deem sufficiently primitive that they likely do not experience pain or suffering. Our best data suggest that plants cannot experience anything at all (much less pain and suffering), hence there is no moral argument against using them as a food source. (Whereas it's pretty clear that many mammals can experience pain and suffering.)
You may disagree with the argument (that's fine), but don't mis-characterize it. In fact, most people do agree with the argument, but merely set the line somewhere different (they will consider it wrong to kill other humans, and even primates, for food).
I think omnivorous humans need to stop using weak logic to defend their habits. They should just accept that their meat-eating does indeed cause environmental damage, and animal suffering, but that they consider this an acceptable compromise given the luxury that meat-eating represents. (Meat-eating is hardly the only luxury in modern society that has negative environmental consequences.) Conversely, if you just can't handle the thought that your luxurious diet causes environmental damage and animal suffering, then perhaps you should change your diet.
I suspect the point will be efficiency and convenience, which will be true for technophobes and technophiles alike.
... and one that changes on occasion!), remembering which shows are on which websites, or even remembering what time a given show plays. They just tell the device "these are the shows I like watching" and it takes care of the rest.
Think of Google search. "All" it did was make finding things more efficient--but that represented a dramatic improvement in the experience of using the web. Or Gmail--we all had email beforehand, but it provided a much better interface. (Obviously not everyone will agree that the Gmail interface is good, but my point is just that lots of people do like that interface, and thus switched to Gmail.)
If GoogleTV just makes it simpler/more-efficient to watch TV, then that's a sufficient improvement. That is "the point". The idea seems to be that instead of deciding "I want to watch this show at some point, better set it to record on my DVR" or deciding "Oh, that show is starting soon, better head to my TV" or "that show I like is on Hulu, I think, let me go find it"... the GoogleTV will deal will all those details. You will just type in the name of the show you want to watch, and it will get that show for you (either scheduling the DVR, or switching to the channel, or loading the appropriate website, or whatever). This frees the user from having to navigate the arcane TV listings (which are, even in this day and age, just a numerical list!
One can immediately think of other useful things such a box could do (auto-loading the next episode if available, recommending new shows based on ones you already like, etc.). Of course these are all things that the user could do themselves with some effort. But the idea is to reduce the effort, and make the user experience better. (Really, that's what all of technology is: mechanizing labor, automating tedious tasks, hiding away complexity... in a sense these all amount to refining a person's user experience with respect to a given task/action.)
Of course I have no idea if GoogleTV will do all of this in a smooth and effective way. It might suck. But there is at least the potential to come up with something useful. Something that most people would indeed like to have...
Frankly I don't buy the "glory days of newspaper" nostalgia argument. The idea that headlines were once crafted to be deeply insightful, and informative doesn't mesh with my own recollections. I've always found headlines to be frustratingly vague. Headline writers seem obsessed with injecting puns, usually at the expense of clarity. The whole concept of a headline in print, being limited by font size and page size, means that the content is strangely constrained and thus non-optimal sentence fragments end up being used. And, finally, I think newspapers have been optimizing their headlines to be attention-grabbing (rather than strictly informative/useful) for a long time now.
In other words, the notion of a headline crafted for a non-journalistic purpose has been around for a long time. In the print era, it was optimized for what was most likely to catch/attract a reader who is walking by a newsstand. (There is a reason the headlines on print newspapers are so gigantic.) Nowadays the headlines are being optimized for what an online reader is most likely to stumble across or search for. In both cases, the headline is an advertisement for the article. It is meant to induce you to go check out the product.
As long as there is a profit motive behind journalism/news, there will be a conflict between what the distributor wants (to make money) and what the consumer wants (to be informed). That's more or less fine, since we've achieved a decent balance. But that does mean there are some inefficiencies (like infuriatingly misleading headlines).
Is it really so hard to simply go through Facebook's privacy settings yourself and consciously set them to whatever you want (as far as that's possible)?
Yes, it really is "so hard". Intentionally so. Take a look at this NY Times graphic showing all the privacy settings options that exist throughout a Facebook profile. (Or, at least, the options the NY Times was able to find.) You can see that the options behave in inconsistent ways. You can set "maximum privacy" on one page without realizing that an option at a different level over-rides this (e.g. third-party ads may still have access).
To really insure maximum privacy, you not only have to navigate this maze of options (the NY Times graphic helps to make sure you've nailed them all), but you have to repeatedly re-check your settings since Facebook can (and does) change the settings interface (and thus the default settings) from time to time. So a previously "highly private" profile can have information leak unless you are actively checking whenever there are changes.
As I said before, this is probably intentional. Facebook would prefer to have more access to data and more ability to redistribute personal data for profit. So it is to their advantage if people don't have maximally-private settings. A plugin that actually produces a clean, sane, and useful privacy settings interface can thus make it much easier to control those settings. It also points out just had bad Facebook's settings and customization pages really are: you need third-party apps and newspaper flow-charts to make sense of them.
I hope windowing systems die soon.
We all have our complaints about windowing systems. It does indeed seem like we spend a fair amount of time just managing the windows (moving, resizing, etc.) rather than working. Like you, I'm pretty convinced that there has to be a better design out there. But I don't think it's the right strategy to throw-out windowing systems altogether, without a viable alternative to actually push towards. Despite all their warts, our modern GUIs are by now highly tuned and in fact do help us be productive.
There has to be a better design than a metaphor to desks and file cabinets...
I think our modern desktop metaphor isn't really mimicking desks and file cabinets in any meaningful way. Sure, the same terms are applied ("desktop", "folder", "file", etc.), but in reality the computer-objects bear little resemblance to the real-world objects. (You can't infinitely nest folders in the real world!) I think our GUI metaphors have abandoned any real-world resemblance that was slowing them down. (E.g. you can't arbitrarily resize a real-world sheet of paper on the fly, but it's easy to resize a GUI.)
I'm not sure what the answer is (mostly just thinking out loud, here), but I think our time would be better spent refining the modern GUI, rather than throwing it all away and hoping that something fantastically better fills the void. Some ideas that spring to mind:
1. Windows in a GUI are useful (e.g. to read from one and type into another) but managing all the windows is as much fun as shuffling paper on a real desk. What would help is far smarter layout algorithms. When a new window appears, its size and position should "make sense". For instance it should be in some way proportional to the amount of text within it. It should try to appear in areas that will not obscure existing content. A given document should re-open to the same position on screen as the last time you had it open (thereby taking advantage of human visual memory and habit-forming procedures). A GUI that shuffled all the windows around on you would probably be more annoying than helpful. But some amount of predictive behavior would be nice (e.g. tossing a window towards one edge of the screen could dock it there cleanly.)
2. GUIs should let users easily define tasks rather than forcing them to manually open all the windows/documents associated with a given workflow. So when I open the "banking" task, my financial spreadsheets should open (and appear with the size/position I always set them to), my Firefox window should appear in the right place with the right websites all open, my calculator app should pop open in the upper-right-hand-corner, and so on... It should be easier for users to define sets of tasks and have those states reappear when required. This all boils down to: the size, position, and state of all the windows on-screen actually conveys useful information to the user! Don't throw that information away!
3. Each app should have a hidden backend database where every command and help topic (with appropriate index terms and tags/keywords and synonyms) is stored. If you can't remember where the button or menu item for a given task is, it should be trivial to type that into a persistent "help/do-stuff" bar and have the option simply appear, ready to be clicked/invoked. For apps with tons of options (MS Word, Photoshop, etc.) this would make it trivial to find the option you want. (Just type "red eye correction" or "make sentence all caps" or whatever.) If done properly, this would also allow users to interact with applications in a faster text-command mode (anyone who has used Firefox's Ubiquity will know what I'm talking about.)
These are just the ideas that have occurred to me (repeatedly) and may not be the best ideas out there. Overall my point is that I agree we need better GUI-interaction styles... but that I think we can use the existing windowing systems as good starting points for further refinement.
If we have rules for intellectual property, we should have them for intellectual fraud too.
I disagree. Plagiarism is morally wrong, but that doesn't mean it has to be illegal. There are lots of things that are morally wrong but not illegal (e.g. cheating on your spouse). That's the way it should be: for the vast majority of things, social norms and consequences (including public outcry, shaming, damage to reputation, etc.) are more than sufficient. Laws should only be enacted in those rare cases where the public safety or public good needs more protection. To do otherwise gives the lawmakers/enforcers too much power, and tends to turn every person into a criminal. (Does it really make sense to prosecute a college student who cheats on an essay? Or is flunking him sufficient?)
Really, we have far too many laws at present, and could stand to have many repealed. (The various "intellectual property" laws could certainly stand to be pruned-down, for instance.) I see no pressing social need for plagiarism to be illegal. (Plagiarism may be part of some larger fraud, but in those cases there are already other good laws (anti-fraud, truth-in-advertising, etc.) to address the real transgression.)
This.
It's a false dichotomy to discuss "streamlined user experience" versus "user freedom" as if one is completely at odds with the other. To provide a streamlined experience simply requires good design and sensible defaults. You don't have to lock-out the user from changing those defaults, accessing the full capabilities of the device, or repurposing the device entirely.
Of course it makes sense that vendors of locked-down solutions would spread this misunderstanding. They want to enforce consumer lock-in to their product/services stack. By convincing customers that the lock-in is actually to their benefit, they now have people effectively begging to give up their user freedoms. What bothers me is that media outlets seem not to have generally caught on to this lie. Instead they repeat the false dichotomy, as if it were a fact of nature. I guess it is because computers are still fairly misunderstood by the public at large. (By comparison, most people would not buy it if they hired an electrician who installed locks on their fusebox, telling them that they'll have to call/pay him when the fuses blow... because only then can he guarantee a proper "electrical user experience"...)
every kid in the world knows that it's a lot funnier to poke the bitchy guy, and everyone knows the best thing to counter is to just ignore.
Well you can either ignore people by giving them what they've whining to get... or you can ignore them by sticking to your principles and not budging.
Wikipedia is supposed to be a collection of solid, sourced information. It's not supposed to be "a source of solid, sourced information... except when it's funny not to be!"
So Wikipedia is trying to stick to their principles and not let an entry degenerate into something funny but ultimately confusing. The only proper way to actually maintain the entry is to explain the origin and popularization of the word (specifically, that it is a word mentioned in an xkcd comic). Their current solution, a redirect to the entry on xkcd, seems reasonable until the term gains further notability and there's something to actually write about in the entry.
now, wikipedians, chill out. IIRC, there's an entry on the wikipedia's rules saying that you can throw away all the rules if appropriate.
The problem with the "chill out" argument is that the perpetrator of every joke-edit and piece of vandalism would like Wikipedia to "chill out"--but to allow all those joke entries to accumulate would seriously harm the quality and credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Why does your joke-edit warrant the "throw away the rules" exception but all the other joke-edits do not? The fair and proper solution is to not allow joke-content, and to stick to Wikipedia's principles.
So, really, I think it is the joke purveyors (well-meaning vandals?) who should chill out, and accept that the jokes they are interested in do not warrant the "throw away the rules" exception.
Indeed. Scroogle sounds like a good idea... but it's a service that exists parasitically to Google proper. I'm not trying to imply anything unethical by using the word "parasite", but this really is a situation where Scroogle uses Google's capabilities/services without contributing anything back to Google. This is fine to the extent that Google tolerates it. But they are under no obligation to make accommodations to keep these third-party services running smoothly. TFA says "It's not as if Google needs the money" which seems rather uncharitable given that Google has put up with Scroogle's operations for many years now without any complaints or blocking attempts (that I'm aware of). And Google does need some money (they would have to shut down if everyone used their services through Scroogle...).
Scroogle needs to either adjust their service to keep up with Google's changes, or make a business case to Google for why it is in their best interest to provide a stable interface/API for third-party redistributors like them. The implication in TFA that they are somehow entitled to this interface/API/access is really silly.