To be clear, as I was on the other thread, I did not make any statements about severity, or propose any solutions, or even suggest anything needed to be done about Global Warming. All I did was state the scientific consensus, and that was all I needed to send you into a frothing, irrational rage.
And yet nowhere in any of my posts have I made any mention of a need to act on Global Warming, proposed any solutions to it, or even suggested that solutions are needed. All I did was state the science, and that is what you and so many others react to. You are against the science because you fear that to concede even that much will somehow render you powerless to have a reasonable discussion about public policy.
There is the science dimension to this and there is the public policy dimension. If the skeptics would simply accept the science, they might have me as an ally when it comes to debating public policy, but when they even reject the science, I can't take anything else they say seriously.
That's not how this works. You propose your problem then you suggest a solution.
Everyone makes their own evaluation as to the relevance of the problem and the cost of your solution and then either accepts your offer or makes counter proposals.
I disagree. First we have to agree on the science. If any solution I propose can be vetoed by someone because they reject the science, then we aren't having a discussion. If I propose eliminating oil subsidies and increasing alternative energy incentives and the response I get every single time is the accusation that I am pushing a political agenda based on pseudoscience, then I have to take step back to the science and fight for that.
The reality is that I don't care if we do anything about Global Warming for the next 20-30 years. What I care about is science, and the skeptics are calling science into question, which leads to pseudoscience taking hold in other public policy issues. To me, Global Warming is about science education. The public policy dimensions are for other people to dispute. There is no balance between skeptics and scientists. The science is overwhelming.
I agree, we should stick to the science. Here you go:
The peer-reviewed Journal "Nature Climate Change" includes and references thousands of scientific papers on the subject.
The IPCC's 1,500-page "Physical Science Basis" report cites hundreds of references and is authored by hundreds of experts. It clearly states what we know, don't know, and how we know it. It reviews its past predictions, notes where its models have errored, and takes into account an incredible wealth and scope of scientific observations over 150 years.
The USGS has a Climate Model Browser that lets you try out all the different simulated predictions for Global Warming. You'll notice the specifics vary widely, but they all predict dramatic temperature rises.
The United States Defense department has several reports on the risks posed by Global Warming (see here, here, here, and here).
The Center for Coastal Resources Management (CCRM) has produced some excellent reports on sea level rise due to Climate Change to inform local communities like Norfolk VA, where flooding is already a major issue, what to expect in the near future due to Global Warming.
You can also watch the sea levels rise at the NOAA's Sea-Level Trends website.
If you don't trust the government, then I recommend The Berkely Earth Project. It was funded by the liberal's favorite bad guys, the Koch Brothers, but its results were so compelling that the lead Climatologist, Richard A. Muller, wrote a piece for the New York Times announcing he was no longer a skeptic.
Of course, it's always good to have a contrarian viewpoint in the mix, and for that, I recommend AGW skeptic Judith Curry, who presents valid challenges to the consensus with her strong scientific background. I don't find her convincing, but her challenges make for good food for thought.
If you dispute this science, then I recommend publishing your own peer-reviewed papers, your own models, and your own alternative hypotheses in the scientific journals. I see a lot of skeptics nit-picking the science, but not many actually taking the effort to publish in the scientific forums.
I eagerly await one of the skeptics out there to please post an equally substantive list of references to "balance" my citations, so everyone can review and compare them.
"...we've stalled for the past 6 years, actually cooled the last couple of years..."
I realize there's a legitimate debate over how many years constitutes which, but I think you fall in the category of people confusing weather and climate. I remember back in 2008 when AGW-skeptics said there had been a decade of global cooling by using 1998, the warmest year on record, as their baseline. Then increasingly warmer years eliminated that talking point. Now you are saying it's cooled the past couple of years, so you must be using 2010 as your baseline, which is the current warmest year on record.
If the predicted El Nino manifests this summer and fall, it might make 2015 an unusually warm year. So I guess in 2016 or 2017 I should expect to hear again about how the Earth has actually been cooling the past few years. A more intellectually honest way to look at climate is to observe the decade by decade warming trend.
If you're interested in the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming, I suggest you read the science, not blog posts. I've read both WattsUp and SkepticalScience, and they are both very poorly written and lack rigorousness. If you are reading these two blogs, you are reading the work of bias amateurs.
Here's what you should be reading:
the peer-reviewed Journal "Nature Climate Change," which includes and references thousands of scientific papers on the subject.
he IPCC's 1,500-page "Physical Science Basis" report, clearly states what we know, don't know, and how we know it. It reviews its past predictions, notes where its models have errored, and takes into account an incredible wealth and scope of scientific observations over 150 years. I highly recommend downloading this 0.5 GIG report and at least skimming it. I consider it the model of good science.
If you don't trust the government, then I recommend The Berkely Earth Project. It was funded by the liberal's favorite bad guys, the Koch Brothers, but its results were so compelling that the lead Climatologist, Richard A. Muller, wrote a piece for the New York Times announcing he no longer a skeptic.
Of course, it's always good to have a contrarian viewpoint in the mix, and for that, I recommend AGW skeptic Judith Curry, who presents valid challenges to the consensus with her strong scientific background. I don't find her convincing, but her challenges make for good food for thought.
Science, published peer-reviewed science, not blogs, is where we should keep this discussion.
It's interesting that no one is questioning the basic premise of this article: that the US puts more resources into remedial students than gifted. It makes for just one more thing people can complain and get self-righteous about, but my experience in Virginia schools is just the opposite. Here in Virginia, my gifted friends got to attend special highly-funded magnet schools or got to attend the #1 public high school in the country and the gifted classrooms at my high school got the best supplies and brightest teachers. As someone who was originally tracked in remedial everything and had to fight his way up to advanced-level courses, I can tell you that the remedial classes received no instruction whatsoever and were basically just holding-pens for students until they turned 18 and the system could kick them out.
Maybe some states don't have a gifted program, but before we all go tilting at windmills, maybe we should realize this is a state-level problem, one that does not apply to Virginia, and may not apply to your state either.
This is where they lost me. How often are scrapes and cuts (or even car accidents) treated with antibiotics? Sure, major lesions will warrant a general antibiotic, but in my first three decades of life i can count on one hand the number of times I took antibiotics, and almost all of them were preventative (meaning even without them, the risk to life was statistically indistinguishable from 0). Trying to rally the public with "if you get a scrape you will die" is pretty much fear mongering. And fear mongers can fuck right off.
You say you " can count on one hand the number of times I took antibiotics, and almost all of them were preventative," meaning you took them to prevent infection, so you don't know how many times you could have actually gotten an infection. I did an informal survey of my friends to find out how many have taken antibiotics to fight an actual infection, and the response was 100%. If those infections were antibiotic-resistant, that means 100% of them would have died. I think you're misunderstanding the risk and your comment actually reinforces the danger of infection.
You ask, "How often are scrapes and cuts (or even car accidents) treated with antibiotics?" The answer is very few, but over the course of a lifetime, we experience many scrapes and cuts, and only need to get infected once with an antibiotic-resistant bacteria to die. That's why it's a problem, and it's not being overstated.
Unfortunately, this mirrors my own experience when I bought all the kids on my street laptops on the condition that they spend weeks with me learning how to handle and respect them. One year later, every single laptop was inoperable. Of course, every one of these kids owned an iPod touch... with a broken screen, so there were warning signs.
I think the problem is the portability of these devices. The reason I didn't break my Commodore 64 when I was a kid is because it sat on a desk. If it was portable, I probably would have shattered or lost it at some point too. I don't think we can make these devices rugged enough to survive your average teenager.
Why should I pay $9.99 for an ebook that can be taken away from me anytime Amazon wants, can't be lent out or given away, and can't be resold? When I buy a real book, it's an investment. I can resell it, donate it to my local library, or buy other real books from used book sellers for $0.99. My wife's grandmother just passed away, and her family let me take a wealth of old books from her collection. All the money she spent on those books over her lifetime has transferred to her children and grandchildren. When I die, the hundreds--maybe thousands--of dollars spent on my ebook collection dies with me.
I love my kindle. I love reading ebooks. I love highlighting, clipping, and making notes in them, but there's a very tough tradeoff here. Real books are a material investment, ebooks are ephemeral.
I was thinking the same thing. I keenly remember Microsoft Azure going down for eight hours, right after we migrated to their cloud service. With our old datacenter, we were alerted immediately and their tech support had a bang list to alert all our customers for us that the system was down. With Microsoft, we got NOTHING. Our customers alerted us to the fact that they couldn't access their applications, and we had to go to twitter to @WindowsAzure to ask when the servers would be back up. Then, a year later, the East Coast datacenter went down and we learned that Cloud service does not include disaster recovery and we were responsible for setting up our own recovery solution on Window's Azure's servers.
My wife and I had our second child two weeks ago. Despite the fact that we had spent nine months working closely with a clinic that had been monitoring the pregnancy, dispensing the proper medications, and who had midwives and doctors working at the hospital we would be delivering at, when we arrived at the hospital we found that they had NOTHING in their systems regarding my wife and her medical history. We then spent an hour telling the triage nurse everything we knew about the pregnancy from memory, until a doctor from our clinic finally showed up at the hospital with a big folder of printouts that no one had time to look at because my wife delivered a half hour later.
When we asked afterwards why the hospital had no record of us despite the fact that they knew we would be delivering there, they explained their system had no way to transfer electronic records and that they were still relying on printouts that would have to be entered by hand. Amusingly enough, they were launching a new networked electronic system while we were there that would enable the transfer of records.
Of course, the hospital staff freely admitted the new system was a complete headache to learn and that they had resisted it as long as possible, but thanks to "Obamacare" they were now required by law to implement such a system. Let that sink in for a moment. Hospitals are perfectly happy to have absolutely no information on the patients that arrive in their emergency rooms in America because upgrading their information systems is a hassle.
People complain about government regulations, but in this case, I'm perfectly happy to have government give the Medical industry a swift regulatory kick in the ass on this. There is no excuse for endangering human lives like this.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I do still feel there is something highly 'accidental' to the genius of Card's Ender's series, but I have read some criticisms that damn the books for being highly manipulative in the way they persuade the audience to forgive Ender's actions:
"Card has spoken in interviews about his tropism for the story of the person who sacrifices himself for the community. This is the story, he tells us, that he has been drawn to tell again and again. For example, in justification of the scenes of violence in his fiction, Card told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990 that, “In every single case, cruelty was a voluntary sacrifice. The person being subjected to the torture was suffering for the sake of the community.” I find this statement astonishingly revealing. By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.” Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. No, in these situations, according to Card the person being tortured is Ender, and even though he walks away from every battle, the sacrifice is his. In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence. It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game."
There is ZERO equivalency. Making the Constitutionally-protected choice to freely associate or not associate with someone because of their political or religious beliefs by simply not buying a movie ticket is in no way the same thing as supporting the government incarcerating people for their private lifestyle. It boggles my mind that you can see these two things as equivalent.
I loved loved loved "Ender's Game" as a youth, but 10 years ago, when I discovered Orson Scott Card's blog and his perpetual stream of scientifically illiterate bigoted ravings, it really tainted everything with his name on it for me. Suddenly, "Ender's Game," "Speaker for the Dead," and "Xenocide" were no longer deep books about ethical conundrums, but shallow stories where ethical conflicts just happen with depth given to them by the reader--because there's no way Card's shallow, binary mind could possibly comprehend the many ethical dimensions of the events he describes in his stories.
As for tolerance. You are correct, I am completely intolerant of Card's intolerance. I am choosing to not give my patronage to the film adaptation of his book because his personal views and political activism have soiled the whole thing for me; however, I fully support his right to voice those views. By contrast, Card believes that those he disagrees with, homosexuals, should be incarcerated and stripped of their rights. So I find the attempts by many online to draw an equivalency between the intolerance of those participating in the boycott and Card's intolerance extremely weak.
I allowed Immersion to review my gmail, and I don't think it really reflects what PRISM is accessing in any way. All it did was go through my emails and build a standard social network map out of my emails based on who was in the address lines. My understanding is that PRISM is actually analyzing the content of my emails. Immersion is neat, but it really seems like the developers are trying to promote their own software by attaching it to the surveillance scandal.
As for Immersion itself. It is a neat application and it's fun to see a chart of everyone you interact with an how they are all networked together. If you're interested in seeing your Facebook and Twitter networks modeled in a similar way, you can use the open-source NodeXL plugin for Excel, which let's you harvest your data from these social networks and build your own visualizations. It's actually much much more robust than Immersion and you don't have to give a third-party access to your accounts since you run it from your local machine yourself.
I've never been to Silicon Valley, but I met a programmer who was happy to get out of there as soon as he could escape. I'll never forget the mental image he painted of the place, "On Friday nights everyone takes their expensive cars out cruising, but there are no women in Silicon Valley, so it's just a bunch of guys trying to impress other guys."
It's a nice act, but isn't it a little on the hypocritical side considering France has just been exposed as having an equally egregious citizen-spying program in place? I'm glad the EU-legislation is doing something, but it sounds like they need to now pass a resolution condemning the program going on inside their own borders. Everyone should be outraged at PRISM, but everyone should also be outraged that France was condemning the United States for running a program they themselves were secretly running as well.
Slashdot Mirror
To be clear, as I was on the other thread, I did not make any statements about severity, or propose any solutions, or even suggest anything needed to be done about Global Warming. All I did was state the scientific consensus, and that was all I needed to send you into a frothing, irrational rage.
And yet nowhere in any of my posts have I made any mention of a need to act on Global Warming, proposed any solutions to it, or even suggested that solutions are needed. All I did was state the science, and that is what you and so many others react to. You are against the science because you fear that to concede even that much will somehow render you powerless to have a reasonable discussion about public policy.
There is the science dimension to this and there is the public policy dimension. If the skeptics would simply accept the science, they might have me as an ally when it comes to debating public policy, but when they even reject the science, I can't take anything else they say seriously.
I don't care how right you are, it's your self-righteous and smug tone that inclines me to vote against you.
This is sarcasm, right? You're presenting an unfair caricature of a climate skeptic to discredit them, yes?
That's not how this works. You propose your problem then you suggest a solution.
Everyone makes their own evaluation as to the relevance of the problem and the cost of your solution and then either accepts your offer or makes counter proposals.
I disagree. First we have to agree on the science. If any solution I propose can be vetoed by someone because they reject the science, then we aren't having a discussion. If I propose eliminating oil subsidies and increasing alternative energy incentives and the response I get every single time is the accusation that I am pushing a political agenda based on pseudoscience, then I have to take step back to the science and fight for that.
The reality is that I don't care if we do anything about Global Warming for the next 20-30 years. What I care about is science, and the skeptics are calling science into question, which leads to pseudoscience taking hold in other public policy issues. To me, Global Warming is about science education. The public policy dimensions are for other people to dispute. There is no balance between skeptics and scientists. The science is overwhelming.
I agree, we should stick to the science. Here you go:
If you dispute this science, then I recommend publishing your own peer-reviewed papers, your own models, and your own alternative hypotheses in the scientific journals. I see a lot of skeptics nit-picking the science, but not many actually taking the effort to publish in the scientific forums.
I eagerly await one of the skeptics out there to please post an equally substantive list of references to "balance" my citations, so everyone can review and compare them.
"...we've stalled for the past 6 years, actually cooled the last couple of years..."
I realize there's a legitimate debate over how many years constitutes which, but I think you fall in the category of people confusing weather and climate. I remember back in 2008 when AGW-skeptics said there had been a decade of global cooling by using 1998, the warmest year on record, as their baseline. Then increasingly warmer years eliminated that talking point. Now you are saying it's cooled the past couple of years, so you must be using 2010 as your baseline, which is the current warmest year on record.
If the predicted El Nino manifests this summer and fall, it might make 2015 an unusually warm year. So I guess in 2016 or 2017 I should expect to hear again about how the Earth has actually been cooling the past few years. A more intellectually honest way to look at climate is to observe the decade by decade warming trend.
If you're interested in the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming, I suggest you read the science, not blog posts. I've read both WattsUp and SkepticalScience, and they are both very poorly written and lack rigorousness. If you are reading these two blogs, you are reading the work of bias amateurs.
Here's what you should be reading:
Science, published peer-reviewed science, not blogs, is where we should keep this discussion.
Found the SNP: KL-VS refers to rs9536314 for F352V and rs9527025 for C370S... see page 29 of the paper.
For everyone else who has that gene (I don't know if I do, I'm still trying to figure out what SNP KLOTHO references in my genetic results), and can't stand reading the Economist's painfully dumbed-down explanation of the research, here's the actual paper.
It's interesting that no one is questioning the basic premise of this article: that the US puts more resources into remedial students than gifted. It makes for just one more thing people can complain and get self-righteous about, but my experience in Virginia schools is just the opposite. Here in Virginia, my gifted friends got to attend special highly-funded magnet schools or got to attend the #1 public high school in the country and the gifted classrooms at my high school got the best supplies and brightest teachers. As someone who was originally tracked in remedial everything and had to fight his way up to advanced-level courses, I can tell you that the remedial classes received no instruction whatsoever and were basically just holding-pens for students until they turned 18 and the system could kick them out.
Maybe some states don't have a gifted program, but before we all go tilting at windmills, maybe we should realize this is a state-level problem, one that does not apply to Virginia, and may not apply to your state either.
North Koeans are required to worship their leaders as gods. There is nothing Atheistic about that.
In his book "The Selfish Gene" Richard Dawkins uses the Prisoner's Dilemma to construct a quasi-mathematical proof that judicious altruism beats greed as an evolutionary strategy. Also, Hamilton's Rule provides quantification to why altruism makes sense for the species.
This is where they lost me. How often are scrapes and cuts (or even car accidents) treated with antibiotics? Sure, major lesions will warrant a general antibiotic, but in my first three decades of life i can count on one hand the number of times I took antibiotics, and almost all of them were preventative (meaning even without them, the risk to life was statistically indistinguishable from 0). Trying to rally the public with "if you get a scrape you will die" is pretty much fear mongering. And fear mongers can fuck right off.
You say you " can count on one hand the number of times I took antibiotics, and almost all of them were preventative," meaning you took them to prevent infection, so you don't know how many times you could have actually gotten an infection. I did an informal survey of my friends to find out how many have taken antibiotics to fight an actual infection, and the response was 100%. If those infections were antibiotic-resistant, that means 100% of them would have died. I think you're misunderstanding the risk and your comment actually reinforces the danger of infection.
You ask, "How often are scrapes and cuts (or even car accidents) treated with antibiotics?" The answer is very few, but over the course of a lifetime, we experience many scrapes and cuts, and only need to get infected once with an antibiotic-resistant bacteria to die. That's why it's a problem, and it's not being overstated.
"The only problem with capitalism is the capitalists." ~ Herbert Hoover
Unfortunately, this mirrors my own experience when I bought all the kids on my street laptops on the condition that they spend weeks with me learning how to handle and respect them. One year later, every single laptop was inoperable. Of course, every one of these kids owned an iPod touch... with a broken screen, so there were warning signs.
I think the problem is the portability of these devices. The reason I didn't break my Commodore 64 when I was a kid is because it sat on a desk. If it was portable, I probably would have shattered or lost it at some point too. I don't think we can make these devices rugged enough to survive your average teenager.
This.
Why should I pay $9.99 for an ebook that can be taken away from me anytime Amazon wants, can't be lent out or given away, and can't be resold? When I buy a real book, it's an investment. I can resell it, donate it to my local library, or buy other real books from used book sellers for $0.99. My wife's grandmother just passed away, and her family let me take a wealth of old books from her collection. All the money she spent on those books over her lifetime has transferred to her children and grandchildren. When I die, the hundreds--maybe thousands--of dollars spent on my ebook collection dies with me.
I love my kindle. I love reading ebooks. I love highlighting, clipping, and making notes in them, but there's a very tough tradeoff here. Real books are a material investment, ebooks are ephemeral.
I was thinking the same thing. I keenly remember Microsoft Azure going down for eight hours, right after we migrated to their cloud service. With our old datacenter, we were alerted immediately and their tech support had a bang list to alert all our customers for us that the system was down. With Microsoft, we got NOTHING. Our customers alerted us to the fact that they couldn't access their applications, and we had to go to twitter to @WindowsAzure to ask when the servers would be back up. Then, a year later, the East Coast datacenter went down and we learned that Cloud service does not include disaster recovery and we were responsible for setting up our own recovery solution on Window's Azure's servers.
Sounds very similar to Sayre's Law, which I suppose is Parkinson's law applied specifically to academia.
This. This. This.
My wife and I had our second child two weeks ago. Despite the fact that we had spent nine months working closely with a clinic that had been monitoring the pregnancy, dispensing the proper medications, and who had midwives and doctors working at the hospital we would be delivering at, when we arrived at the hospital we found that they had NOTHING in their systems regarding my wife and her medical history. We then spent an hour telling the triage nurse everything we knew about the pregnancy from memory, until a doctor from our clinic finally showed up at the hospital with a big folder of printouts that no one had time to look at because my wife delivered a half hour later.
When we asked afterwards why the hospital had no record of us despite the fact that they knew we would be delivering there, they explained their system had no way to transfer electronic records and that they were still relying on printouts that would have to be entered by hand. Amusingly enough, they were launching a new networked electronic system while we were there that would enable the transfer of records.
Of course, the hospital staff freely admitted the new system was a complete headache to learn and that they had resisted it as long as possible, but thanks to "Obamacare" they were now required by law to implement such a system. Let that sink in for a moment. Hospitals are perfectly happy to have absolutely no information on the patients that arrive in their emergency rooms in America because upgrading their information systems is a hassle.
People complain about government regulations, but in this case, I'm perfectly happy to have government give the Medical industry a swift regulatory kick in the ass on this. There is no excuse for endangering human lives like this.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I do still feel there is something highly 'accidental' to the genius of Card's Ender's series, but I have read some criticisms that damn the books for being highly manipulative in the way they persuade the audience to forgive Ender's actions:
"Card has spoken in interviews about his tropism for the story of the person who sacrifices himself for the community. This is the story, he tells us, that he has been drawn to tell again and again. For example, in justification of the scenes of violence in his fiction, Card told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990 that, “In every single case, cruelty was a voluntary sacrifice. The person being subjected to the torture was suffering for the sake of the community.” I find this statement astonishingly revealing. By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.” Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. No, in these situations, according to Card the person being tortured is Ender, and even though he walks away from every battle, the sacrifice is his. In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence. It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game."
There is ZERO equivalency. Making the Constitutionally-protected choice to freely associate or not associate with someone because of their political or religious beliefs by simply not buying a movie ticket is in no way the same thing as supporting the government incarcerating people for their private lifestyle. It boggles my mind that you can see these two things as equivalent.
I loved loved loved "Ender's Game" as a youth, but 10 years ago, when I discovered Orson Scott Card's blog and his perpetual stream of scientifically illiterate bigoted ravings, it really tainted everything with his name on it for me. Suddenly, "Ender's Game," "Speaker for the Dead," and "Xenocide" were no longer deep books about ethical conundrums, but shallow stories where ethical conflicts just happen with depth given to them by the reader--because there's no way Card's shallow, binary mind could possibly comprehend the many ethical dimensions of the events he describes in his stories.
As for tolerance. You are correct, I am completely intolerant of Card's intolerance. I am choosing to not give my patronage to the film adaptation of his book because his personal views and political activism have soiled the whole thing for me; however, I fully support his right to voice those views. By contrast, Card believes that those he disagrees with, homosexuals, should be incarcerated and stripped of their rights. So I find the attempts by many online to draw an equivalency between the intolerance of those participating in the boycott and Card's intolerance extremely weak.
I allowed Immersion to review my gmail, and I don't think it really reflects what PRISM is accessing in any way. All it did was go through my emails and build a standard social network map out of my emails based on who was in the address lines. My understanding is that PRISM is actually analyzing the content of my emails. Immersion is neat, but it really seems like the developers are trying to promote their own software by attaching it to the surveillance scandal.
As for Immersion itself. It is a neat application and it's fun to see a chart of everyone you interact with an how they are all networked together. If you're interested in seeing your Facebook and Twitter networks modeled in a similar way, you can use the open-source NodeXL plugin for Excel, which let's you harvest your data from these social networks and build your own visualizations. It's actually much much more robust than Immersion and you don't have to give a third-party access to your accounts since you run it from your local machine yourself.
I've never been to Silicon Valley, but I met a programmer who was happy to get out of there as soon as he could escape. I'll never forget the mental image he painted of the place, "On Friday nights everyone takes their expensive cars out cruising, but there are no women in Silicon Valley, so it's just a bunch of guys trying to impress other guys."
Really sounds like Sartre's description of hell as "other people" to me.
It's a nice act, but isn't it a little on the hypocritical side considering France has just been exposed as having an equally egregious citizen-spying program in place? I'm glad the EU-legislation is doing something, but it sounds like they need to now pass a resolution condemning the program going on inside their own borders. Everyone should be outraged at PRISM, but everyone should also be outraged that France was condemning the United States for running a program they themselves were secretly running as well.