Marvel tried this with the New Universe imprint, 1986-1989. It was unpopular and canceled pretty quickly. We might theorize that the further removed the fantasy world is from the real-world, the harder it is for readers to immerse themselves in it.
"One of the founding ideas of the New Universe was that the existence of paranormals would have real and lasting consequences... Despite all of this, sales were poor and the imprint was abruptly discontinued in late 1989 after a total of 174 comics had been published."
"You missed out the entirety of the next paragraph which define the exceptions. As these cover almost all of the most likely scenarios, it's a little empty. The policy does mean that if you write a text book, or you might be able to retain copyright, although under normal employment law, the university would own that."
Totally disagree with that interpretation. In the following section B -- Items (1) and (2) say there may possibly be less owned by the researcher if a separate agreement is signed; item (3) says things like HR manuals are owned by the college, but otherwise strengthens scholarly ownership by researcher; item (4) strengthens researcher ownership when scholarly works are delivered electronically; item (5) says agreements to increase researcher ownership are allowed; and item (6) says work prepared specially for university media (TV, radio) accrues more to the college.
You seem to confuse the functioning of the institution of science (by logically falsifying theories) with the activities of individual scientists (who generally seek more evidence for for their favored theories). They don't have to be the same. For example, Karl Popper (popularizer of the falsification criteria) compared scientific theories to evolution. Likewise in that case you need two separate and distinct operations: mutation and natural selection. Ultimately, competition is how the institution uses individual theories as an engine for progress.
Or as written in this week's New Yorker: "Physicists are ontological detectives. We think of scientists as wholly rational, open to all possible arguments. But to begin with a conviction and then to use one's intellectual prowess to establish support for that conviction has worked for scientists..." -- Rivka Galchen, "Dream Machines" (on quantum computing), New Yorker 5/2/11
I agree with the original topic. The fact that current science research from publicly-funded universities is locked up in pay journals, in the age of the Internet, is batshit crazy. It may be one of the top-10 insanities of our age.
"Are you really that fucking stupid??? *Every* university requires that their graduate students and professors sign away all their intellectual work while at the university."
Bullshit. For example, CUNY policy on intellectual property (http://portal.cuny.edu/cms/id/cuny/documents/level_3_page/001173.htm)
General Rule: 1. The Creator shall own all rights in Copyrightable Works. 2. The University shall own all rights in other Intellectual Property.
So clearly not "every university" and not "all intellectual work". Note that CUNY is the largest urban university in the U.S. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUNY).
I teach falsifiability. But what happens in practice is that people go looking for tests to accrue additional evidence for their position. Surely you know how rarely null-hypothesis results get published.
If anything, researchers look for ways to refute their competitor's position.
"... might be helpful (at least from the point of view of Prof. Taylor) would be to eliminate the bullshit Ph.D.s in fields such as political science, poetry, philosophy, English literature, and so on..."
You sure about that? Because Prof. Taylor himself has a doctorate in Philosophy (Copenhagen 1981), and he now heads Columbia's Department of Religion.
I read this more as a thinly-veiled attack on basic scientific research, actually.
Note that "Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor", pontificating on how research has become too specialized and non-understandable to the public at large, and "must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population" is himself a Professor of Religion. FTA:
"Mark C. Taylor is chair of the department of religion at Columbia University in New York and the author of Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, 2010). e-mail:mct22@columbia.edu"
Sort of easy to predict that, in fact. Because you know what? A person doing real, cutting-edge research, developing insights that no one else ever has before in history, is almost by definition going to be non-understandable by other people -- at least until such time as their research becomes diffused and more accepted by the mainstream. The call to "nourish cross-disciplinary investigation... focus on solving practical problems" is a thinly-disguised attack on basic scientific research. It's classic short-term thinking; if you demand profit/practical solutions right now, then the basic research that develops heretofore unimaginable solutions tomorrow will not be done.
Now, there's a lot of problems with PHD employment prospects, etc. But this is pretty damned skewed by how exceptionally non-useful this guys' graduates in philosophy and religious studies are. (I say this as someone with degrees in both philosophy and STEM.) I might suggest actual solutions would include: (a) Mandatory clear information provided to prospects about career and employment prospects, so they can make their own decisions on priorities. (b) Rollback the corporate-minded administrative takeover of higher education from faculty. (c) Return most teaching positions to being full-time tenured, instead of part-time contingent faculty as we have today, etc. The "make education practical/profitable" effort has been going on for 30 years, what we have now is the result of it, and it's time to stop digging the damn hole any deeper.
So granted that Slashdot is all "hey-man-don't-regulate-my-games". I mean, I'm in the same boat, video game engineering was my employment at one point, and I'd tend to not want restrictions on the source of both my paycheck and entertainment. (The "who's ox is getting gored" bias, as we'd say down on the farm.)
But honestly, this summary/article is a pretty shitty, rambling, poorly-founded, juvenile, knee-jerk complaint. Assessing the level of expertise in differing camps is a fairly common technique nowadays -- analyzing published articles in the subject matter at hand, the prominence of the journals in question, the influence as measured by citations, etc. "And, again, the entire basis of this result is a meaningless dataset." Meaningless? Uh, no. It's just an analysis whose conclusion you don't like. (Or as I might tell my stats students: "You'll do a month of statistics, present it to your boss who doesn't like the result, and then he'll tell you to go to hell.")
Final line FTA: "They're starting with an established position and trying to figure out ways to present evidence to support that. That's not science." Um, actually, that's pretty damn close to the actual definition of science (hypothesis, followed by experimental design). As long as you're intellectually honest enough to admit when the results contradict your starting position.
Here's where you get the "anecdote does not equal data" discussion.
Consider a comprehensive study of the issue in CA released last year: "Study: Calif. Courts Discipline Prosecutorial Misconduct Less Than 1% of the Time... in addition, the report states that the California State Bar Association has publicly disciplined only six prosecutors for misconduct during the past dozen years or less than 1 percent of the 707 times in which courts have found that prosecutors did commit misconduct."
"Surely there is some kind of penalty in our well-designed system for such sloppiness on the part of law-enforcement."
Almost exactly the opposite. Thee days, there's quite a bit of aggravation aimed at (a) partial immunity for law enforcement, and (b) complete immunity for prosecutors. (Of which the latter often blankets and protects the former.)
"Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale."
The summary is a perfectly accurate representation of how the police/statist spokespeople are spinning this, and of course the mass media just regurgitates it verbatim. But that is totally the wrong point to take from this. It's a cautionary tale, all right -- of the horrifying real-life consequences of our brain-addled priorities towards pornography. And the result is they'll want to make it illegal to share our Internet and information access with fellow citizens. Pretty outrageous.
This is a cruddy review, and I suspect that the book is cruddy, as well. (1) A review posted anonymously smells bad. How can we be sure this is not the author/publisher? Etc. (2) Usually taking any discipline and hammering into being more "aligned with business" wrecks it. (3) Math doesn't add up. "The basic premise is that software should be 'released' on a targeted six-week schedule. There are eight six-week cycles in a calendar year, and releasing your software three times a quarter allows the Business to plan their own cycles accordingly." I'm pretty sure that 8/year = 2/quarter. Etc.
Mario Kart doesn't get categorized as a "Sports" game (see IGN review, "Genre: Racing Action" -- http://wii.ign.com/articles/868/868012p1.html). Admittedly, I'm thinking more of a simulation video game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_video_game). This is in reference to great-great-grandparent post's idea of "the same game without the NFL branding and fake teams and names". I mean, I'm just saying I've actually seen that get played out and end a company I worked at.
It means brand licensing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_licensing). It's a major, established, and well-defined part of many industries, including video games. The place where I worked had a full-time employee devoted solely to brand licensing. Examples such as Street Fighter, Super Smash Brothers, and Mario Kart would not count -- they are not marks licensed from an outside, real-world brand.
Nice in theory but totally invalidated by actual activity in the industry. I once worked at a small company that made a licensed sports game for a few years: company made big bucks. Then the license expired and EA bought it up. Company I'd been at tried to sell the exact same game (with improvements) unlicensed. After a few years it was out-of-business.
Right now, I couldn't name a single unlicensed sports game of any success level at all. (I've been out of the industry for some years, so my knowledge base is admittedly low.) Licensing has been proven to be almost everything in that industry. People don't care about "football" in the abstract, they care about their particular home team and its players.
Admittedly it might be nice to have a version of that latter chart specifying what party controlled Congress at which time (granted Congress has the budgetary power).
But as far as Presidential debates go, certainly that is on-topic.
"And no one's rushing out to define a decimal second either. The metric system might be slightly more convenient, but it's hardly the apex of human invention.)"
This is a rather awesome point. I think my next response to a metric-uber-alles debate will be -- "I look forward to your recommendations for decimalizing time, angles, and longitude".
Overall I agree that estimations are easier in (reduced) fractions than decimals. However, it's silly to say "humans seem to naturally think in base 12". The fact that 1/3 is easier than 6/10 is simply that the former deals with smaller numbers -- there's lots of cognitive research than people compare and think about smaller numbers more easily (as if that wasn't totally self-evident). The fact that 12 is nice is a result of that (divides by 1, 2, 3, 4), not the cause. Same goes for the Babylonian magic value of 60.
Slashdot Mirror
White House admits bin Laden "was not armed" during the raid:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theenvoy/20110503/ts_yblog_theenvoy/in-aftermath-of-bin-laden-raid-new-intelligence-shifting-accounts
Marvel tried this with the New Universe imprint, 1986-1989. It was unpopular and canceled pretty quickly. We might theorize that the further removed the fantasy world is from the real-world, the harder it is for readers to immerse themselves in it.
"One of the founding ideas of the New Universe was that the existence of paranormals would have real and lasting consequences... Despite all of this, sales were poor and the imprint was abruptly discontinued in late 1989 after a total of 174 comics had been published."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Universe
I call "social networking bubble". Where can I short-sell?
I agree. Most unfortunately, this smells of desperation when I read it.
Subsection 5. Regulatory capture will allow a sufficiently successful business to rewrite all the above when it becomes an issue.
"You missed out the entirety of the next paragraph which define the exceptions. As these cover almost all of the
most likely scenarios, it's a little empty. The policy does mean that if you write a text book, or you might be able
to retain copyright, although under normal employment law, the university would own that."
Totally disagree with that interpretation. In the following section B -- Items (1) and (2) say there may possibly be less owned by the researcher if a separate agreement is signed; item (3) says things like HR manuals are owned by the college, but otherwise strengthens scholarly ownership by researcher; item (4) strengthens researcher ownership when scholarly works are delivered electronically; item (5) says agreements to increase researcher ownership are allowed; and item (6) says work prepared specially for university media (TV, radio) accrues more to the college.
You seem to confuse the functioning of the institution of science (by logically falsifying theories) with the activities of individual scientists (who generally seek more evidence for for their favored theories). They don't have to be the same. For example, Karl Popper (popularizer of the falsification criteria) compared scientific theories to evolution. Likewise in that case you need two separate and distinct operations: mutation and natural selection. Ultimately, competition is how the institution uses individual theories as an engine for progress.
Or as written in this week's New Yorker: "Physicists are ontological detectives. We think of scientists as wholly rational, open to all possible arguments. But to begin with a conviction and then to use one's intellectual prowess to establish support for that conviction has worked for scientists..." -- Rivka Galchen, "Dream Machines" (on quantum computing), New Yorker 5/2/11
I agree with the original topic. The fact that current science research from publicly-funded universities is locked up in pay journals, in the age of the Internet, is batshit crazy. It may be one of the top-10 insanities of our age.
"Are you really that fucking stupid??? *Every* university requires that their graduate students and professors sign away all their intellectual work while at the university."
Bullshit. For example, CUNY policy on intellectual property (http://portal.cuny.edu/cms/id/cuny/documents/level_3_page/001173.htm)
General Rule:
1. The Creator shall own all rights in Copyrightable Works.
2. The University shall own all rights in other Intellectual Property.
So clearly not "every university" and not "all intellectual work". Note that CUNY is the largest urban university in the U.S. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUNY).
I teach falsifiability. But what happens in practice is that people go looking for tests to accrue additional evidence for their position. Surely you know how rarely null-hypothesis results get published.
If anything, researchers look for ways to refute their competitor's position.
"... might be helpful (at least from the point of view of Prof. Taylor) would be to eliminate the bullshit Ph.D.s in fields such as political science, poetry, philosophy, English literature, and so on..."
You sure about that? Because Prof. Taylor himself has a doctorate in Philosophy (Copenhagen 1981), and he now heads Columbia's Department of Religion.
I read this more as a thinly-veiled attack on basic scientific research, actually.
Note that "Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor", pontificating on how research has become too specialized and non-understandable to the public at large, and "must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population" is himself a Professor of Religion. FTA:
"Mark C. Taylor is chair of the department of religion at Columbia University in New York and the author of Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, 2010). e-mail:mct22@columbia.edu"
Sort of easy to predict that, in fact. Because you know what? A person doing real, cutting-edge research, developing insights that no one else ever has before in history, is almost by definition going to be non-understandable by other people -- at least until such time as their research becomes diffused and more accepted by the mainstream. The call to "nourish cross-disciplinary investigation... focus on solving practical problems" is a thinly-disguised attack on basic scientific research. It's classic short-term thinking; if you demand profit/practical solutions right now, then the basic research that develops heretofore unimaginable solutions tomorrow will not be done.
Now, there's a lot of problems with PHD employment prospects, etc. But this is pretty damned skewed by how exceptionally non-useful this guys' graduates in philosophy and religious studies are. (I say this as someone with degrees in both philosophy and STEM.) I might suggest actual solutions would include: (a) Mandatory clear information provided to prospects about career and employment prospects, so they can make their own decisions on priorities. (b) Rollback the corporate-minded administrative takeover of higher education from faculty. (c) Return most teaching positions to being full-time tenured, instead of part-time contingent faculty as we have today, etc. The "make education practical/profitable" effort has been going on for 30 years, what we have now is the result of it, and it's time to stop digging the damn hole any deeper.
So granted that Slashdot is all "hey-man-don't-regulate-my-games". I mean, I'm in the same boat, video game engineering was my employment at one point, and I'd tend to not want restrictions on the source of both my paycheck and entertainment. (The "who's ox is getting gored" bias, as we'd say down on the farm.)
But honestly, this summary/article is a pretty shitty, rambling, poorly-founded, juvenile, knee-jerk complaint. Assessing the level of expertise in differing camps is a fairly common technique nowadays -- analyzing published articles in the subject matter at hand, the prominence of the journals in question, the influence as measured by citations, etc. "And, again, the entire basis of this result is a meaningless dataset." Meaningless? Uh, no. It's just an analysis whose conclusion you don't like. (Or as I might tell my stats students: "You'll do a month of statistics, present it to your boss who doesn't like the result, and then he'll tell you to go to hell.")
Final line FTA: "They're starting with an established position and trying to figure out ways to present evidence to support that. That's not science." Um, actually, that's pretty damn close to the actual definition of science (hypothesis, followed by experimental design). As long as you're intellectually honest enough to admit when the results contradict your starting position.
Here's where you get the "anecdote does not equal data" discussion.
Consider a comprehensive study of the issue in CA released last year: "Study: Calif. Courts Discipline Prosecutorial Misconduct Less Than 1% of the Time... in addition, the report states that the California State Bar Association has publicly disciplined only six prosecutors for misconduct during the past dozen years or less than 1 percent of the 707 times in which courts have found that prosecutors did commit misconduct."
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/study_calif._courts_discipline_less_than_1_of_prosecutors_they_find_committ/
"Surely there is some kind of penalty in our well-designed system for such sloppiness on the part of law-enforcement."
Almost exactly the opposite. Thee days, there's quite a bit of aggravation aimed at (a) partial immunity for law enforcement, and (b) complete immunity for prosecutors. (Of which the latter often blankets and protects the former.)
"Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale."
The summary is a perfectly accurate representation of how the police/statist spokespeople are spinning this, and of course the mass media just regurgitates it verbatim. But that is totally the wrong point to take from this. It's a cautionary tale, all right -- of the horrifying real-life consequences of our brain-addled priorities towards pornography. And the result is they'll want to make it illegal to share our Internet and information access with fellow citizens. Pretty outrageous.
Hopefully this dies without me having to spend time arguing/politically organizing against it. I'm kind of pissed I even wrote this comment.
This is a cruddy review, and I suspect that the book is cruddy, as well. (1) A review posted anonymously smells bad. How can we be sure this is not the author/publisher? Etc. (2) Usually taking any discipline and hammering into being more "aligned with business" wrecks it. (3) Math doesn't add up. "The basic premise is that software should be 'released' on a targeted six-week schedule. There are eight six-week cycles in a calendar year, and releasing your software three times a quarter allows the Business to plan their own cycles accordingly." I'm pretty sure that 8/year = 2/quarter. Etc.
Mario Kart doesn't get categorized as a "Sports" game (see IGN review, "Genre: Racing Action" -- http://wii.ign.com/articles/868/868012p1.html). Admittedly, I'm thinking more of a simulation video game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_video_game). This is in reference to great-great-grandparent post's idea of "the same game without the NFL branding and fake teams and names". I mean, I'm just saying I've actually seen that get played out and end a company I worked at.
It means brand licensing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_licensing). It's a major, established, and well-defined part of many industries, including video games. The place where I worked had a full-time employee devoted solely to brand licensing. Examples such as Street Fighter, Super Smash Brothers, and Mario Kart would not count -- they are not marks licensed from an outside, real-world brand.
http://www.sportsmedia.net/MediaKit/Collegiate_Licensing/collegiate_licensing.htm
http://theodmgroup.com/2011/01/11/sports-licensing-seminar-a-whole-new-game/
http://www.buzzaboutgames.com/lack-sports-game-market-competition-quality-consumers/sports/
Nice in theory but totally invalidated by actual activity in the industry. I once worked at a small company that made a licensed sports game for a few years: company made big bucks. Then the license expired and EA bought it up. Company I'd been at tried to sell the exact same game (with improvements) unlicensed. After a few years it was out-of-business.
Right now, I couldn't name a single unlicensed sports game of any success level at all. (I've been out of the industry for some years, so my knowledge base is admittedly low.) Licensing has been proven to be almost everything in that industry. People don't care about "football" in the abstract, they care about their particular home team and its players.
Admittedly it might be nice to have a version of that latter chart specifying what party controlled Congress at which time (granted Congress has the budgetary power).
But as far as Presidential debates go, certainly that is on-topic.
Network effects, and the fact that the U.S. can be looked at as one of the most isolated countries (in terms of geography and culture) on Earth.
(Personally, I think there are advantages to both imperial and metric: estimating easier in the former, conversions easier in the latter.)
"And no one's rushing out to define a decimal second either. The metric system might be slightly more convenient, but it's hardly the apex of human invention.)"
This is a rather awesome point. I think my next response to a metric-uber-alles debate will be -- "I look forward to your recommendations for decimalizing time, angles, and longitude".
Overall I agree that estimations are easier in (reduced) fractions than decimals. However, it's silly to say "humans seem to naturally think in base 12". The fact that 1/3 is easier than 6/10 is simply that the former deals with smaller numbers -- there's lots of cognitive research than people compare and think about smaller numbers more easily (as if that wasn't totally self-evident). The fact that 12 is nice is a result of that (divides by 1, 2, 3, 4), not the cause. Same goes for the Babylonian magic value of 60.