Having seen my son raised on a diet of his mother's milk for his first six months, I'm especially perplexed at the idea that the sight of bared female breasts is harmful to children. I have to assume that prudes only feed their kids formula.
Let's be honest. There isn't a lot of money in science. Most smart US-born kids who are strong in science are going to follow the dollars and the social prestige and go to med school, not grad school. The foreign students are often going to grad school in the US in hopes of being able to stay, and that's why they're willing to put up with the low wages and long hours in the sciences, both the "dignified poverty" of grad school and the less-than-stellar wages and shaky job security once they get out.
Of course, it might be argued that one reason there's so little money in science is that US universities are producing more PhDs than the economy can realistically support, and some of that is due to the presence of so many foreign grad students.
For now, the US is reaping the benefits of brain drain from other countries, and the relatively poor quality of science education for US-born students consequently doesn't have much of a real impact.
Given their evident ignorance, I'd expect the FBI to track the purchase of garbanzo beans and chick peas separately under the mistaken belief that these are actually distinct. The most distinctly Middle Eastern ingredient in hummus is tahini. Of course, tahini can be made from sesame seeds, so they'd need to track those as well, but I don't expect the FBI is aware that tahini is made from sesame seeds.
1. The act of unfolding or unrolling; hence, any process of growth or development; as, the evolution of a flower from a bud, or an animal from the egg. - 1913 Webster
The alternative to "evolution" is "the first draft == the final draft". That may be OK for a divinity who is by definition perfect and omnipotent, creating all biota in their current respective forms within the span of a week, but the rest of us typically have to take a more gradual approach towards getting what we want. Evolution in this context is hardly incompatible with design, which certainly takes place as well, and the term is especially valid in cases where the design is modified (i.e. the design evolves) between its original version and its final version. In broader usage, "[P]rocess of... development" certainly applies to software. Software evolves, and the word "evolution" was used long before Darwin. Get over it.
Consider the more detailed paper, with s/Internet/foo/ applied:
To be diagnosed as having foo Addiction Disorder, a person must meet certain criteria as prescribed by the American Psychiatric Association. Three or more of these criteria must be present at any time during a twelve month period:
2. Two or more withdrawal symptoms developing within days to one month after reduction of foo or cessation of foo (i.e., quitting cold turkey) , and these must cause distress or impair social, personal or occupational functioning. These include: psychomotor agitation, i.e. trembling, tremors; anxiety; obsessive thinking about what is happening with respect to foo; fantasies or dreams about foo; voluntary or involuntary imitation of the movements characteristic of foo.
(the mere act of thinking about foo while not engaged in foo presumably qualifies as "fantasies")
3. Use of the Internet is engaged in to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms.
(if thinking about foo qualifies as withdrawal, then engaging in foo qualifies as relief of withdrawal)
5. A significant amount of time is spent in activities related to foo.
By this standard of addiction, any activity which one both considers ("fantasies") and practices, and which occupies a significant amount of time (even if it's simply liesure time), qualifies as an addiction.
"Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."
I've known many human beings. None of them, so far as I know, were an "earlier species of animal" at any point in their lives. They've been fetuses, and they've been embryos, but they've all been *human* fetuses and embryos. I know no humans who have themselves previously been dogs (Sharikov?), cats, chipmunks, or any other non-human species. Human beings, *as we know them*, developed from human beings. There hasn't been recognizable speciation within humanity in our lifetimes. A better question would be the origin of the human *species*. Strictly speaking, we need to draw a distinction between human beings as individuals (who do not, as a rule, "develop", Lamarck notwithstanding) and populations (which do change over time, even if it's purely drift). If one rejects Lamarck in favor of Darwin, should one disagree with the statement?
Did the human species develop from *several* earlier species (there's an implied plural, since there's no article), or just one? If different species, by definition, do not interbreed to yield fertile offspring, how could one species have developed from several earlier species? Or is the implication of the plural that these several species were in succession, i.e. that the human species developed from another species, which in turn developed from a third species, and so forth, as in the much-parodied illustration? If one does not believe that humans could develop from multiple species simultaneously (based on the definition of "species"), should one disagree with the statement?
Ignoring the problem that the definition of species becomes highly speculative when one only has the fossil record[1], perhaps the US would have fared better if this statement had been phrased more carefully in English. One wonders whether it was asked less clumsily in Icelandic. One of the problems with international surveys like this one is the difficulty of comparing the answers to questions asked in different languages. I think it would have been more clear in English as "Humans developed from earlier species of animals". Perhaps the bias of the authors led them to phrase the statement poorly in English?
Yeah, I know. I'm probably just making excuses.
[1] Given two somewhat similar sets of bones, how can one know for certain whether the two animals were able to interbreed, yielding fertile offspring? How much morphological difference can be attributed to individual variation, sexual dimorphism, or pathology within one species? What if the two sets of bones were temporally distinct? Do people today belong to a different species from people living three hundred years ago, given that there isn't a lot of interbreeding across that many generations? Do the people who lived three hundred years ago and six hundred years ago inherently constitute "earlier species of animals" simply by temporal separation? Once the conventional definition of species becomes impractical, the definition of distinct species becomes much more speculative.
My post was a response to something I perceived as an attack on hard science by squishy science. I fully realized that I was to some extent proving your point (especially with regards to ad hominem attacks), but I simply couldn't let a comparison of hard scientists with astrologers (itself an ad hominem attack) go unanswered, and thus I decided to feed a troll by counter-trolling. You were baiting me to support your point, and I went for the bait. It's entirely possible that your typos were calculated to draw such a response. My basic point is that if you're going to attack hard science, you should at least do some editing lest you undermine your message, and calling me an "idoit" will just make me point at you and laugh.
I'll get to work on personality tests, though, if you like.
My specific jab at psychology ("based on cigars and violins") went unanswered, though it is something that makes most respectable psychologists blush and stare at their feet, knowing the lack of rigor that characterized the early history of their field. Another post pointed out the statistical problems typical of many psychology studies (chiefly insufficient sample size). In terms of personality tests, it's not uncommon for them to be horribly written, with a number of stale assumptions. For example, the old-school MMPI had some hilarious true/false questions:
I like tall women. I know a tall woman, a psych nurse living in Minnesota, who was puzzled by this question. If she says no, does that indicate that she doesn't like herself and that she has self-esteem problems? If she says yes, does that indicate that she is a lesbian?
I used to like "drop-the-handkerchief."
This may have been a meaningful question in the 1930s, when the test was written, but within a few decades, most people taking the test didn't understand the question well enough to be able to give a meaningful answer.
I understand that the MMPI has been reworked, but it still stands as an example of a typical personality test, full of poorly-worded ambiguous questions that say as much about the failings of the test writer as they do about the personality of the test taker. For further discussion, see The Straight Dope. I feel entirely justified in saying that this is pseudo-science.
Would you care to respond to these points, or shall we continue to swap ad hominem attacks?
But you are welcome to judge me on whatever criteria you prefer, since it seems important to you.
Bingo. Care to guess how I turn up on Myers-Briggs?
WHile [sic] a lot of what you say has been well though [sic] out, this statement is a perfect example of a major problem amoung [sic] hard science people in their view of psychology. It is like an astrologer who says they [sic] understand asstronomy [sic] because they know astrology.
I think you have that backwards. The stereotype among hard science people about psychology is that psychology is something akin to astrology, but based on cigars and violins rather than signs of the zodiac and planets.
Do you give psychologists credit for that little intelligence? Serioulsy [sic] -- think about it.
Here's a question for a psychologist: is spelling a useful metric of intelligence? I expect you'll argue that it isn't. Then again, sloppy typing is an even less valid metric.
Here's another question for a psychologist: will your arguments be judged by the reader based on how well you can construct them? Will the perception of the reader be that you're an idiot, with your message being taken with a larger grain of salt, if you post articles full of typos?
"Hamlet" is based on the "Gesta Danorum" of Saxo Grammaticus
"Othello" is based on Cinthio's "Hecatommithi"
"King Lear" is based on the "Historia Regum Britanniae" of Geoffrey of Monmouth and on Holinshed's Chronicles.
For that matter, most of his histories and "Cymbeline" are also based on Holinshed.
"Troilus and Cressida" is based on Chaucer's "Troilus and Crisedye"
One could go on: all but a handful of his plays are adaptations, often based (if loosely at times) on history. As was noted in antiquity, "There's nothing new under the sun."
If you've seen "Seven Samurai", the parallels are quite obvious. It's admittedly mapped onto the traditional grasshopper/ant fable, but as a movie, it's clearly patterned after "Seven Samurai".
That's true of Disney. It's worth noting that other than the (limited) similarities between "Bug's Life" and "The Seven Samurai" and "Toy Story 2" being a sequel, all of Pixar's films to date have been completely original works. I'm curious to whether Disney will start creating more original works rather than making adaptations of ill-chosen 19th century French novels (one shudders at the prospect of Disney versions of "Scarlet and Black" or "Madame Bovary").
All media have biases. Journalists who are inclined to trust corporations (and distrust government) are more likely to seek work in the private sector, given an option. Journalists who are inclined to trust government (and distrust corporations) are more likely to seek work in the public sector, given an option. There's less of a dichotomy in the US, where the government isn't so heavily involved in journalism and where journalism is thus overwhelmingly private sector.
The BBC has its own biases, based largely on the prejudices of its reporters. It's different from the advertiser-appeasing biases sometimes imposed by producers in the private sector, but I wouldn't call the BBC completely balanced and objective. To the extent that media management anywhere (private sector or public sector, doesn't much matter) is biased, their underlings will tend to show those same biases. Stories that support their prejudices will be eagerly reported; those that don't (or which incur cognitive dissonance) are swept under the rug as much as possible. Biases will go beyond which stories they report and will extend to what people are interviewed and what questions they are asked.
The widespread journalistic doctrine embraced by the BBC, mandating that there are two equivalent sides to every story, that there is need to describe conflict with "objectivity" and "balance" (when it suits them), is itself a form of bias. For example, there's evidently a BBC policy against describing *anything* as "terrorism". Since there's no universally recognized definition of terrorism, it's best simply to deny that it exists at all. There are simply those who carry out violence, and the victims of that violence, and they are portrayed on equal terms. There's no suggestion of terrorism as being somehow criminal or morally wrong. Instead, there's analysis of the motives of the terrorists, what drove them to such violence, a portrayal of murderer as victim. And the victims? For the sake of "balance", they must be painted as aggressors, somehow responsible for whatever happened to them. To see aggressors as aggressors and victims as victims is somehow seen as intellectually lazy, so it becomes an intellectual exercise to justify a role reversal. It's all rather pathological.
I often listen to the BBC World Service on my commute, so I have some solid basis for my opinion of the BBC. They're not communists at the BBC, but they're typically "useful idiots".
That's not to say Fox isn't also biased. My real thesis is that all media are biased; they're just biased in different ways.
The cognitive dissonance in this story (which, for me, is the fun part) is that Slashdot readers, who tend to be a rather anti-corporate lot (and certainly anti-Microsoft), have finally found a company they like (Google), and that company is being attacked by the old, familiar, trustworthy, anti-corporate media. And we're supposed to be surprised?
Maybe the BBC, historically one of the world's great information delivery organizations, has an interest in casting Google in a negative light? Microsoft isn't the only company that sees Google as a threat, after all.
You're thinking of the Quartos, which were mostly bootlegs published during Shakespeare's lifetime. The First Folio was edited by two friends and heirs of Shakespeare, actors in his company, after his death. There was never an authorized published version of his plays; the First Folio is as close to authorized as it gets. There was probably the notion that any reasonable copyright expired on his death, since he certainly wasn't going to be staging any more plays himself at that point unless he took on the role of Yorick.
I don't think the Quartos had modern spelling, either, FWIW.
Printed texts of the day often had other spelling quirks based on printers coping with letter shortages (e.g. "vv" standing in for "w"), akin to what you'll see once in a while today with slide-in letters in roadside signs and theater marquees, arguably less to do with the author's spelling than with the printer's typesetting.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel like I'm trapped in a Samuel Beckett play.
...far away from us!
- "Fiddler on the Roof"
The only news source I've found that's providing any real coverage any more is The Tech.
Having seen my son raised on a diet of his mother's milk for his first six months, I'm especially perplexed at the idea that the sight of bared female breasts is harmful to children. I have to assume that prudes only feed their kids formula.
So the Kabbalah predates the Torah?
Let's be honest. There isn't a lot of money in science. Most smart US-born kids who are strong in science are going to follow the dollars and the social prestige and go to med school, not grad school. The foreign students are often going to grad school in the US in hopes of being able to stay, and that's why they're willing to put up with the low wages and long hours in the sciences, both the "dignified poverty" of grad school and the less-than-stellar wages and shaky job security once they get out.
Of course, it might be argued that one reason there's so little money in science is that US universities are producing more PhDs than the economy can realistically support, and some of that is due to the presence of so many foreign grad students.
For now, the US is reaping the benefits of brain drain from other countries, and the relatively poor quality of science education for US-born students consequently doesn't have much of a real impact.
Of course, the ability to cite de Tocqueville is an example of erudition.
Not quite, by an order of magnitude. It's now 9.3 million users, not 93 million users.
Given their evident ignorance, I'd expect the FBI to track the purchase of garbanzo beans and chick peas separately under the mistaken belief that these are actually distinct. The most distinctly Middle Eastern ingredient in hummus is tahini. Of course, tahini can be made from sesame seeds, so they'd need to track those as well, but I don't expect the FBI is aware that tahini is made from sesame seeds.
So much for "20 GB is enough for anyone"
Lamarck obviously never attended a bris.
1. The act of unfolding or unrolling; hence, any process of growth or development; as, the evolution of a flower from a bud, or an animal from the egg.
... development" certainly applies to software. Software evolves, and the word "evolution" was used long before Darwin. Get over it.
- 1913 Webster
The alternative to "evolution" is "the first draft == the final draft". That may be OK for a divinity who is by definition perfect and omnipotent, creating all biota in their current respective forms within the span of a week, but the rest of us typically have to take a more gradual approach towards getting what we want. Evolution in this context is hardly incompatible with design, which certainly takes place as well, and the term is especially valid in cases where the design is modified (i.e. the design evolves) between its original version and its final version. In broader usage, "[P]rocess of
Consider the more detailed paper, with s/Internet/foo/ applied:
To be diagnosed as having foo Addiction Disorder, a person must meet certain
criteria as prescribed by the American Psychiatric Association. Three or more of these
criteria must be present at any time during a twelve month period:
2. Two or more withdrawal symptoms developing within days to one month after
reduction of foo or cessation of foo (i.e., quitting cold turkey) , and these
must cause distress or impair social, personal or occupational functioning. These include:
psychomotor agitation, i.e. trembling, tremors; anxiety; obsessive thinking about what is
happening with respect to foo; fantasies or dreams about foo; voluntary or involuntary
imitation of the movements characteristic of foo.
(the mere act of thinking about foo while not engaged in foo presumably qualifies as "fantasies")
3. Use of the Internet is engaged in to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms.
(if thinking about foo qualifies as withdrawal, then engaging in foo qualifies as relief of withdrawal)
5. A significant amount of time is spent in activities related to foo.
By this standard of addiction, any activity which one both considers ("fantasies") and practices, and which occupies a significant amount of time (even if it's simply liesure time), qualifies as an addiction.
Seems like a pretty broken definition to me.
The first recorded fatal car accident was with a steam-powered car in 1869.
)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ward_(scientist
From TFA:
"Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."
I've known many human beings. None of them, so far as I know, were an "earlier species of animal" at any point in their lives. They've been fetuses, and they've been embryos, but they've all been *human* fetuses and embryos. I know no humans who have themselves previously been dogs (Sharikov?), cats, chipmunks, or any other non-human species. Human beings, *as we know them*, developed from human beings. There hasn't been recognizable speciation within humanity in our lifetimes. A better question would be the origin of the human *species*. Strictly speaking, we need to draw a distinction between human beings as individuals (who do not, as a rule, "develop", Lamarck notwithstanding) and populations (which do change over time, even if it's purely drift). If one rejects Lamarck in favor of Darwin, should one disagree with the statement?
Did the human species develop from *several* earlier species (there's an implied plural, since there's no article), or just one? If different species, by definition, do not interbreed to yield fertile offspring, how could one species have developed from several earlier species? Or is the implication of the plural that these several species were in succession, i.e. that the human species developed from another species, which in turn developed from a third species, and so forth, as in the much-parodied illustration? If one does not believe that humans could develop from multiple species simultaneously (based on the definition of "species"), should one disagree with the statement?
Ignoring the problem that the definition of species becomes highly speculative when one only has the fossil record[1], perhaps the US would have fared better if this statement had been phrased more carefully in English. One wonders whether it was asked less clumsily in Icelandic. One of the problems with international surveys like this one is the difficulty of comparing the answers to questions asked in different languages. I think it would have been more clear in English as "Humans developed from earlier species of animals". Perhaps the bias of the authors led them to phrase the statement poorly in English?
Yeah, I know. I'm probably just making excuses.
[1] Given two somewhat similar sets of bones, how can one know for certain whether the two animals were able to interbreed, yielding fertile offspring? How much morphological difference can be attributed to individual variation, sexual dimorphism, or pathology within one species? What if the two sets of bones were temporally distinct? Do people today belong to a different species from people living three hundred years ago, given that there isn't a lot of interbreeding across that many generations? Do the people who lived three hundred years ago and six hundred years ago inherently constitute "earlier species of animals" simply by temporal separation? Once the conventional definition of species becomes impractical, the definition of distinct species becomes much more speculative.
Yes, Hizbollah has a history of involvement in suicide bombings.
My post was a response to something I perceived as an attack on hard science by squishy science. I fully realized that I was to some extent proving your point (especially with regards to ad hominem attacks), but I simply couldn't let a comparison of hard scientists with astrologers (itself an ad hominem attack) go unanswered, and thus I decided to feed a troll by counter-trolling. You were baiting me to support your point, and I went for the bait. It's entirely possible that your typos were calculated to draw such a response. My basic point is that if you're going to attack hard science, you should at least do some editing lest you undermine your message, and calling me an "idoit" will just make me point at you and laugh.
I'll get to work on personality tests, though, if you like.
My specific jab at psychology ("based on cigars and violins") went unanswered, though it is something that makes most respectable psychologists blush and stare at their feet, knowing the lack of rigor that characterized the early history of their field. Another post pointed out the statistical problems typical of many psychology studies (chiefly insufficient sample size). In terms of personality tests, it's not uncommon for them to be horribly written, with a number of stale assumptions. For example, the old-school MMPI had some hilarious true/false questions:
I know a tall woman, a psych nurse living in Minnesota, who was puzzled by this question. If she says no, does that indicate that she doesn't like herself and that she has self-esteem problems? If she says yes, does that indicate that she is a lesbian?
This may have been a meaningful question in the 1930s, when the test was written, but within a few decades, most people taking the test didn't understand the question well enough to be able to give a meaningful answer.
I understand that the MMPI has been reworked, but it still stands as an example of a typical personality test, full of poorly-worded ambiguous questions that say as much about the failings of the test writer as they do about the personality of the test taker. For further discussion, see The Straight Dope. I feel entirely justified in saying that this is pseudo-science.
Would you care to respond to these points, or shall we continue to swap ad hominem attacks?
Bingo. Care to guess how I turn up on Myers-Briggs?
I think you have that backwards. The stereotype among hard science people about psychology is that psychology is something akin to astrology, but based on cigars and violins rather than signs of the zodiac and planets.
Here's a question for a psychologist: is spelling a useful metric of intelligence? I expect you'll argue that it isn't. Then again, sloppy typing is an even less valid metric.
Here's another question for a psychologist: will your arguments be judged by the reader based on how well you can construct them? Will the perception of the reader be that you're an idiot, with your message being taken with a larger grain of salt, if you post articles full of typos?
One could go on: all but a handful of his plays are adaptations, often based (if loosely at times) on history. As was noted in antiquity, "There's nothing new under the sun."
Which means only that they'll object if you eat meat from a living animal. Dunno how common that is in practice.
If you've seen "Seven Samurai", the parallels are quite obvious. It's admittedly mapped onto the traditional grasshopper/ant fable, but as a movie, it's clearly patterned after "Seven Samurai".
That's true of Disney. It's worth noting that other than the (limited) similarities between "Bug's Life" and "The Seven Samurai" and "Toy Story 2" being a sequel, all of Pixar's films to date have been completely original works. I'm curious to whether Disney will start creating more original works rather than making adaptations of ill-chosen 19th century French novels (one shudders at the prospect of Disney versions of "Scarlet and Black" or "Madame Bovary").
All media have biases. Journalists who are inclined to trust corporations (and distrust government) are more likely to seek work in the private sector, given an option. Journalists who are inclined to trust government (and distrust corporations) are more likely to seek work in the public sector, given an option. There's less of a dichotomy in the US, where the government isn't so heavily involved in journalism and where journalism is thus overwhelmingly private sector.
The BBC has its own biases, based largely on the prejudices of its reporters. It's different from the advertiser-appeasing biases sometimes imposed by producers in the private sector, but I wouldn't call the BBC completely balanced and objective. To the extent that media management anywhere (private sector or public sector, doesn't much matter) is biased, their underlings will tend to show those same biases. Stories that support their prejudices will be eagerly reported; those that don't (or which incur cognitive dissonance) are swept under the rug as much as possible. Biases will go beyond which stories they report and will extend to what people are interviewed and what questions they are asked.
The widespread journalistic doctrine embraced by the BBC, mandating that there are two equivalent sides to every story, that there is need to describe conflict with "objectivity" and "balance" (when it suits them), is itself a form of bias. For example, there's evidently a BBC policy against describing *anything* as "terrorism". Since there's no universally recognized definition of terrorism, it's best simply to deny that it exists at all. There are simply those who carry out violence, and the victims of that violence, and they are portrayed on equal terms. There's no suggestion of terrorism as being somehow criminal or morally wrong. Instead, there's analysis of the motives of the terrorists, what drove them to such violence, a portrayal of murderer as victim. And the victims? For the sake of "balance", they must be painted as aggressors, somehow responsible for whatever happened to them. To see aggressors as aggressors and victims as victims is somehow seen as intellectually lazy, so it becomes an intellectual exercise to justify a role reversal. It's all rather pathological.
I often listen to the BBC World Service on my commute, so I have some solid basis for my opinion of the BBC. They're not communists at the BBC, but they're typically "useful idiots".
That's not to say Fox isn't also biased. My real thesis is that all media are biased; they're just biased in different ways.
The cognitive dissonance in this story (which, for me, is the fun part) is that Slashdot readers, who tend to be a rather anti-corporate lot (and certainly anti-Microsoft), have finally found a company they like (Google), and that company is being attacked by the old, familiar, trustworthy, anti-corporate media. And we're supposed to be surprised?
Maybe the BBC, historically one of the world's great information delivery organizations, has an interest in casting Google in a negative light? Microsoft isn't the only company that sees Google as a threat, after all.
You're thinking of the Quartos, which were mostly bootlegs published during Shakespeare's lifetime. The First Folio was edited by two friends and heirs of Shakespeare, actors in his company, after his death. There was never an authorized published version of his plays; the First Folio is as close to authorized as it gets. There was probably the notion that any reasonable copyright expired on his death, since he certainly wasn't going to be staging any more plays himself at that point unless he took on the role of Yorick.
I don't think the Quartos had modern spelling, either, FWIW.
Printed texts of the day often had other spelling quirks based on printers coping with letter shortages (e.g. "vv" standing in for "w"), akin to what you'll see once in a while today with slide-in letters in roadside signs and theater marquees, arguably less to do with the author's spelling than with the printer's typesetting.