And *you* may have just broken the same law, perhaps, by using the phrase "fight CBDTPA" in your comment tied to his comment. You have created a future link in Google between "fight CBDTPA", his post, and, implicitly, the allegedly infringing software. You're helping people find software that "fights" (circumvents) these laws.
Did you read the original article? There are some interesting swipes against the National Sleep Foundation:
---
'Kripke, whose study was funded by federal tax dollars, said doctors' recommendations that everyone get eight hours of sleep a night may have been influenced partly by companies that make sleeping pills. He cited a report from a public relations firm representing the maker of the medicine Ambien, which gave the National Sleep Foundation money to alert people about an insomnia "public health crisis" as part of a marketing campaign.
Both Buysse and Walsh have served as paid consultants to sleeping-pill makers, but both denied being influenced by that. Walsh said most researchers in the field have accepted consulting fees from the companies, because "99 percent of the funding to support this type of research is from pharmaceutical companies." '
---
Now, you can put whatever weight you want into this suggestion of bias. But at least the Washington Post, unlike CNN, alerted us to what *might* be exacerbating the conflict between the scientists here.
As you may have read, bestselling historian Stephen Ambrose was recently caught having lifted sentences and even passages from other sources, and passing them off as his own writing in his books. (While he mentioned the source books in footnotes/endnotes, he did not put the cribbed text in quotes.) At least four different Ambrose books have now been shown to have the same pattern of lifted, unattributed passages.
These instances only came to light because an author of a lifted passage noticed it while reading Ambrose's book. Subsequent episodes came about because other authors started looking, and now some people are checking out new likely sources; this works because Ambrose only lifted passages from books that he admired and heavily footnoted (at least, so far as we know!).
Perhaps Ambrose was really just lazy, as he was fairly open about crediting others for the ideas (he "just" failed to credit them for the words, too). There are many cases of sneakier plagiarism than that, both in academia and in journalism.
So, class, the programming problem for today is, given the text of two books, spit out the most likely candidates for lifted passages, based on length and similarity of words. You get a B if you can do this for exact, verbatim matches, an A if you can do it with individual word substitution, and an A+ if you can recognize re-ordered clauses. The end users for this tool would be 1) authors everywhere who want to protect their own writing, and 2) journalists looking for juicy plagiarism scandals.
I don't see why this email is interesting, outside of being additional evidence that you can buy the results you want from some consulting companies. The rest of the letter is just sales hype and tips that hold no surprises.
The phrasing sounds very much like Microsoft manager-speak, and the banal content makes it unlikely that it's faked.
Some people are confused by his statement about tracking forwards of the email. Exchange can track forwards within the system (Microsoft's corporate LAN), and the author points out that he used to manage the Exchange group, so he should know. Of course, a mole in Redmond could always cut and paste the email to send it off to the press, but that's not what Mr. Valentine is worried about here. He's mostly worried about *accidental* leakage because people have auto-forwarding rules in Outlook that will spread the email to other MS groups and possibly to outside the LAN (corporate partners, perhaps).
Some readers suggested that the author might have or should have tracked leaks by sending slightly different emails to each recipient. The problem with that is that this mail probably went to hundreds or thousands of people, based on the two Exchange aliases it was mailed to: WW [Worldwide?] Sales, Marketing & Services Group. Think, people.
Counter the madrassahs: start a secular school
on
Volunteer Work Abroad?
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
If I were fluent in Urdu, I like to think I would be on the next plane to Peshawar, Pakistan, to create a non-religious school. I think that, if successful, that plan would give one of the highest bangs for the buck that an individual could get right now in nonprofit work.
Poor Pakistanis put their sons into madrassahs for several reasons. It's free to them (sponsored by rich Islamists abroad), the boys are clothed and fed, they learn the *rudiments* of a normal education, and it allows them to serve their religion. Parents have no other options, since the Pakistan government fails to provide real money for public schools (and the other social services the madrassahs provide).
If you were to create a free school oriented around math and science, that offered kids some chance of getting a real job somewhere down the line, I think you'd get plenty of willing students. (Remember, Pakistanis and Afghans do not hate Western technology, just because some of them hate the culture it comes from.)
You simply don't talk about Islam. And you don't teach Arabic. Arabic isn't the language of business in Pakistan, Urdu is. So you teach Urdu and English (the global language of business and science). You don't discredit or analyze Islam; you simply say it's the business of a family and its mosque to teach religion, not the business of a technical school. (Besides, there really isn't time, given all the other stuff you need to teach them.) You could also teach girls, which madrassahs never do (although you might decide it's culturally easier to teach them in separate classes or schools).
Each student you take in potentially represents a family lifted out of poverty, and a life turned away from violence and terrorism.
"Would you expect to go to the USPTO and not have to pay for use of the photocopy machine ? I wouldn't."
I'd expect free photocopies, if the marginal cost were 0.000001 cents per page. They are an informational agency. Web access to their database should be a basic part of their budget.
Check out this picture:
http://www.geocities.com/capsulepipelines/images /i z2103.jpg
and its description:
"Much time was spent in the manual redirection of cylinders but, after experiments in 1931, automatic navigation was introduced using apparatus which could accept or pass on
cylinders according to the setting of electrically conducting bands encircling the cylinders. "
(http://www.geocities.com/capsulepipelines/libra ry/tl0003.txt)
There could be all kinds of prior art from packet, er, capsule routing system.
"what matters is how well it holds up for that 10 years. The best way to have that happen is to buy it new and properly care for it for that entire time."
Keeping the car in good shape for ten years is half the strategy. The other half is to shop around for a few-years-old car in *good* condition, instead of buying new. Cars these days, particularly Japanese cars, are much more reliable than the clunkers we made in the 70s and 80s. A few-years-old car well-maintained is not significantly different than a new car. (Click and Clack, from "Car Talk", agree that if something's going to go bad on a recent model, it's going to do it in the first year or two; by buying after that, you're letting other buyers screen out the lemons for you!)
What *is* different is the price, and the loss of that money for ten years. Let's say you buy a new 2001 Corolla for $15,000. I buy a 1997 Corolla for $8,000. (First I really shop around, have the cars inspected by a trusted mechanic, etc., because my savings will be worth this effort.)
If we're both able to hold our cars for ten years (and with a 1997 Corolla in good shape, I easily could), my $7,000 savings will be worth $19,800! (assumes longterm 11% gain in stocks; hey, buy low now). Assuming inflation of 3%, that's still a difference of $13,000 in 2001 dollars. Check out "The Millionaire Next Door", and you'll see that many hidden millionaires prefer to buy used cars.
Of course it's not *surprising*. The debate is over whether it's proper. We get surprised by less and less over the years, but you still need to fight for what you think is right, even if you're weary of it. E.g., the ACLU probably sees the same kinds of cases year in, year out. They still have to fight each battle unless they want adverse case law to be made.
"This utopian information access idea is great in principle but at the moment we just don't have the always on style internet access available."
There are many hurdles between us and the Semantic Web, but lack of always-on connectivity is a small one. Do people use the non-semantic web today, despite not having a gigabit device in their ear all day? Of course. People send email, make Priceline requests, send off EBay bids, and go on with their day, checking back later. Many other services (search engines) are fast enough that people can execute a whole transaction in a few seconds at their desk.
The Semantic Web merely expands the range of services we can ask the Web to handle for us. If it were here today as envisioned in the article, I would use it all the time on my broadband connection. If I only had 28.8 dialup, I would use it when I was in the mood to dialup, the same way I approached anything else on the Web back then.
"[the CYC people] are about to release some of the project after 17 years of development..."
Exactly. 17 years later. Perhaps the most powerful of TB-L's ideas here is to accept inaccuracies. If you insist that everything be consistent, well-defined, centralized, and proper, you're back to the morass of AI, and nothing useful ever gets out of the lab.
The same thing was true with networked hypertext in general, which is why Xanadu never get off the ground and why Tim's WWW took off exponentially.
"I hand-filed gears, sprockets, cogs and pistons for my own Babbage Difference Engine, arranged for shipping for thirteen metric tonnes of high-grade coal from China,..."
well, it is called "defending your thesis" for a reason - the judges/jury is supposed to question your conclusions and try to poke holes in your methods. Different disiplines and levels of thesis have different levels of scrutiny, but it is theoretically a partially adversarial process."
It's much like arguing a case before the Supreme Court, if there were no opposing counsel. The Justices will investigate and probe, but their duty is fairness and truth. No lawyer's duty is fairness and truth, it is to fight as hard as they legally can. I think our problem here is a limited vocabulary. We want something investigative, to push for truth, and some advocatory, where someone is sworn to defend our rights, and instead of a mix of both that we might call "x", we end up with a mix that we call "adversarial". Or "reformed adversarial" (which includes modern discovery, rules of officers of the court, and the other nitpicks we see in "Law and Order").
Regarding your example of a prof on a thesis committee: that sounds more like a biased judge than a good lawyer. It's not adversarial, it's judicial.
Regarding your example of a Defender of the Faith: unless the guy is a rhetorical genius and his audience is full of the easily-led, you should conclude he's doing his job. If you're going to classify someone as a saint in your religion, and infallibility of the church is one of your tenets, then there should be a high burden of proof against canonization, and you would expect very few people to be canonized.
But in general, I agree with you that the adversarial system is not, in reality, a terrific way to get at the truth. We're not necessarily stuck with it though; I think we haven't put enough thought into alternatives.
"The message this would be sending to the theoretically offended children (of which there were none), is that racial preferences disappear with age, and that their childhood is not a valid experience for the rest of life."
First, we don't know that no children were offended. We can infer that from the columnist's rhetoric, but we don't know because we have no reports from the kids themselves. (We could send a reporter in there and ask the kids to get more data.)
Second, one could also conclude from the data that white people at all ages prefer white Barbies; it's just that children are naturally honest and adults learn to lie to avoid social disapproval. Of course, this presupposes lying, and there's no evidence in this experiment for that, so it's not as good a hypothesis. But it is consistent with the data. A good scientist would then propose additional experiments to find out whether the adults were in fact lying.
But the main question for the teachers is, "is this experiment appropriate to present to young children?" Unless you're going to devote classtime to the topic (not a bad idea), you'd want to be confident that a social experiment that could impact an eight-year-old's self-worth has results that are easy to understand and accept on the face of it. I don't think this experiment quite meets that test, so I would probably either remove it from the science fair, or use it as the beginning of a whole teaching unit.
"Since this is equally true of everything done for a Science Fair, why bother to have one at all?"
Most fruit fly exhibits aren't going to leave a big social disturbance in their wakes. And even though little Jimmy's fruit fly experiment might have bad methodology, the proteomic industry isn't counting on his results. Yet the main goal of teaching Jimmy what an experiment is like is still accomplished.
However, you bring to mind a great idea: a 2-3 month period of multiple experiments, where the students try to do real peer-reviewed science, building on the previous experiments. This teaches the kids much more about how science really works than a single science fair exhibit.
First, have a science fair early in the year. Then, the kids get to vote on which topic raised there they would like to pursue further. Then you get kids trying to duplicate the original experiment, creating variations and alternative hypotheses, etc. You can even have a class "Journal", and require approval by other classmates (peer review) in order to get published.
The result is that kids learn how to create better experiments, learn how to scrutinize scientific reports for errors, learn how scientists sometimes make mistakes, although they're generally corrected by the community process, learn how science is not a single truth we discover, but an ongoing adapting of theories to explain facts better and better.
If anyone out there has had an experience like this, particularly in elementary school, please share it. Thanks.
"The problem here is that the school board is deeming this girl's thoughts to be destructive. Once you cross that line, deeming a mere thought to be destructive, who tells you when to stop?"
It's not about her thoughts, it's about the findings she published. Her findings were that kids overwhelmingly preferred the white Barbies. Without giving kids a context and a forum for understanding or talking about what that means or why it's so, it might very well be hurtful, particularly to eight-year-old black girls.
Since the study was well-designed for a third grader, and assuming she had no ill intent, she should get an 'A'. Whether it turned out to be appropriate to display to other students is a separate issue. So please don't mislabel this as an attempt at thought control; it's only an attempt at controlling discussion of a sensitive topic. You can be opposed to that, too, but it's not the same thing.
"Please, oh please, can someone who agrees with this school director explain to me what is a more appropriate forum to discuss the issue than a (somewhat) scientific study?"
I'm not agreeing with the director, but I think the official answer would be "the proper forum is in Social Studies, during our unit on Race Relations."
To play Devil's Advocate for a moment, suppose the girl had surveyed only children, and presented the results she found: "only six of 30 children picked the black Barbie, regardless of dress." That's just a scientific "fact", right?
How does she then interpret this fact? In the article, it says her hypothesis was "that white people would prefer white Barbies because they were used to seeing white Barbies", and the results from the children confirm that. But she could have instead had a hypothesis that white people think white Barbies are prettier than black Barbies, and the evidence would have supported that conclusion, too. So the girl could publish that in big letters on her posterboard, a scientific fact that all the black kids in school could see and feel terrible about.
Could a peer come up with another study that contradicted or better explained her evidence? Possibly. But the science fair is already over for this year. And furthermore, maybe her elementary school chums really do think white people are prettier than black people. If the class had several weeks to investigate people's attitudes and personal histories in more depth, it could be a terrific Social Studies project. But just this one study popping up on science fair day and then disappearing, that is not the give and take of an ongoing scientific community. To the black students in the school, who are only young kids after all, it can feel no different than someone driving by and shouting "you people are ugly!" The car drives on, the children are left hurt and confused. While young Ms. Thielen probably had no axe to grind, would you all be as supportive if you knew that the study was done by a third-grade neo-nazi, whose father was in the KKK? Same experiment, let's say.
Now, if this were "Science" in the adult world, it would also be a controversial study. Not because it's wrong to ask people about preferences, but because there's not enough detail in the study to understand *why* they have preferences. There are social taboos limiting the study of racial differences. Think Shockley, "The Bell Curve", etc. One of the reasons is that studies often aren't well thought out. Another reason is that people with racial preferences often latch on to the results of one study that support their preferences, no matter how limited, flawed, or contradicted by future studies it is. If adults have trouble with that, might not third graders have a little more?
That's my Devil's Advocacy on this. Feel free to attack the arguments.
Doh, my post got mangled. The beginning should read "You seem to be equating a third-grader choosing a sociological topic for her science fair project, with pre-teens smoking pot."
"All these care-free hippy children who can do whatever they please is a very bad trend in today's society. Kids need stern discpline from their parents, not friendship!"sociological topic for her science fair project,
You seem to be equating a third-grader choosing a with pre-teens smoking pot. Or maybe you're thinking of "Lord of the Flies"? I don't know what you're talking about, because you're lumping together all kinds of behaviors you consider bad.
For myself, I would love to see more "care-free hippy [sic] children." Care-free is a state we would all be lucky to attain; I don't mean vegetative, I mean without constant worry. And hippie children I have met are often the most thoughtful, the most considerate, the most mature children around. There are lots of kids who are troubled, or immature, or stressed, and act up in annoying or antisocial ways. I just think "care-free" and "hippy [sic]" are labels that rarely apply to those kids. Maybe you can restate your point.
I'm not sure if it was Plank, Rutherford, or some other really famous scientist, but one of them said (loosely quoting) "Scientific theories don't become laws because of repeated failure to disprove the theories. Rather, they become laws because all of their opponents die."
That's the basic premise of Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", where the "paradigm shift" happens pretty much as the old guard retires. His point was that even intelligent scientists can have blind spots and dig in their heels individually, but the scientific community as a whole will tend to move forward.
Of course, the people who doubt the moon landings are not scientists. While some are likely ignorant, others may be quite intelligent. But what they all seem to have in common is a willingness to trade reason and an open mind for the thrill of being in-the-know on the alleged coverup of the century, and a self-satisfaction that they're smarter than all the politicians, reporters, and scientists of the last 30 years. All groups that they probably feel powerless against. Hmm... it must feel good to be smarter than all of them.
I am not content to sit back and wait for dumb ideas to die. I do not want my vote cancelled out by someone who believes gigantic, physically impossible conspiracies. I just think that's such a waste of everyone's time and potential. It's sad. People need to learn how to think clearly, and we all need to help them do it.
What?! I'm sorry, but I completely disagree with you.
First of all, if Apollo was faked, the Soviets wouldn't need any moles at Los Alamos to figure it out, or to prove it. A fake moon landing would have generated far more evidence than the specious interpretations in the Fox show. (You know, little things like dust kicking up, instead of bouncing away in friction-free parabolas; unless you have an airtight vacuum soundstage, something that couldn't be manufactured, even today.)
Okay, now let's imagine the Soviets *did* need some deep moles to dig up the evidence, and that they would be exposed. It would *definitely* have been worth sacrificing dozens of moles to expose such a huge conspiracy by the Americans. The Soviets already had hydrogen bombs. They already had ICBMs and subs. All that the moles normally do is look for incremental technical improvements, and strategy.
But in sacrificing the moles to expose Apollo, the USSR would have humiliated the US beyond their wildest dreams. Remember that in 1969, the US and USSR were battling for the hearts and minds of people all over the world. In Europe, in the Third World, many peoples were on the fence about which side to trust. The Space Race was about showing the world which sociopolitical system was better, and both governments took that goal very, very seriously.
The US's position was not dominant, but it was strong, and it was largely based on a) our military, b) our advocacy of high ideals, and c) our can-do abilities, both economic and technical. Exposing Apollo would have dealt huge blows to b) and c), and those are the two legs of the stool that cover hearts and minds. The third leg, military power, only persuades through fear, and it's not enough to maintain world leadership when you've lost the world's respect on b) and c).
So in short, the fact that the Soviets never said we faked the moon landings (given their proclivity to challenge us on most things anyhow) is strong evidence on its own that we did, in fact, land there. Of course, there's also 800 pounds of moon rocks, etc.:-)
I didn't see the Fox show. But according to the USAtoday.com article, the conspiracy theorists (CTs) are suggesting Nixon struck a secret deal to sell the Soviets cheap wheat in exchange for their silence. Just as an exercise, let's examine this hypothesis a bit.
First, there is no evidence for it. That would be enough to stop most people. But since these CTs would rather continue to extend their theory than to admit the far-simpler alternative (that there was no conspiracy), they just assert it.
Second, the Soviets could (and did) buy grain from plenty of countries, such as Argentina. They were not dependent on American grain.
Third, the Soviets are a tough people. They lost something like 20 million people defending their land against the Nazis. And the early leadership starved and murdered millions more of their own people, for political purposes. You think they would have given up the chance to shove the greatest humiliation in history into the face of their arch-enemy, just to save some money on wheat?
Fourth, it would have been far, far, far more cost effective to expose the alleged Apollo conspiracy, and pay whatever the rest of the world wanted in wheat, than to continue their own moon program. In other words, just say "no one can get to the moon, and here's how the Americans faked it!". Boom, you've just saved $10-$20 billion, and 1% of that will buy you plenty of wheat, regardless of current prices. And you've won the Space Race. You were first in space, and the Americans have no firsts. And the American program would surely have collapsed in disgrace.
Fifth, the Soviet-hush-fund sub-conspiracy now forces the expansion of the conspiracy circle, to include the President and members of his staff. Of course, this expansion will suggest many more potential problems. (Say, did Nixon remember to turn off his taping system for this?)
Anytime an objection is raised to a conspiracy theory like this, the CTs respond by making the theory much more complicated, to "explain" the conflicting evidence. That, to put it mildly, is not the mark of a scientific theory. It is the mark of an unsound mind.
Slashdot Mirror
And *you* may have just broken the same law, perhaps, by using the phrase "fight CBDTPA" in your comment tied to his comment. You have created a future link in Google between "fight CBDTPA", his post, and, implicitly, the allegedly infringing software. You're helping people find software that "fights" (circumvents) these laws.
Of course, I've now done the same thing.
Did you read the original article? There are some interesting swipes against the National Sleep Foundation:
---
'Kripke, whose study was funded by federal tax dollars, said doctors' recommendations that everyone get eight hours of sleep a night may have been influenced partly by companies that make sleeping pills. He cited a report from a public relations firm representing the maker of the medicine Ambien, which gave the National Sleep Foundation money to alert people about an insomnia "public health crisis" as part of a marketing campaign.
Both Buysse and Walsh have served as paid consultants to sleeping-pill makers, but both denied being influenced by that. Walsh said most researchers in the field have accepted consulting fees from the companies, because "99 percent of the funding to support this type of research is from pharmaceutical companies." '
---
Now, you can put whatever weight you want into this suggestion of bias. But at least the Washington Post, unlike CNN, alerted us to what *might* be exacerbating the conflict between the scientists here.
As you may have read, bestselling historian Stephen Ambrose was recently caught having lifted sentences and even passages from other sources, and passing them off as his own writing in his books. (While he mentioned the source books in footnotes/endnotes, he did not put the cribbed text in quotes.) At least four different Ambrose books have now been shown to have the same pattern of lifted, unattributed passages.
These instances only came to light because an author of a lifted passage noticed it while reading Ambrose's book. Subsequent episodes came about because other authors started looking, and now some people are checking out new likely sources; this works because Ambrose only lifted passages from books that he admired and heavily footnoted (at least, so far as we know!).
Perhaps Ambrose was really just lazy, as he was fairly open about crediting others for the ideas (he "just" failed to credit them for the words, too). There are many cases of sneakier plagiarism than that, both in academia and in journalism.
So, class, the programming problem for today is, given the text of two books, spit out the most likely candidates for lifted passages, based on length and similarity of words. You get a B if you can do this for exact, verbatim matches, an A if you can do it with individual word substitution, and an A+ if you can recognize re-ordered clauses. The end users for this tool would be 1) authors everywhere who want to protect their own writing, and 2) journalists looking for juicy plagiarism scandals.
I don't see why this email is interesting, outside of being additional evidence that you can buy the results you want from some consulting companies. The rest of the letter is just sales hype and tips that hold no surprises.
The phrasing sounds very much like Microsoft manager-speak, and the banal content makes it unlikely that it's faked.
Some people are confused by his statement about tracking forwards of the email. Exchange can track forwards within the system (Microsoft's corporate LAN), and the author points out that he used to manage the Exchange group, so he should know. Of course, a mole in Redmond could always cut and paste the email to send it off to the press, but that's not what Mr. Valentine is worried about here. He's mostly worried about *accidental* leakage because people have auto-forwarding rules in Outlook that will spread the email to other MS groups and possibly to outside the LAN (corporate partners, perhaps).
Some readers suggested that the author might have or should have tracked leaks by sending slightly different emails to each recipient. The problem with that is that this mail probably went to hundreds or thousands of people, based on the two Exchange aliases it was mailed to: WW [Worldwide?] Sales, Marketing & Services Group. Think, people.
If I were fluent in Urdu, I like to think I would be on the next plane to Peshawar, Pakistan, to create a non-religious school. I think that, if successful, that plan would give one of the highest bangs for the buck that an individual could get right now in nonprofit work.
Poor Pakistanis put their sons into madrassahs for several reasons. It's free to them (sponsored by rich Islamists abroad), the boys are clothed and fed, they learn the *rudiments* of a normal education, and it allows them to serve their religion. Parents have no other options, since the Pakistan government fails to provide real money for public schools (and the other social services the madrassahs provide).
If you were to create a free school oriented around math and science, that offered kids some chance of getting a real job somewhere down the line, I think you'd get plenty of willing students. (Remember, Pakistanis and Afghans do not hate Western technology, just because some of them hate the culture it comes from.)
You simply don't talk about Islam. And you don't teach Arabic. Arabic isn't the language of business in Pakistan, Urdu is. So you teach Urdu and English (the global language of business and science). You don't discredit or analyze Islam; you simply say it's the business of a family and its mosque to teach religion, not the business of a technical school. (Besides, there really isn't time, given all the other stuff you need to teach them.) You could also teach girls, which madrassahs never do (although you might decide it's culturally easier to teach them in separate classes or schools).
Each student you take in potentially represents a family lifted out of poverty, and a life turned away from violence and terrorism.
"Would you expect to go to the USPTO and not have to pay for use of the photocopy machine ? I wouldn't."
I'd expect free photocopies, if the marginal cost were 0.000001 cents per page. They are an informational agency. Web access to their database should be a basic part of their budget.
Check out this picture:s /i z2103.jpg
a ry /tl0003.txt)
http://www.geocities.com/capsulepipelines/image
and its description:
"Much time was spent in the manual redirection of cylinders but, after experiments in 1931, automatic navigation was introduced using apparatus which could accept or pass on
cylinders according to the setting of electrically conducting bands encircling the cylinders. "
(http://www.geocities.com/capsulepipelines/libr
There could be all kinds of prior art from packet, er, capsule routing system.
"what matters is how well it holds up for that 10 years. The best way to have that happen is to buy it new and properly care for it for that entire time."
Keeping the car in good shape for ten years is half the strategy. The other half is to shop around for a few-years-old car in *good* condition, instead of buying new. Cars these days, particularly Japanese cars, are much more reliable than the clunkers we made in the 70s and 80s. A few-years-old car well-maintained is not significantly different than a new car. (Click and Clack, from "Car Talk", agree that if something's going to go bad on a recent model, it's going to do it in the first year or two; by buying after that, you're letting other buyers screen out the lemons for you!)
What *is* different is the price, and the loss of that money for ten years. Let's say you buy a new 2001 Corolla for $15,000. I buy a 1997 Corolla for $8,000. (First I really shop around, have the cars inspected by a trusted mechanic, etc., because my savings will be worth this effort.)
If we're both able to hold our cars for ten years (and with a 1997 Corolla in good shape, I easily could), my $7,000 savings will be worth $19,800! (assumes longterm 11% gain in stocks; hey, buy low now). Assuming inflation of 3%, that's still a difference of $13,000 in 2001 dollars. Check out "The Millionaire Next Door", and you'll see that many hidden millionaires prefer to buy used cars.
Of course it's not *surprising*. The debate is over whether it's proper. We get surprised by less and less over the years, but you still need to fight for what you think is right, even if you're weary of it. E.g., the ACLU probably sees the same kinds of cases year in, year out. They still have to fight each battle unless they want adverse case law to be made.
"This utopian information access idea is great in principle but at the moment we just don't have the always on style internet access available."
There are many hurdles between us and the Semantic Web, but lack of always-on connectivity is a small one. Do people use the non-semantic web today, despite not having a gigabit device in their ear all day? Of course. People send email, make Priceline requests, send off EBay bids, and go on with their day, checking back later. Many other services (search engines) are fast enough that people can execute a whole transaction in a few seconds at their desk.
The Semantic Web merely expands the range of services we can ask the Web to handle for us. If it were here today as envisioned in the article, I would use it all the time on my broadband connection. If I only had 28.8 dialup, I would use it when I was in the mood to dialup, the same way I approached anything else on the Web back then.
"[the CYC people] are about to release some of the project after 17 years of development..."
Exactly. 17 years later. Perhaps the most powerful of TB-L's ideas here is to accept inaccuracies. If you insist that everything be consistent, well-defined, centralized, and proper, you're back to the morass of AI, and nothing useful ever gets out of the lab.
The same thing was true with networked hypertext in general, which is why Xanadu never get off the ground and why Tim's WWW took off exponentially.
Well, I'll hate myself in the morning, but I've been inspired to put online my take of "Jurassic Park", with finger puppets.
http://matt.jensen.tripod.com/jp.html.
(.AVI, 5MByte download.)
"I hand-filed gears, sprockets, cogs and pistons for my own Babbage Difference Engine, arranged for shipping for thirteen metric tonnes of high-grade coal from China, ..."
What kind of wuss won't even mine his own coal?
"It was produced as a kneejerk reaction to Star Trek showing on the other networks..."
No, it was a reaction to the success of Star Wars. (Why can't they teach decent History in school?)
And anyway, Star Trek was rerunning in syndication, mostly on UHF channels, not on "other networks". Maybe you meant "channels"?
well, it is called "defending your thesis" for a reason - the judges/jury is supposed to question your conclusions and try to poke holes in your methods. Different disiplines and levels of thesis have different levels of scrutiny, but it is theoretically a partially adversarial process."
It's much like arguing a case before the Supreme Court, if there were no opposing counsel. The Justices will investigate and probe, but their duty is fairness and truth. No lawyer's duty is fairness and truth, it is to fight as hard as they legally can. I think our problem here is a limited vocabulary. We want something investigative, to push for truth, and some advocatory, where someone is sworn to defend our rights, and instead of a mix of both that we might call "x", we end up with a mix that we call "adversarial". Or "reformed adversarial" (which includes modern discovery, rules of officers of the court, and the other nitpicks we see in "Law and Order").
Regarding your example of a prof on a thesis committee: that sounds more like a biased judge than a good lawyer. It's not adversarial, it's judicial.
Regarding your example of a Defender of the Faith: unless the guy is a rhetorical genius and his audience is full of the easily-led, you should conclude he's doing his job. If you're going to classify someone as a saint in your religion, and infallibility of the church is one of your tenets, then there should be a high burden of proof against canonization, and you would expect very few people to be canonized.
But in general, I agree with you that the adversarial system is not, in reality, a terrific way to get at the truth. We're not necessarily stuck with it though; I think we haven't put enough thought into alternatives.
"The message this would be sending to the theoretically offended children (of which there were none), is that racial preferences disappear with age, and that their childhood is not a valid experience for the rest of life."
First, we don't know that no children were offended. We can infer that from the columnist's rhetoric, but we don't know because we have no reports from the kids themselves. (We could send a reporter in there and ask the kids to get more data.)
Second, one could also conclude from the data that white people at all ages prefer white Barbies; it's just that children are naturally honest and adults learn to lie to avoid social disapproval. Of course, this presupposes lying, and there's no evidence in this experiment for that, so it's not as good a hypothesis. But it is consistent with the data. A good scientist would then propose additional experiments to find out whether the adults were in fact lying.
But the main question for the teachers is, "is this experiment appropriate to present to young children?" Unless you're going to devote classtime to the topic (not a bad idea), you'd want to be confident that a social experiment that could impact an eight-year-old's self-worth has results that are easy to understand and accept on the face of it. I don't think this experiment quite meets that test, so I would probably either remove it from the science fair, or use it as the beginning of a whole teaching unit.
"Since this is equally true of everything done for a Science Fair, why bother to have one at all?"
Most fruit fly exhibits aren't going to leave a big social disturbance in their wakes. And even though little Jimmy's fruit fly experiment might have bad methodology, the proteomic industry isn't counting on his results. Yet the main goal of teaching Jimmy what an experiment is like is still accomplished.
However, you bring to mind a great idea: a 2-3 month period of multiple experiments, where the students try to do real peer-reviewed science, building on the previous experiments. This teaches the kids much more about how science really works than a single science fair exhibit.
First, have a science fair early in the year. Then, the kids get to vote on which topic raised there they would like to pursue further. Then you get kids trying to duplicate the original experiment, creating variations and alternative hypotheses, etc. You can even have a class "Journal", and require approval by other classmates (peer review) in order to get published.
The result is that kids learn how to create better experiments, learn how to scrutinize scientific reports for errors, learn how scientists sometimes make mistakes, although they're generally corrected by the community process, learn how science is not a single truth we discover, but an ongoing adapting of theories to explain facts better and better.
If anyone out there has had an experience like this, particularly in elementary school, please share it. Thanks.
"The problem here is that the school board is deeming this girl's thoughts to be destructive. Once you cross that line, deeming a mere thought to be destructive, who tells you when to stop?"
It's not about her thoughts, it's about the findings she published. Her findings were that kids overwhelmingly preferred the white Barbies. Without giving kids a context and a forum for understanding or talking about what that means or why it's so, it might very well be hurtful, particularly to eight-year-old black girls.
Since the study was well-designed for a third grader, and assuming she had no ill intent, she should get an 'A'. Whether it turned out to be appropriate to display to other students is a separate issue. So please don't mislabel this as an attempt at thought control; it's only an attempt at controlling discussion of a sensitive topic. You can be opposed to that, too, but it's not the same thing.
"Please, oh please, can someone who agrees with this school director explain to me what is a more appropriate forum to discuss the issue than a (somewhat) scientific study?"
I'm not agreeing with the director, but I think the official answer would be "the proper forum is in Social Studies, during our unit on Race Relations."
To play Devil's Advocate for a moment, suppose the girl had surveyed only children, and presented the results she found: "only six of 30 children picked the black Barbie, regardless of dress." That's just a scientific "fact", right?
How does she then interpret this fact? In the article, it says her hypothesis was "that white people would prefer white Barbies because they were used to seeing white Barbies", and the results from the children confirm that. But she could have instead had a hypothesis that white people think white Barbies are prettier than black Barbies, and the evidence would have supported that conclusion, too. So the girl could publish that in big letters on her posterboard, a scientific fact that all the black kids in school could see and feel terrible about.
Could a peer come up with another study that contradicted or better explained her evidence? Possibly. But the science fair is already over for this year. And furthermore, maybe her elementary school chums really do think white people are prettier than black people. If the class had several weeks to investigate people's attitudes and personal histories in more depth, it could be a terrific Social Studies project. But just this one study popping up on science fair day and then disappearing, that is not the give and take of an ongoing scientific community. To the black students in the school, who are only young kids after all, it can feel no different than someone driving by and shouting "you people are ugly!" The car drives on, the children are left hurt and confused. While young Ms. Thielen probably had no axe to grind, would you all be as supportive if you knew that the study was done by a third-grade neo-nazi, whose father was in the KKK? Same experiment, let's say.
Now, if this were "Science" in the adult world, it would also be a controversial study. Not because it's wrong to ask people about preferences, but because there's not enough detail in the study to understand *why* they have preferences. There are social taboos limiting the study of racial differences. Think Shockley, "The Bell Curve", etc. One of the reasons is that studies often aren't well thought out. Another reason is that people with racial preferences often latch on to the results of one study that support their preferences, no matter how limited, flawed, or contradicted by future studies it is. If adults have trouble with that, might not third graders have a little more?
That's my Devil's Advocacy on this. Feel free to attack the arguments.
Doh, my post got mangled. The beginning should read "You seem to be equating a third-grader choosing a sociological topic for her science fair project, with pre-teens smoking pot."
"All these care-free hippy children who can do whatever they please is a very bad trend in today's society. Kids need stern discpline from their parents, not friendship!"sociological topic for her science fair project,
You seem to be equating a third-grader choosing a with pre-teens smoking pot. Or maybe you're thinking of "Lord of the Flies"? I don't know what you're talking about, because you're lumping together all kinds of behaviors you consider bad.
For myself, I would love to see more "care-free hippy [sic] children." Care-free is a state we would all be lucky to attain; I don't mean vegetative, I mean without constant worry. And hippie children I have met are often the most thoughtful, the most considerate, the most mature children around. There are lots of kids who are troubled, or immature, or stressed, and act up in annoying or antisocial ways. I just think "care-free" and "hippy [sic]" are labels that rarely apply to those kids. Maybe you can restate your point.
I'm not sure if it was Plank, Rutherford, or some other really famous scientist, but one of them said (loosely quoting) "Scientific theories don't become laws because of repeated failure to disprove the theories. Rather, they become laws because all of their opponents die."
That's the basic premise of Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", where the "paradigm shift" happens pretty much as the old guard retires. His point was that even intelligent scientists can have blind spots and dig in their heels individually, but the scientific community as a whole will tend to move forward.
Of course, the people who doubt the moon landings are not scientists. While some are likely ignorant, others may be quite intelligent. But what they all seem to have in common is a willingness to trade reason and an open mind for the thrill of being in-the-know on the alleged coverup of the century, and a self-satisfaction that they're smarter than all the politicians, reporters, and scientists of the last 30 years. All groups that they probably feel powerless against. Hmm... it must feel good to be smarter than all of them.
I am not content to sit back and wait for dumb ideas to die. I do not want my vote cancelled out by someone who believes gigantic, physically impossible conspiracies. I just think that's such a waste of everyone's time and potential. It's sad. People need to learn how to think clearly, and we all need to help them do it.
What?! I'm sorry, but I completely disagree with you.
:-)
First of all, if Apollo was faked, the Soviets wouldn't need any moles at Los Alamos to figure it out, or to prove it. A fake moon landing would have generated far more evidence than the specious interpretations in the Fox show. (You know, little things like dust kicking up, instead of bouncing away in friction-free parabolas; unless you have an airtight vacuum soundstage, something that couldn't be manufactured, even today.)
Okay, now let's imagine the Soviets *did* need some deep moles to dig up the evidence, and that they would be exposed. It would *definitely* have been worth sacrificing dozens of moles to expose such a huge conspiracy by the Americans. The Soviets already had hydrogen bombs. They already had ICBMs and subs. All that the moles normally do is look for incremental technical improvements, and strategy.
But in sacrificing the moles to expose Apollo, the USSR would have humiliated the US beyond their wildest dreams. Remember that in 1969, the US and USSR were battling for the hearts and minds of people all over the world. In Europe, in the Third World, many peoples were on the fence about which side to trust. The Space Race was about showing the world which sociopolitical system was better, and both governments took that goal very, very seriously.
The US's position was not dominant, but it was strong, and it was largely based on a) our military, b) our advocacy of high ideals, and c) our can-do abilities, both economic and technical. Exposing Apollo would have dealt huge blows to b) and c), and those are the two legs of the stool that cover hearts and minds. The third leg, military power, only persuades through fear, and it's not enough to maintain world leadership when you've lost the world's respect on b) and c).
So in short, the fact that the Soviets never said we faked the moon landings (given their proclivity to challenge us on most things anyhow) is strong evidence on its own that we did, in fact, land there. Of course, there's also 800 pounds of moon rocks, etc.
I didn't see the Fox show. But according to the USAtoday.com article, the conspiracy theorists (CTs) are suggesting Nixon struck a secret deal to sell the Soviets cheap wheat in exchange for their silence. Just as an exercise, let's examine this hypothesis a bit.
First, there is no evidence for it. That would be enough to stop most people. But since these CTs would rather continue to extend their theory than to admit the far-simpler alternative (that there was no conspiracy), they just assert it.
Second, the Soviets could (and did) buy grain from plenty of countries, such as Argentina. They were not dependent on American grain.
Third, the Soviets are a tough people. They lost something like 20 million people defending their land against the Nazis. And the early leadership starved and murdered millions more of their own people, for political purposes. You think they would have given up the chance to shove the greatest humiliation in history into the face of their arch-enemy, just to save some money on wheat?
Fourth, it would have been far, far, far more cost effective to expose the alleged Apollo conspiracy, and pay whatever the rest of the world wanted in wheat, than to continue their own moon program. In other words, just say "no one can get to the moon, and here's how the Americans faked it!". Boom, you've just saved $10-$20 billion, and 1% of that will buy you plenty of wheat, regardless of current prices. And you've won the Space Race. You were first in space, and the Americans have no firsts. And the American program would surely have collapsed in disgrace.
Fifth, the Soviet-hush-fund sub-conspiracy now forces the expansion of the conspiracy circle, to include the President and members of his staff. Of course, this expansion will suggest many more potential problems. (Say, did Nixon remember to turn off his taping system for this?)
Anytime an objection is raised to a conspiracy theory like this, the CTs respond by making the theory much more complicated, to "explain" the conflicting evidence. That, to put it mildly, is not the mark of a scientific theory. It is the mark of an unsound mind.