The device has to be custom fitted, custom calibrated, and hand made for each patient. It needs to fit perfectly in your ear. Custom medical appliances are expensive. You can have a cheap one that doesn't really work, or you can put a horn in your ear like in an old cartoon, or you can pay experts (doctors and engineers and skilled labor) to make the right device to cure your problem. It isn't a scam, or a flaw in the market economy.
As a comp teacher from U of Michigan, I can only concur. Single source research is not research. Encyclopedia research is not research. Only in primary school do you find encylopedias as the primary research school. So why does anyone who actually does research (a PhD for example) even care about Wikipedia? All you have to do is explain that any fact or idea found in any encyclopedia has to be verified with primary sources. Really, Wikipedia should expose the tenuous quality of all information, and force people to be suspicious of all information that they don't personally verify. Isn't that the point of a college education?
We want to produce trained skeptics with the will and the skills to judge each new piece of data on their own, and to have confidence in their judgment. Wikipedia only makes that goal more pertinent. In addition to all of the other good it does, I think we should thank it for that alone.
Star Trek fans need to BUY Star Trek. They need to start a non-profit organization, and get someone like Lawrence Lessig and/or the Creative Commons people to help set up a new corporate structure for a media company dedicated to transforming a piece of corporate art into Public Art. Trek is the perfect franchise to start with. It was always supported by a rabid fan base, and so it justly belongs in the hands of fans. If a legally and economically viable system can be established to purchase those rights and successfully manage the franchise, then we might actually be able to make a change in our culture.
The problem with the privacy concern debate is that we are left with two opposing sides: One side that gives into corporations because of legit feelings that the reward is better than the cost, and another side that is so paranoid (also for legit reasons) that they want everything shreaded immediately. As a writer and an historian, I'm troubled by both sides. In a hundred years I think people in my jobs will want 1. the documents of a 21st century Hemingway to NOT be owned by Google, inc. but 2. for those documents to exist. If we capitulate on the privacy issue, then all emails are going to become the property of some corporate honcho and that is going to really seriously squelch scholarship, but of course if we wear our foil hats and burn our credit card receipts in our Unabomber-style shacks... well, there will be a pretty big whole in the historic record. Can there be a third way? If there were some sort of Creative Commons license on the Gmail files, and an oversight body to monitor what happens to the docs when the owner dies... then Google could become one of the most important historic libraries in history. Of course that kind of plan requires serious people working hard for a long time to make it work... sigh, it's probably pointless.
I agree that the distinction seems important. But the trick is, the humanities has no production other than its academic writings. There are papers about paintings, and there are paintings. There are papers about bridge design, and there are bridges. But there are only papers about lit crit (and related POMO fields). There is no production here. In fact, many POMOs would insist that what they do is its own end, that it exists like a painting or a bridge or a poem as a product. Sci-tech research ultimately has to connect with experimental proof or practical result. The rubber has to hit the road. In lit crit, there is often no rubber, and many of the people involved have stopped believing in the road.
90% of bridges aren't crap. 90% of combustion engines aren't crap. 90% of rockets aren't crap. Hell, even paintings get a better qualitative ratio than that (except when the painting is actually made of crap... then it's fifty-fifty on how crappy it is).
What I am saying is that one shouldn't accept such a disfunctional signal-to-noise ratio. I teach comp at the University of Michigan, so I am saying this from deep within the jungle. 90% (or more) of what is talked about in the humanities could qualify as grade-a crap. That scares me. I think something needs to be done.
Yeah, I have a question about that BSD underlayer. How big a difference is the whole OS going to be from other flavors of UNIX? Will OSX mean that the Mac-Unix community will become tighter software wise (that is more ports between the platforms)? Or does the Quartz stuff present to much of difference and make OSX as alien to other OSs as the old Mac OS?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb-SlbL_cJg
The device has to be custom fitted, custom calibrated, and hand made for each patient. It needs to fit perfectly in your ear. Custom medical appliances are expensive. You can have a cheap one that doesn't really work, or you can put a horn in your ear like in an old cartoon, or you can pay experts (doctors and engineers and skilled labor) to make the right device to cure your problem. It isn't a scam, or a flaw in the market economy.
As a comp teacher from U of Michigan, I can only concur. Single source research is not research. Encyclopedia research is not research. Only in primary school do you find encylopedias as the primary research school. So why does anyone who actually does research (a PhD for example) even care about Wikipedia? All you have to do is explain that any fact or idea found in any encyclopedia has to be verified with primary sources. Really, Wikipedia should expose the tenuous quality of all information, and force people to be suspicious of all information that they don't personally verify. Isn't that the point of a college education?
We want to produce trained skeptics with the will and the skills to judge each new piece of data on their own, and to have confidence in their judgment. Wikipedia only makes that goal more pertinent. In addition to all of the other good it does, I think we should thank it for that alone.
Star Trek fans need to BUY Star Trek. They need to start a non-profit organization, and get someone like Lawrence Lessig and/or the Creative Commons people to help set up a new corporate structure for a media company dedicated to transforming a piece of corporate art into Public Art. Trek is the perfect franchise to start with. It was always supported by a rabid fan base, and so it justly belongs in the hands of fans. If a legally and economically viable system can be established to purchase those rights and successfully manage the franchise, then we might actually be able to make a change in our culture.
The problem with the privacy concern debate is that we are left with two opposing sides: One side that gives into corporations because of legit feelings that the reward is better than the cost, and another side that is so paranoid (also for legit reasons) that they want everything shreaded immediately. As a writer and an historian, I'm troubled by both sides. In a hundred years I think people in my jobs will want 1. the documents of a 21st century Hemingway to NOT be owned by Google, inc. but 2. for those documents to exist. If we capitulate on the privacy issue, then all emails are going to become the property of some corporate honcho and that is going to really seriously squelch scholarship, but of course if we wear our foil hats and burn our credit card receipts in our Unabomber-style shacks... well, there will be a pretty big whole in the historic record. Can there be a third way? If there were some sort of Creative Commons license on the Gmail files, and an oversight body to monitor what happens to the docs when the owner dies... then Google could become one of the most important historic libraries in history. Of course that kind of plan requires serious people working hard for a long time to make it work... sigh, it's probably pointless.
I agree that the distinction seems important. But the trick is, the humanities has no production other than its academic writings. There are papers about paintings, and there are paintings. There are papers about bridge design, and there are bridges. But there are only papers about lit crit (and related POMO fields). There is no production here. In fact, many POMOs would insist that what they do is its own end, that it exists like a painting or a bridge or a poem as a product. Sci-tech research ultimately has to connect with experimental proof or practical result. The rubber has to hit the road. In lit crit, there is often no rubber, and many of the people involved have stopped believing in the road.
90% of bridges aren't crap. 90% of combustion engines aren't crap. 90% of rockets aren't crap. Hell, even paintings get a better qualitative ratio than that (except when the painting is actually made of crap... then it's fifty-fifty on how crappy it is).
What I am saying is that one shouldn't accept such a disfunctional signal-to-noise ratio. I teach comp at the University of Michigan, so I am saying this from deep within the jungle. 90% (or more) of what is talked about in the humanities could qualify as grade-a crap. That scares me. I think something needs to be done.
www.poormojo.org/dod.html
A quick and easy way to convert any text to a PalmDoc for distribution.
Yeah, I have a question about that BSD underlayer. How big a difference is the whole OS going to be from other flavors of UNIX? Will OSX mean that the Mac-Unix community will become tighter software wise (that is more ports between the platforms)? Or does the Quartz stuff present to much of difference and make OSX as alien to other OSs as the old Mac OS?