I got off of caffine by gradually mixing regular coffee beans with decaf coffee beans. After about a couple of weeks, I was off of caffine. However, I discovered that one addiction grows to overtake the void left by a previous addiction, a weird variant of Boyles Gas Law, so chocolate has come to rule all. The results of dropping caffine is about 50 lbs. My advice, keep the caffine and take saw palmetto as caffine can contribute to enlarged prostate problems. Take it as a variant of Newton's "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" law. If you have an addiction, you will have to come up with something to mitigate its affects. If you get rid of an addiction, your other addictions will grow to take up the space vacated by the departing addiction.
The moral to the story is: life is stressful, addictions help mitigate the stress, stress and addictions both contribute to a reduced life span, fear of death causes us to question our addictions, which increases our stress level, etc............ It's all about the math.
Back in the 1980s, Michael Parenti wrote a book called Inventing Reality. In this book, he has a great quote that I will paraphrase: The media can't tell you what to think, but they can tell you what to think about.
While the internet has broken the news media monopoly on information distribution, one is hard pressed to argue that the editorial process in traditional media is not influenced, if not outright dictated in some cases, by the financial interests of the parent company. This is the danger academic-corporate partnering presents.
Scientific research is based on facts, but which facts will be researched when the only motive is to turn a profit? Once the researchers are in the lab and focused on a project, there is no argument about what influences data collection and analysis: scientific method. However, scientific method and scientific objectivity really don't play a role in the corporate decision making process. The board room operates on a completely different logic.
You are right in your second paragraph, "...this money can go to other useful causes....", unfortunately, it doesn't. Even though most universities require any grant application to include an extra percentage above the amount requested for "administrative purposes", this money is usually placed in the General Fund or some other account and used for institutional needs, not "less-profitable" research.
In the end, we come to the problem of interpretation. Facts are not unassailable things. There are many epistemological concerns that can call them into question, whether legitimate or not, that can derail an idea for generations, ie the aether, the homunculus theory of reproduction, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, etc. Facts can be unclear, which is why we have research, in that they can have multiple interpretations such as the Big Bang vs. Quasi-Steady State theories of the universe. In the end, it depends on how we collect the facts and how we interpret them. In this endeavor, logic and method sometimes fail. You can't just "...magically come up with facts to support your personal agenda!", but scientists can and do interpret facts to support pet theories.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, the partnering of academics and corporate funding does not have to be a bad thing. It will all depend on how well it is managed and how much emphasis is given to basic research. If universities strike an agreement with corporations to provide a certain amount of funding for pure research for each million dollars of "profitable research", that could be a very good thing, indeed.
I think that is what Katz is trying to say. Economic reductionism is a dead horse. I think most scholars who study social events see a rich fabric of multidirectional relations. Social processes are systems with positive and negative feedback loops, so no action/policy/ideology/belief/etc. occurs in a vacuum.
The fact that Katz sees academe as "selling out" is probably an artifact of the more public and "press conference celebration" of corporate-academic partnering. Is this bad for education? It doesn't have to be. It all depends on how universities and colleges handle things.
One of the fundamental facts of modern life is that education costs big bucks. I am still paying for my doctoral education and will be for the next several years. But one of the dangers that lies in close ties between academe and the corporate world is the restriction of free inquiry. It is not a moral question, but a question of what will corporations finance. Will they finance the arts and humanities? There is no intrinsic profit to be had from this, but there is prestige, of a sort. If the only corporations making enough money to finance academic research are telecom and biotech firms, who will fund basic research in fields like physics, astronomy, mathematics, ecology, geology, etc.? If these firms cannot see the long term benefit in funding basic research as opposed to research that leads to a short term market turn-around, then there will be problems.
If academic research is soley determined by a funding-to-profit formula, then the arts and humanities will receive short shrift. That is what can lead to the idealless superficiality of Elliot's "The Hollow Men". If our academic institutions become proving grounds for technology and cease to be havens of ideas, what will there be to inspire humanity to better itself aside from profit? Although the subject matter of the arts and humanities are not rigorous and scientific, they still have value to our humanity and our creativity. If the relation between academe and corporate funding can preserve these two things, we will be alright.
I think it is pretty obvious by the volume of this discussion that Jiggling tits and pornographyare political speech. It is the right of expression and the implicit right to consume that expression that is at stake. Any time you start restricting a form of expression, it becomes political because some people have a vested interest in it.
Besides, as others here have pointed out, censorship never stays localized to one issue. Once you let it out of the bag, it will spread. I don't think we should take the risk over something the Supreme Court cannot define. What was it Renquist(sp?) said, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." That bet's a little too shaky for me to wager our freedom on.
That may be the case, but what about Kansas. Should we allow our children to be taught by intellectual neanderthals who would disregard the fossil record and teach creationism? The implications for knowledge in general are too great to turn everything over to the tyranny of the masses, so to speak.
Is pornography harmful to children? HELL YES! But out-right misinformation destroys their entire future. The creative engine of this country fuels itself on free thought. There is precious little use of the libraries as it is, so we don't even need to open the flood-gates of censorship a little bit, at any level.
In a perfect world, families would spend time together, would use the library together and parents could supervise their children's use of the internet. But we don't live in that perfect world. We live in a world where parents have to work and kids are left to their own devices and/or daycare. That is a reality to which we have to adjust. That is a fact of life, but I don't think the solution is to begin enforcing "right thinking."
State rights are important. Regional issues are too diverse to oversee from a central authority. However, our success as a nation depends on our intellectual ability. It is already eroding and censoring any organization that receives federal funding will only accelerate that erosion.
Of course, the fact that it is a really stupid question doesn't justify the kinds of human-rights atrocities you have to perpetrate in order to run a communist state.
Communism, Marxism, Fascism, Pseudo-Theocratic Republicanism, Quasi-Socialist Democratism. The source of human rights atrocities is the desire to eliminate dissent. Any set of ideas can be warped to justify the use of force and we all know that a lie repeated enough times eventually becomes the truth. This becomes even easier when the messenger brings an "absolute truth" to enlighten the masses.
In a world without hope, anyone can become a savior.
I suppose I could tell you to take your lies and misconceptions off of slashdot, but I wont adorn myself with the arrogant presumption to pass judgement on another's ideas. This is the difference between thinking in the box and thinking outside of the box. The posting to which you are responding is an almost exegetical summary of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The perspective is sociological, not theological.
A dialogue has to potiential to exist, but not if the recognition of perspective is unacknowledged. Be that as it may, the vision you present of Calvinism is a beautiful one and one that can probably be seen quite clearly from within that perspective. However, I think if you look at the world for a moment, you will see that for 99% of the world, that beautiful vision doesn't exist.
Yes the Bible clearly teaches that God is concerned for the poor, but the corporate boards of the world have little to do with God unless it increases the bottom line, or unless there is some advantage in their presentation of self that they could reap. However logical the system is internally (the one you represent in your posting) shouldn't its truth value rest on how well it corresponds with reality?
No one is going to shake the world with an unbreakable truth for the same reason that no one will succeed in constructing a universal language. People are too different because our experiences are so different. These create the perspective with which you view the world and the means you have at your disposal to describe the world. Absolute truths can only exist when dissent is not allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
Did some dyslexic gen-eng whiz kid splice Bush and Gates together? Do we finally have a reason to have BushGate(s)?
Aside from Iraq, oil prices, Katrina victims, and a host of things we probably never heard about.I got off of caffine by gradually mixing regular coffee beans with decaf coffee beans. After about a couple of weeks, I was off of caffine. However, I discovered that one addiction grows to overtake the void left by a previous addiction, a weird variant of Boyles Gas Law, so chocolate has come to rule all. The results of dropping caffine is about 50 lbs. My advice, keep the caffine and take saw palmetto as caffine can contribute to enlarged prostate problems. Take it as a variant of Newton's "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" law. If you have an addiction, you will have to come up with something to mitigate its affects. If you get rid of an addiction, your other addictions will grow to take up the space vacated by the departing addiction.
The moral to the story is: life is stressful, addictions help mitigate the stress, stress and addictions both contribute to a reduced life span, fear of death causes us to question our addictions, which increases our stress level, etc............ It's all about the math.
Back in the 1980s, Michael Parenti wrote a book called Inventing Reality. In this book, he has a great quote that I will paraphrase: The media can't tell you what to think, but they can tell you what to think about.
While the internet has broken the news media monopoly on information distribution, one is hard pressed to argue that the editorial process in traditional media is not influenced, if not outright dictated in some cases, by the financial interests of the parent company. This is the danger academic-corporate partnering presents.
Scientific research is based on facts, but which facts will be researched when the only motive is to turn a profit? Once the researchers are in the lab and focused on a project, there is no argument about what influences data collection and analysis: scientific method. However, scientific method and scientific objectivity really don't play a role in the corporate decision making process. The board room operates on a completely different logic.
You are right in your second paragraph, "...this money can go to other useful causes....", unfortunately, it doesn't. Even though most universities require any grant application to include an extra percentage above the amount requested for "administrative purposes", this money is usually placed in the General Fund or some other account and used for institutional needs, not "less-profitable" research.
In the end, we come to the problem of interpretation. Facts are not unassailable things. There are many epistemological concerns that can call them into question, whether legitimate or not, that can derail an idea for generations, ie the aether, the homunculus theory of reproduction, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, etc. Facts can be unclear, which is why we have research, in that they can have multiple interpretations such as the Big Bang vs. Quasi-Steady State theories of the universe. In the end, it depends on how we collect the facts and how we interpret them. In this endeavor, logic and method sometimes fail. You can't just "...magically come up with facts to support your personal agenda!", but scientists can and do interpret facts to support pet theories.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, the partnering of academics and corporate funding does not have to be a bad thing. It will all depend on how well it is managed and how much emphasis is given to basic research. If universities strike an agreement with corporations to provide a certain amount of funding for pure research for each million dollars of "profitable research", that could be a very good thing, indeed.
I think that is what Katz is trying to say. Economic reductionism is a dead horse. I think most scholars who study social events see a rich fabric of multidirectional relations. Social processes are systems with positive and negative feedback loops, so no action/policy/ideology/belief/etc. occurs in a vacuum.
The fact that Katz sees academe as "selling out" is probably an artifact of the more public and "press conference celebration" of corporate-academic partnering. Is this bad for education? It doesn't have to be. It all depends on how universities and colleges handle things.
One of the fundamental facts of modern life is that education costs big bucks. I am still paying for my doctoral education and will be for the next several years. But one of the dangers that lies in close ties between academe and the corporate world is the restriction of free inquiry. It is not a moral question, but a question of what will corporations finance. Will they finance the arts and humanities? There is no intrinsic profit to be had from this, but there is prestige, of a sort. If the only corporations making enough money to finance academic research are telecom and biotech firms, who will fund basic research in fields like physics, astronomy, mathematics, ecology, geology, etc.? If these firms cannot see the long term benefit in funding basic research as opposed to research that leads to a short term market turn-around, then there will be problems.
If academic research is soley determined by a funding-to-profit formula, then the arts and humanities will receive short shrift. That is what can lead to the idealless superficiality of Elliot's "The Hollow Men". If our academic institutions become proving grounds for technology and cease to be havens of ideas, what will there be to inspire humanity to better itself aside from profit? Although the subject matter of the arts and humanities are not rigorous and scientific, they still have value to our humanity and our creativity. If the relation between academe and corporate funding can preserve these two things, we will be alright.
I think it is pretty obvious by the volume of this discussion that Jiggling tits and pornography are political speech. It is the right of expression and the implicit right to consume that expression that is at stake. Any time you start restricting a form of expression, it becomes political because some people have a vested interest in it.
Besides, as others here have pointed out, censorship never stays localized to one issue. Once you let it out of the bag, it will spread. I don't think we should take the risk over something the Supreme Court cannot define. What was it Renquist(sp?) said, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." That bet's a little too shaky for me to wager our freedom on.
That may be the case, but what about Kansas. Should we allow our children to be taught by intellectual neanderthals who would disregard the fossil record and teach creationism? The implications for knowledge in general are too great to turn everything over to the tyranny of the masses, so to speak.
Is pornography harmful to children? HELL YES! But out-right misinformation destroys their entire future. The creative engine of this country fuels itself on free thought. There is precious little use of the libraries as it is, so we don't even need to open the flood-gates of censorship a little bit, at any level.
In a perfect world, families would spend time together, would use the library together and parents could supervise their children's use of the internet. But we don't live in that perfect world. We live in a world where parents have to work and kids are left to their own devices and/or daycare. That is a reality to which we have to adjust. That is a fact of life, but I don't think the solution is to begin enforcing "right thinking."
State rights are important. Regional issues are too diverse to oversee from a central authority. However, our success as a nation depends on our intellectual ability. It is already eroding and censoring any organization that receives federal funding will only accelerate that erosion.
Of course, the fact that it is a really stupid question doesn't justify the kinds of human-rights atrocities you have to perpetrate in order to run a communist state.
Communism, Marxism, Fascism, Pseudo-Theocratic Republicanism, Quasi-Socialist Democratism. The source of human rights atrocities is the desire to eliminate dissent. Any set of ideas can be warped to justify the use of force and we all know that a lie repeated enough times eventually becomes the truth. This becomes even easier when the messenger brings an "absolute truth" to enlighten the masses.
In a world without hope, anyone can become a savior.
I suppose I could tell you to take your lies and misconceptions off of slashdot, but I wont adorn myself with the arrogant presumption to pass judgement on another's ideas. This is the difference between thinking in the box and thinking outside of the box. The posting to which you are responding is an almost exegetical summary of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The perspective is sociological, not theological.
A dialogue has to potiential to exist, but not if the recognition of perspective is unacknowledged. Be that as it may, the vision you present of Calvinism is a beautiful one and one that can probably be seen quite clearly from within that perspective. However, I think if you look at the world for a moment, you will see that for 99% of the world, that beautiful vision doesn't exist.
Yes the Bible clearly teaches that God is concerned for the poor, but the corporate boards of the world have little to do with God unless it increases the bottom line, or unless there is some advantage in their presentation of self that they could reap. However logical the system is internally (the one you represent in your posting) shouldn't its truth value rest on how well it corresponds with reality?
No one is going to shake the world with an unbreakable truth for the same reason that no one will succeed in constructing a universal language. People are too different because our experiences are so different. These create the perspective with which you view the world and the means you have at your disposal to describe the world. Absolute truths can only exist when dissent is not allowed.