I would not dispute in many cases that in order to get things done, a large organization needs to be diplomatic and cannot take a stand on every issue of principle. But in this case, the large organization is a university, and the principle at stake is free and open access to information. Academic freedon is absolutely core to their mission. It is the one place, above all others, where a university should make a principled stand.
And what I proposed is not "a direct attack on Bush." I do not think they should have complied at all; but if they did, my suggestion was that they simply inform people, directly and openly, that the database is being censored and by whom.
What I don't understand is, why are they doing this censorship so quietly and compliantly? It seems like the principled thing would have been to fight it on free speech grounds. Short of that, why not set up the DB to respond with a message like, "All information about abortion has been censored by executive order of President Bush"? They would have been technically in compliance with the policy, but could have made a point (and drawn others to their cause).
The sample size isn't the issue (it's a pretty good sample size, as surveys go). Rather, it's that the researcher is proposing to throw out a large body of research including randomized experiments and longitudinal followups, in favor of her own one-time survey study.
It's almost as though "you can't show cause-and-effect with a one-time survey." Wait a minute, where did I get that quote? From Dr. Cheryl K. Olson, quoted directly from TFA. It's almost unbelievable that she's apparently saying it with a straight face while asking us to draw causal conclusions (null ones) from her one-time survey.
Are you sure? Because when I googled for "Cheryl K. Olson," the first hit I got showed that she is on the payroll of Big Tobacco. She has also been a "strategic communications consultant" for Big Pharmaceutical and Big Media. I haven't found anything (yet) to indicate that she's on the gaming industry's payroll, but her history reads like that of a professional shill, not a dispassionate scientist.
If you don't believe in gravity being a fact, please jump off a 42 story building.
A fact is what you have observed. A theory is an explanation of why it is so.
In the strictest sense, the fact is that you have always (previously) observed that objects fall to the ground. But in order to link that fact to your prediction that he will fall to the ground after jumping off a building, you have to have a theory of gravity that predicts how a novel event (i.e., the grandparent poster jumping off a 42 story building) will unfold in the future.
Put more succintly: "Objects thrown off a building have always fallen" is a statement of fact. "Objects thrown off a building will always fall" is a hypothesis derived from a theory.
[The U.S.] Constitution specifies copyrights and patents are to get artists to create in order that the public domain be enriched
Article I, Section 8: Congress shall have the Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Not many places in the US Constitution is it explicitly stated why some provision is put in. Here it's clear: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." I've never understood why the Supreme Court does not use that as a test of what is a reasonable copyright term. Up to a certain point, copyright promotes net progress (net == of society) by providing an incentive to creators to produce and share their work. But as you increase the copyright term, you get diminishing marginal returns. Eventually the yield in creative output is outweighed by the opportunity cost of not allowing society to have unencumbered use of the material. A law that extends copyright beyond that balancing point should be considered unconstitutional.
Judging from your four-digit ID number, I am going to assume that you wrote that software yourself, so you still owe me. Unless your software passes the Turing test, in which case you are safe but your computer is going to gitmo.
If the info was confidential it probably had a confidentiality notice at the bottom of it, stating that if you are not the intended recipient that you aren't allowed to do anything with the email. I saw one of those sig's today and started to wonder if that was legally binding in any way. Maybe we will find out now!
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that putting a notice at the bottom of a message creates a legally binding contract.
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"NIH Grantees Win..." Oh heck, this is getting boring. Let me just quote:
"Of the 81 American Nobel laureates in physiology or medicine since 1945, 62 either worked at or were funded by the NIH before winning the prize."
(source)
When religion doesn't get it right, people abandon it completely.
No they don't. They just reinterpret the primary tenets of the religion to suit their current desired conclusions.
A good demonstration of this is in the classic study When Prophecy Fails. A group of social psychologists studied a doomsday cult whose leader had predicted the end of the world. When the predicted date passed and the world didn't end, people did not leave the cult. Instead, they found reasons to explain it away (God was so impressed with their devotion that he put off the apocalypse on their behalf). The end result was that their beliefs were strengthened, not weakened, by disconfirmatory evidence.
(As a sidenote, the study was an important early test of Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance; Festinger had predicted the cult's response based on his theory.)
creationism: 1. the doctrine that matter and all things were created, substantially as they now exist, by an omnipotent Creator, and not gradually evolved or developed.
2. the doctrine that the true story of the creation of the universe is as it is recounted in the Bible, esp. in the first chapter of Genesis.
Keep in mind, "Creationism" != "Religious faith". There are plenty of people who believe in God and who accept the scientific theory of evolution. But they are not creationists.
That's an interesting definition of creationism you're using. It's not most people's, nor does it fit with the dictionary:
creationism:
1. the doctrine that matter and all things were created, substantially as they now exist, by an omnipotent Creator, and not gradually evolved or developed.
2. the doctrine that the true story of the creation of the universe is as it is recounted in the Bible, esp. in the first chapter of Genesis.
It sounds like you're thinking of theistic evolution, which is different from creationism.
I've met some creationists, but most of them are of the "God created the universe , Big Bang and the standard model takes it from there... " kind of creationists.
They don't sound like any kind of creationists. As I understand the term, "creationism" refers to the belief that God created life in its present form. The people you are describing sound like religious people who integrate their faith with modern science.
The night before my 6th birthday, after I had gone to bed, I could hear my parents and sister talking downstairs. Their voices were too hushed to hear what they were saying, but all of a sudden I heard my sister say really loudly, "A TV...!" So I was convinced I was getting a TV.
The next morning I ripped open my presents. None of the packages looked big enough to hold a TV, which was kind of surprising. But I did get this weird black box with knobs that looked cool. When I asked where was the TV for my room to hook it up, my parents didn't know what I was talking about. It finally turned out my sister had started to say "A TV game!" but my parents clapped their hands over her mouth before she finished. I wasn't really disappointed, the "TV game" was much cooler than a TV would've been (and knowing my sister was jealous was cool too).
Man, I loved that thing. Three different versions of the same damn game, but I could play for hours. I was pretty sad years later when our pet bunny chewed through all the wires and it shorted out (but at least that helped build the case for an Atari 2600).
Admittedly I was not highlighting the distinction between a position on funding stem cell research versus a position on stem cell research per se. But among Republicans, only Paul treats those as separate issues. For others who are opposed, their position against funding embryonic stem cell research derives from a pro-life moral stance. Fred Thompson has referred to "unborn children" in discussing embryonic stem cell research, Tom Tancredo has called it "morally reprehensible," and Alan Keyes says that it violates equal rights. All three (and several others) are pro-life and would outlaw abortion if they could. Their language suggests they would define embryos as human life and thus be inclined to ban embryonic stem cell research as part of a broader ban on abortion.
So to give a serious answer to your question: Yes, several candidates are against embryonic stem cell research.
From your link: "This is early-stage research. We should not abandon other areas of stem cell research. It's by no means certain they'll differentiate in the same way as a normal embryonic stem cell."
Additionally, you said:
I can't really picture the most conservative of conservatives being against it on this basis.
Based on his past statements, it is likely that Ron Paul would still oppose it.
Has anyone actually come out against stem cell research?
Democrats all seem to favor stem cell research. But among Republicans it's mixed:
Giuliani favors expanding stem cell research.
McCain and Romney oppose research using cloned human embryos but not embryos left over from fertility treatments.
Huckabee only favors continuing research with existing lines.
Hunter, Keyes, Tancredo, and Thompson oppose embryonic stem cell research.
Paul opposes funding stem cell research (but for econo-libertarian reasons rather than religious/moral ones. If you generalize from his stated position about stem cells, he apparently would oppose most federal funding for science and medicine).
Source: The Pew Forum (except the Ron Paul parenthetical).
"Easy to follow matrix"? Not exactly. At first, I thought the matrix indicated endorsements, but it doesn't -- checkmarks simply indicate that they were able to find out where a candidate stands. If you actually want to know what that stance is, you sometimes have to click through many screens to get to it.
Great idea, mediocre execution. (And why is gun control on a list of science and technology issues, but not stem cell research?)
Most of the studies present a violent image and ask you questions after. Partly because it'd be unethical to show them imagery and then attempt to induce violence. Thus they must use proxies which only prove a relationship from the imagery to the proxy.
Are you suggesting they should have tried to measure actual violence inside an MRI scanner?
Or are you speaking more broadly about research on media violence in general? Because plenty of studies have randomly manipulated media exposure and then measured real physical aggression. Check out this comprehensive review (pdf warning) of the research literature and see for yourself. The linked article notes that there have been (at least) 71 randomized studies of TV and movies which measured actual physical violence as an outcome; they overwhelmingly show a causal link. (There have also been similar studies on video games, though fewer.) The fMRI study, one presumes, is trying to help explain that causal process.
A lot of civil-liberties-minded folks get uptight about research on media violence, because they think it will lead toward government control. But that doesn't have to be the case. Research can help people make more informed, personal decisions about what media to consume and how to raise their kids, even while society still zealously guards the right to free speech. If you are worried about an erosion of rights, then your quarrel is with overreaching policymakers, not scientists.
First of all, the article I linked is not a single study. It is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed synthesis of numerous previous studies. I'll take that over a wikipedia article any day.
Second, "debatable" doesn't really rebut anything, because in science everything is debatable. (If you want to get philosophical, nothing in science is ever 100% settled.) But as a useful summary of the expert consensus, I stand by what I said. There is very little independent, peer-reviewed evidence that supports the Rorschach, even the supposedly "objective" Exner scoring system; and there is a lot of evidence that challenges its reliability and validity.
It's unlikely that they'll be able to learn anything "psychological" about their users in the sense most people would think about it. That's because the Rorschach isn't valid for inferring personality or other psychological states.
More likely it's for a technical analysis. My guess is they want to verify whether there's enough unpredictability in the passwords produced to mean this is a secure method.
Here's what I wrote (with minor editing) in a comment to the earlier article...
Suppose that you want to keep your political attitudes private -- for whatever reason, you decided it's nobody else's business. On IMDb, publicly linked to your real identity, you choose to only rate movies with non-political content, which you don't mind anybody knowing your opinion about. On Netflix, you believe that your ratings will be kept private, and you want to take advantage of their recommendations. So you rate all the same movies that you rated on IMDb, but you also post your ratings of politically charged movies like Fahrenheit 9/11, The Corporation, etc. With the method described in the arXiv paper, somebody could potentially link your supposedly anonymized political ratings back to your real identity and try to infer your political attitudes from your pattern of ratings.
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Entirely consistent with their environmentalist goals. That's part of their strategy to stop global warming.
They're working on it.
I would not dispute in many cases that in order to get things done, a large organization needs to be diplomatic and cannot take a stand on every issue of principle. But in this case, the large organization is a university, and the principle at stake is free and open access to information. Academic freedon is absolutely core to their mission. It is the one place, above all others, where a university should make a principled stand.
And what I proposed is not "a direct attack on Bush." I do not think they should have complied at all; but if they did, my suggestion was that they simply inform people, directly and openly, that the database is being censored and by whom.
What I don't understand is, why are they doing this censorship so quietly and compliantly? It seems like the principled thing would have been to fight it on free speech grounds. Short of that, why not set up the DB to respond with a message like, "All information about abortion has been censored by executive order of President Bush"? They would have been technically in compliance with the policy, but could have made a point (and drawn others to their cause).
The sample size isn't the issue (it's a pretty good sample size, as surveys go). Rather, it's that the researcher is proposing to throw out a large body of research including randomized experiments and longitudinal followups, in favor of her own one-time survey study.
It's almost as though "you can't show cause-and-effect with a one-time survey." Wait a minute, where did I get that quote? From Dr. Cheryl K. Olson, quoted directly from TFA. It's almost unbelievable that she's apparently saying it with a straight face while asking us to draw causal conclusions (null ones) from her one-time survey.
They don't have an agenda
Are you sure? Because when I googled for "Cheryl K. Olson," the first hit I got showed that she is on the payroll of Big Tobacco. She has also been a "strategic communications consultant" for Big Pharmaceutical and Big Media. I haven't found anything (yet) to indicate that she's on the gaming industry's payroll, but her history reads like that of a professional shill, not a dispassionate scientist.
A fact is what you have observed. A theory is an explanation of why it is so.
In the strictest sense, the fact is that you have always (previously) observed that objects fall to the ground. But in order to link that fact to your prediction that he will fall to the ground after jumping off a building, you have to have a theory of gravity that predicts how a novel event (i.e., the grandparent poster jumping off a 42 story building) will unfold in the future.
Put more succintly: "Objects thrown off a building have always fallen" is a statement of fact. "Objects thrown off a building will always fall" is a hypothesis derived from a theory.
Article I, Section 8: Congress shall have the Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Not many places in the US Constitution is it explicitly stated why some provision is put in. Here it's clear: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." I've never understood why the Supreme Court does not use that as a test of what is a reasonable copyright term. Up to a certain point, copyright promotes net progress (net == of society) by providing an incentive to creators to produce and share their work. But as you increase the copyright term, you get diminishing marginal returns. Eventually the yield in creative output is outweighed by the opportunity cost of not allowing society to have unencumbered use of the material. A law that extends copyright beyond that balancing point should be considered unconstitutional.
Judging from your four-digit ID number, I am going to assume that you wrote that software yourself, so you still owe me. Unless your software passes the Turing test, in which case you are safe but your computer is going to gitmo.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that putting a notice at the bottom of a message creates a legally binding contract.
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NOTICE: This message is distributed under the Slashdot Propriety License. By reading this message, you agree to moderate this message "+1 Informative" if you have mod points, otherwise to send $1,000 in small unmarked bills to the author. Failure to adhere to the terms of the license (which, if you are still reading at this point, you have already agreed to) will result in your being prosecuted under the terms of the DMCA and thrown in a small unheated cell on Guantanamo.
"NIH Grantees Win 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine"
"NIH Grantees Win 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine"
"NIH Grantees Win..." Oh heck, this is getting boring. Let me just quote:
"Of the 81 American Nobel laureates in physiology or medicine since 1945, 62 either worked at or were funded by the NIH before winning the prize."
(source)
A good demonstration of this is in the classic study When Prophecy Fails. A group of social psychologists studied a doomsday cult whose leader had predicted the end of the world. When the predicted date passed and the world didn't end, people did not leave the cult. Instead, they found reasons to explain it away (God was so impressed with their devotion that he put off the apocalypse on their behalf). The end result was that their beliefs were strengthened, not weakened, by disconfirmatory evidence.
(As a sidenote, the study was an important early test of Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance; Festinger had predicted the cult's response based on his theory.)
Yes they are, at least for the standard dictionary definition of creationism:
creationism:
1. the doctrine that matter and all things were created, substantially as they now exist, by an omnipotent Creator, and not gradually evolved or developed.
2. the doctrine that the true story of the creation of the universe is as it is recounted in the Bible, esp. in the first chapter of Genesis.
Keep in mind, "Creationism" != "Religious faith". There are plenty of people who believe in God and who accept the scientific theory of evolution. But they are not creationists.
That's an interesting definition of creationism you're using. It's not most people's, nor does it fit with the dictionary:
creationism:
1. the doctrine that matter and all things were created, substantially as they now exist, by an omnipotent Creator, and not gradually evolved or developed.
2. the doctrine that the true story of the creation of the universe is as it is recounted in the Bible, esp. in the first chapter of Genesis.
It sounds like you're thinking of theistic evolution, which is different from creationism.
They don't sound like any kind of creationists. As I understand the term, "creationism" refers to the belief that God created life in its present form. The people you are describing sound like religious people who integrate their faith with modern science.
The night before my 6th birthday, after I had gone to bed, I could hear my parents and sister talking downstairs. Their voices were too hushed to hear what they were saying, but all of a sudden I heard my sister say really loudly, "A TV...!" So I was convinced I was getting a TV.
The next morning I ripped open my presents. None of the packages looked big enough to hold a TV, which was kind of surprising. But I did get this weird black box with knobs that looked cool. When I asked where was the TV for my room to hook it up, my parents didn't know what I was talking about. It finally turned out my sister had started to say "A TV game!" but my parents clapped their hands over her mouth before she finished. I wasn't really disappointed, the "TV game" was much cooler than a TV would've been (and knowing my sister was jealous was cool too).
Man, I loved that thing. Three different versions of the same damn game, but I could play for hours. I was pretty sad years later when our pet bunny chewed through all the wires and it shorted out (but at least that helped build the case for an Atari 2600).
If the do the redactions their usual way, then the answers to both your questions will be "yes."
What was silly about the post?
Admittedly I was not highlighting the distinction between a position on funding stem cell research versus a position on stem cell research per se. But among Republicans, only Paul treats those as separate issues. For others who are opposed, their position against funding embryonic stem cell research derives from a pro-life moral stance. Fred Thompson has referred to "unborn children" in discussing embryonic stem cell research, Tom Tancredo has called it "morally reprehensible," and Alan Keyes says that it violates equal rights. All three (and several others) are pro-life and would outlaw abortion if they could. Their language suggests they would define embryos as human life and thus be inclined to ban embryonic stem cell research as part of a broader ban on abortion.
So to give a serious answer to your question: Yes, several candidates are against embryonic stem cell research.
From your link: "This is early-stage research. We should not abandon other areas of stem cell research. It's by no means certain they'll differentiate in the same way as a normal embryonic stem cell."
Additionally, you said:
I can't really picture the most conservative of conservatives being against it on this basis.
Based on his past statements, it is likely that Ron Paul would still oppose it.
Has anyone actually come out against stem cell research?
Democrats all seem to favor stem cell research. But among Republicans it's mixed:
Source: The Pew Forum (except the Ron Paul parenthetical).
"Easy to follow matrix"? Not exactly. At first, I thought the matrix indicated endorsements, but it doesn't -- checkmarks simply indicate that they were able to find out where a candidate stands. If you actually want to know what that stance is, you sometimes have to click through many screens to get to it.
Great idea, mediocre execution. (And why is gun control on a list of science and technology issues, but not stem cell research?)
Are you suggesting they should have tried to measure actual violence inside an MRI scanner?
Or are you speaking more broadly about research on media violence in general? Because plenty of studies have randomly manipulated media exposure and then measured real physical aggression. Check out this comprehensive review (pdf warning) of the research literature and see for yourself. The linked article notes that there have been (at least) 71 randomized studies of TV and movies which measured actual physical violence as an outcome; they overwhelmingly show a causal link. (There have also been similar studies on video games, though fewer.) The fMRI study, one presumes, is trying to help explain that causal process.
A lot of civil-liberties-minded folks get uptight about research on media violence, because they think it will lead toward government control. But that doesn't have to be the case. Research can help people make more informed, personal decisions about what media to consume and how to raise their kids, even while society still zealously guards the right to free speech. If you are worried about an erosion of rights, then your quarrel is with overreaching policymakers, not scientists.
First of all, the article I linked is not a single study. It is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed synthesis of numerous previous studies. I'll take that over a wikipedia article any day.
Second, "debatable" doesn't really rebut anything, because in science everything is debatable. (If you want to get philosophical, nothing in science is ever 100% settled.) But as a useful summary of the expert consensus, I stand by what I said. There is very little independent, peer-reviewed evidence that supports the Rorschach, even the supposedly "objective" Exner scoring system; and there is a lot of evidence that challenges its reliability and validity.
It's unlikely that they'll be able to learn anything "psychological" about their users in the sense most people would think about it. That's because the Rorschach isn't valid for inferring personality or other psychological states.
More likely it's for a technical analysis. My guess is they want to verify whether there's enough unpredictability in the passwords produced to mean this is a secure method.
Here's what I wrote (with minor editing) in a comment to the earlier article...
Suppose that you want to keep your political attitudes private -- for whatever reason, you decided it's nobody else's business. On IMDb, publicly linked to your real identity, you choose to only rate movies with non-political content, which you don't mind anybody knowing your opinion about. On Netflix, you believe that your ratings will be kept private, and you want to take advantage of their recommendations. So you rate all the same movies that you rated on IMDb, but you also post your ratings of politically charged movies like Fahrenheit 9/11, The Corporation, etc. With the method described in the arXiv paper, somebody could potentially link your supposedly anonymized political ratings back to your real identity and try to infer your political attitudes from your pattern of ratings.