Just like the babble in programming languages, web standards were supposed to shape human conduct to remove ambiguity and poor practice. Both have failed, Is it because they are designed by a committee and get co-opted, or is it that people find ways to misuse things in ways that undermine the intent of their design? Suppose you were to design a screen reader around Markdown instead of HTML, or convert HTML to Markdown as an intermediate step for a screen reader? Some content on web pages would fail the conversion and if you said that you were going to the immediate step to eliminate spam from the screen reader all the commercial website owners would complain bitterly, especially if you were trying to define a standard for screen readers.
Marshall McCluan pointed out 40+ years ago that a new medium often has the content of an old medium, so lots of web pages driven by advertising look like old print ads. That might be the answer to the issue, people are trying to model old ways to doing things, or designing, in a new medium for which those old ways either are poorly suited, or do not use correctly. I think that is what the minimalist movement in web designs tries to suggest and why commercial sites get it so wrong. Not only are they trying to model something old, they are overplaying their message and are too unaware to see that all they are doing is creating lots of annoying clutter. Being a low vision user, that is painfully, literally, obvious to me. In a nutshell, maybe most people who have ever lived are unaware and selfish, as trite as that may sound.
There are limits to the applicability of the Rule of Law. Yes, Snowden is a "Traitor", for signing an agreement to protect classified materials under the Espnaige Act and then deciding to violate that agreement. That doesn't mean that he hasn't a right to violate that agreement for moral reasons. He felt that the power he was granting to the securing agency was being abused by them and that it was morally wrong and he seems to be accepting the consequence for that, staying out of the U.S. under threat of arrest for violating the law, but he also wants to inform the rest of us of the abuse, for our own good. Now, of course, we have decide if what he is telling us has value above and beyond his violation of the law. Some people, and that includes the AG and other officials, will discredit him primarily because he violated the law while not admitting that they abused the public trust. Snowden has shed light on the problem that regardless of what happens to him will result in a review of the practices and the Congress will have to discharge its duties of oversight. Does that make Snowden a hero? Only time will tell.
I would have probably resigned the position and let the clearances expire, but each of us has to find his own way, and I can tell you that the problem of classification being used to hide imcompetence, political favoritism, and violation of the law is not a new problem at all.
The assessment that polarization of the discussion over whether Edward Snowden is a traitor or hero probably has little to do with the details of the case. It is a process that is always part of our times. It has to do with the broken dialogues that happen in a society polarized over nearly everything and with how the media we have contribute to that sometimes intentionally. The nuances get lost as they do for many issues because of the pressure to arrive at a snap conclusion, it is the speed of the response demanded by instant media; sometimes caused by the conscious rush to be first into print with an opinion no matter how premature. It is kind of like the effect of CNN 24-hour news; people offering their views before all the facts are in, and the Short Attention Span Theater of news and blogs.
In the particular case the thing being overlooked most often and by the government agencies involved that there are no effective checks and balances on what information is justified to be gathered and what information and practices really merit high security. This is not a new problem at all, and if the Congress is supposed to have the oversight, it has not done its job, one of many jobs it has done but poorly.
I am very critical of the blogisphere and social media for their role in degrading civility and public discourse, and it isn't just the self-selection and fragmentation of the media seen most extremely in Fox News. It is the lack of a decent mechanism to really exchange views in a direct and to the point way. Because much of the "discussion" that happens on blogs or blog-like forums, people end up talking past one another and they do not have a structure or an incentive to answer one another's posts point by point. This an unwitting side-effect of social media trying to monetize public discourse, Mark Zuckerberg's stated desire for "Simplicity" and Google's less than honest desire to provide "open" platforms for discussion that it controls in captive market strategy. These factors do more to remove nuance from discussions than merely people shooting from the hip without taking time to think things through. If people replying to one another could really hold each other's feet to the fire, then pride would drive the incentive to stop and think, or even think first, before you spout off. That would be good, and what it would be better for is the vitality of citizenship in a democratic country. I sometimes think that contrary to what they say, lots of the business people who are promoting blogs and social media are anti-democratic conservative elitists.
Good points, Plate tectonics provides a better explanation for Cenozoic Era paleoclimates than just the carbon cycle. The Eocene-Oligocene change has to do with Antarctica drifting over the south pole and icing up. This disrupted ocean circulation and was caused by the breakup of Gondwanaland and the beginning of the circumpolar currents in the Southern Hemisphere. The climate cooled even more in the Miocene and Pliocene because the northern continents surrounded the Arctic and restricted warming sea water from the North Pole. The orbital fluctuations were made critical by the ocean circulation, not the carbon cycle. The carbon cycle is a response to ocean productivity, most carbon fuels are marine in origin. That was very much affected by the land bridges connecting the Americas and Asia, even though the Atlantic opened up. Diverting the Gulf Stream into North Europe, rather than it going from Africa across the Gulf of Mexico and into the Eastern Pacific as it did in Eocene time, would cause greater snow in Northern Europe and Canada that would not melt from season to season and lead to continental glaciation.
As for the cause of the Mass Extinction, the numbers of human in the Americas, only a few thousands, a not enough to explain the collapse of the megafauna, even if people were successful preditors, It is more likely that climate instability and the collapse of food stocks for specialized animals was the real cause. The animals could not adapt, the changes were too fast, happening in decades rather than millenia, and the spieces went extinct.
For our continued existence as megafauna, defined as needing expensive food to survive, it is climate instability that poses the greater risk than ice ages or not. We could have clearly survived in an Eocene climate and we did fine in a Pleistocene one, but to have Eocene in the next 30 years and Pleistocene in the following 30 would be very bad for us.
Screen Readers need the page semantics separated from the style and typography. That is what HTML5 was supposed to allow. Considering the confusion created over the meaning of the new elements, it is doubtful that a good solution for screen readers exists. Responsive design is also supposed to allow accessible designs, except that many web designers driven by commercial pressure violate its generality to get spam first on the page and content way down the page. That is not semantic.
A different perspective. I have poor vision, low visual acuity but not legally blind, and I write my own web pages from scratch using a text editor. The reason is that most templates are too busy for me to look at and process. I want and need simplicity and to be able to zoom the font size, so "sophistication" is for show and not practical.
If truth be told I would de-commercialize the Internet, and that is going to happen on its own as security concerns kill it off. When we revert to older store and forward technology in ad hoc mesh networks, web design will have to become simple again. Minimalism will become necessary. Don't assume that current conditions will persist.
To think yourself exceptional yet being insecure or masking deep-seated insecurity is a combination behind narcissistic personality, which is quite the common disorder in American culture. The third feature, impulse control, counters the mental illness tendency of the first two traits. Its lack is the tale of individuals that founder on the reefs of deception and megalomania, many a public figure, every laughable fall from grace that makes the evening news.
The condition is a transition for an out-group to become an in-group and to have to unlearn the exceptionalism, seem between generations of every ethnic minority that has ever arrived on our shores.
The formula could become lethal for Mankind as he becomes powerful enough to permanently damage the environment when the urge to self-centered greed is not tempered by the damage it does. So being hard-bitten and aggressive can rapidly become lethal. This may be the fate of many technical civilizations that have appeared in the Universe. If we find evidence of intelligent life in the Universe, it may be fossils and ruins of races that evolutionary biology had given competitive tools, but not enough wisdom to temper the lust for power, something religion in our species does not temper. In that since religion is a product of evolutionary biology of this particular omnivour, not a check on it.
Lets be careful to distinguish the UK from other Western countries. The UK is not the USA or France, thank God, although USA seems to be drifting down the same slope the UK has leaped down. I don't know if it is racism or class war or both that motivates the Tories to go so far right, it may be the same urge as the American tea Parties which are being discredited. The UK has a far greater investment in keeping its institutionalized classes separate, at least in the US we can ask "What have you done for ME, lately?" which is the current new question and the watchword of the emerging class war in America.
First, Nazisim was not a Progressive-Liberal Radical idea. The National Socialist party was rabidly anti-communist and full of Capitalist and German elites. It was racist, not socialist, not collectiveist. Its reaction to WW I and the Treaty of Versallles was convervative, nationalist, and elitist, pitting group against group.
This stupid man has fired another salvo in a class war, and does it for the reason every conservative movement does so, to divide and conquer, to disunite a diverse group of people so that his elite, his Capitalist elite, can come out oh top. He is the Nazi, replete with the Social Aarweinsim invented by American Capitalists in the 1890's and adapted by the Nazis in the 1920's.
So, given the income distribution, lopsided, that he helped to create, for the Great Unwashed to get upset that Google and Facebook are giving their employees perks at the expense of everybody else, of renters in the Bay Area and of MUNI riders in San Francisco, interferring at bus stops for public transportation, is an imposition on the 1%, too bad. People are beginning to keep score if the advantages given to Silicon Valley are reallly worth the sacrifice. If SV has really given back in a meaningful and not created more problems. I am not talking about the token charity that Silicon Valley firms and others have patted themselves on the back ad nauseium with the help of the local media, and drive me to turn off the TV and the local news, propaganda. I am talking about real help with the problems that face California and the nation. The 50 year love affair with Silicon Valley and Stanford University and its economic thinking may be done.
Facebook could easily fail. There are a number of things coming up soon that could cause people to leave and investors to lose interest. The growth potential of the website is limited. There just isn't enough space to support more advertising without that becoming annoyingly intrusive to users. Facebook is going to roll out video ads this year. If that isn't done in the right way, people could leave. Several people have pointed out that Facebook throttles what your friends get to see of what you post so that you are induced to pay for promoting your posts, even though they are intended for your friends. If people get wise to this and realize that Facebook is a third party to their relationships, they could be offended and leave. So, right away there are failure modes that could happen and quickly, this year.
Facebook could reinvent itself if its web page fails. It could fall back to being just the global repository for friends' lists, or it could rely on its messaging apps to carry it through. It could spin off the website and its backend, and a third party could actually do that on a regional scale or in the cloud for much less. You and I do not need a CMS capable of serving 1 billion users at once, only Facebook's current business model needs that. The other thing reducing the backend would do is to allow users more choices about the UI. something Facebook is ruthless about keeping because of the big data model it keeps.
I would like to see the social media model of communication built around the blog, really the textarea, reduced in importance, or to have a two tier approach emerge where most sites persist with it to support their business uses and other sites drop it so that something like discussion forums can be started. The echo chamber effect of the Internet is due to social media and its tendency to suppress discussion and its poor handling of dissent and abuse. If people were to conclude that social media does not help them communicate, in fact it hurts their ability to communicate at a depth beyond a knee-jerk reaction, they wil start abandoning sites like Google and Facebook as what they truly are, shallow, ephemeral.
So, everybody is an advertiser on Facebook. Businesses pay to target you with ads, but users pay to get their posts promoted, and as the video suggests, Facebook manipulates what your followers see so that you are induced to pay Facebook to get attention from your friends.
I have already seen direct evidence that people in my modest circle of friends do not see everything I post, but it didn't occur to me that Facebook is actively manipulating that until I saw that video.
How soon can it be before everybody wises up that their regard for their friends on Facebook is shaped by an unseen hand and that relationships are at risk because of it? When that realization becomes the perception that one should not use Facebook to contact family and friends, that it is dangerous to risk relationships on Facebook, the exodus from it will begin. It is a dangerous game that Facebook plays because people change their habits on perceptions and if more and more come to the realization that it is not fair, they will leave. They will leave even sooner if people's News Feed becomes crowded with spam, and Facebook doesn't have very much leeway before that tips. This year they are introducing auto-running video ads. If they don't do this right, they could piss off lots of people and they will leave even sooner. I think that Facebook's position is for Facebook to lose with any number of missteps. I'll go with the Princeton result and as much as the Face Book was originally a paper dossier for dorm life at Harvard and a way to be hung by your own petard. How it is Facebook's turn.
I can see the validity of the criticism of the Princeton study's methodology, using Google search as a metric for interest in Facebook, and the numerous people here have pointed out that Facebook is accessed in ways that use Google, directly. That is indicative unless Google analytics, which is deployed many places, DOES count visits to Facebook.
Even if the research stands up, the notion that Facebook can adapt to ecosystem changes does complicate the measure. Even if visits to ones's newfeed goes down, the use of other interfaces to use Facebook as a chat or messaging service might keep the use rate up.
I did see a graph that showed the growth of Facebook account numbers, a few months ago, I cannot now give a link, but that chart showed a zero change in slope with the potential to flatten out. Maybe that is the first clue that the current set-up had reached its maximum potential.
More of an impression is that the News Feed has limited potential to take more advertising before it starts to become too disruptive. Facebook is adding automatically run sponsored video this year and that could cause a large back lash if it isn't done right. Facebook has a huge risk to fail right there, and if thye cannot grow their revenues, their economic failure could be fast and furious.
I dislike the structure of Facebook communication and of social media generally. I think that the blog is too unstructured for any kind of meaningful discussion. That is not central to the economic viability of social media directly. If Social media is regarded merely as a commercial tool that people use to find products and services, the blog form is adequate, but if people really want more than that they might lose interest in social media generally, and Facebook in particular. People try to push ideas and causes on Facebook and other social media but unless the appeal has fairly immediate knee-jerk appeal it goes not where. I am not suggesting that such impulsive behavior has no place, just that social media as a dominant force in Internet communication restricts the range of ideas quite a bit. I'd like to see that change, not so much that people use Facebook less or for what it is good at, but that they use it and Social Media less for what they are not good at. In this regard, Google+ is more like LinkedIn as a venue for rather shameless attention-getting and promotion than Facebook and is even less adequate as a forum for discussion. Slashdot fits that need much better, so does reddit, but even these two lack the structure needed for an effective focused discussion. The USENET had what is needed. I'd like to see a re-emergance of that style of discourse, especially in the election season.
One area in which Facebook, the blog, and Social Media are very weak is in dealing with bullying and trolling. If for no other reason, threading and context reply on Facebook would really help to manage abuse, and that includes topic drift and hijacking, which are a normal and expected part of most conversations, but which are particularly poorly handled by the strictly chronoogical form of a blog. I believe that the Big Data application of marketers and the scale of the backend prevents the introduction of the needed structure of a forum, and so I have no hope that the return of these features, that have existed in e-mail and newsgroups long before there were web browsers. Facebook users and other blog users can be very intolerant of the normal distractions people throw into conversations, and the reason is not that people are rude but that the technology doesn't correctly model how people want to communicate. What is preventing this is the commercial uses and the cost of doing searches for the Big Data application.
What Facebook does could be done much cheaper and offer much more flexibility if the CMS application were made more regionally. The claim that Facebook serves 1 Billion users at a time is for the benefit of Facebook's business partners. You and I as users have at most a few hundred friends, and I am p
Thanks for the pointer to the book. I did not know the title. I am well aware of the history and difficulties associated with the Grosse Fuga and having seen it performed, the awe and mystery of it are deserved. If I can get the book you mentioned it will be interesting to read what is said about the possibility of Beethoven's depression.
I have learned about the GF, that it can be approached formally as a Braoque Suite, if not a modified sonata form. The opening in G-minor with its trials of the theme for the fugue is reminiscant of the riternello with bass recitative from the "Ode to Joy" movement of the Ninth Symphony, itself a composite form variations, and sonata-altegro form but owing much to opera.
The exposition of the GF is the standard working out of a fugue with several countersubjects, but unlike Bach, it is not given a final cadence and ending right there. It modulates from G-minor to B-Flat, but is followed immediately by a modulation to G-flat, like the attach to adagio or ternary form show movements in other String Quartets.
The G-flat section with its use of the fugue subject over a simple counterpoint acts like a slow movement in a sonata. Beethoven had marked the separation by a double bar as he does for the following section, a Gigue, quickly exposed, followed by another double bar and modulation to A-Flat where the gigue therme is worked out as a double fugue. It is a diminished (in duration) version of the fugue these worked out against a white note, or augmented version of the fugue theme.
Get the score, public domain, and compare the note values of the opening with these and you will see that this lengthy section, which is also the point furthest removed harmonically and functions like the development section of the sonata form, is a complex double fugue. At the next double bar is a working out of the augmented version of the theme in rectus and inversion against a species counterpoint. This is actually a rhyme of the texture in the G-flat section, whose contrapuntal significance is revealed. This is followed by a rhyme of the Gigue theme, at a double bar, a brief fantasia with trills in the theme and the coda, which also has a rhyme with the introduction section. The introductory bars and its rhyme sound very much like the "Mus es sein?" device in Op 135.
In key area form the last three sections rhyme with the first three, and harmonically suggest a sonata form, but they could also suggest the arch form used by Bartok and we know that he was heavily influeinced by Beethoven.
Lastly recall the history of this work. It was originally the last movement of Op 130 and following immediately the touching Cavatina, but it was separated out, given Op 133 and a replacement Rondo, that is itself a great work, was substituted. I have a pocket score that is old enough to show the GF as an appendix to Op 130, and you can get recordings of the original so-called Galitzin version with the GF followed by the Rondo.
The irony between your comment and your sig is duly noted, Because the FTC is there, a blackball can be enforced on an overzealous sales force. If it were just business, he'd get a promotion.
Man, can I tell that you are ignorant of history, or an elitist. Elitists always think they can get away with something, but real world events have a way of proving them wrong. You may think that the police and rule of law protects you from the wrath of a mob, just like the French Nobility thought themselves immune for the mob in 1791. Even the Great Unwashed deserves deference from you. You haven't been following events in the rest of the world, have you, and you suffer the illusion that it can't happen here. Peace in this nation is due to some realities that you might be helping to upset, but then again, most people, especially some of the smartest. become victim to unintended consequences.
I have been meaning to research the point about depression, whether there is any real evidence for it and if biographers and others have shed any light on it. The contrasts in music may be simply devices, except the intensity of the "dark" passages do point to something experienced I think. Maybe more than Op 18 #6 the Adagio in Op 110 points to that. The evident struggle is pretty obvious as is the possibility that the loud chords at the end before the Fugue and its rhyme seem to indicate how deaf the composer was. I am reminded of this by how Alfred Brendel approaches those chords.
Please redraft your reply to me. It s hard to parse the run-on sentence. There need to be some separation of ideas. That is why we have the period as a punctuation mark.
Sorry, pal. The voting with your wallet is not as effective as harassing people you disagree with. Every business man who thinks he has it made gives that argument. Do away with the vote and with the referendum and the demonstration and let the market decide. The market is rigged and your PR can drown out the dissent, especially if you've bought the media. So I would not fall for your ruse. I'd rather leave open the possibility of a riot than let you shut up people you disagree with.
So do you think that the engineer is above blame, that he isn't part of the problem, or is he simply more entitled to the benefit of the arrangement? I read the protest against Google and Facebook to mean more than just resentment that they are naking it harder for people of ordinary means to live in the Bay Area. I think it is due to the realization that these same ordinary people get whenever they use a computer that these companies are not returning something of value that compensates the impact that there employees have on everybody else. There has been a sea change. People are beginning to doubt the universal good of tech, and so they don't put up with the downside as much as they have. The downside is nothing new. The housing market has been insane in the bay Area since at least 1972. It is the fact that Silicon Valley is no longer seen as opportunity, that is is run by an increasingly closed elite, and that it hasn't realized its promise of benefit to all. In fact the conduct of Google and Facebook has shown everybody, tech or not, that there is a downside, That these companies are business as usual in the sense of malfeisance and greed that typifies more traditional industries, that hiring lots of smart people does not mean a better service. Indeed, in the case of these two companies, it indicates an advesarial relationship to the public at large. So every bit of manipulation, of spying, or effort to deceive that happens undermines the vaunted status of tech, of computer scientists, or software engineers. Ordinary people are less inclined to give tech workers the benefit of the doubt and put up with the downside.
Man, you guys are trying so hard to rationalize this all away. Can it be that you are like the french Noble Class just before the Terror? They never knew what hit them when the revolutionary councils threw them in prison and started lopping off their heads. It is time to come out of your Glass Houses and look at things from the point of view of people who aren't in your elite. You are elitists, you have entitlement, just like the great pride before a fall. Reacting conservatively are spending money on The tea Parties won't save you either, if people who think that you are stealing from them come after you.
So now we know what that 'Mission Accomplished' banner really was about.
Good one, it was that George W. Bush would get to help the banks and financial institutions rob the American Middle Class of equity and destroy the American Dream. Of course the war he was gloating about is still going on and it is a losing proposition that the US. will not win. Leadership is al about good timing and the kind of leaders we create in this country are notoriously bad at it, and the current President is even worse at timing than the last.
But Bush was a Carpetbagger, a Wall Street Republican transplanted to Texas, complete with fake Southern accent, born in New England, and like that part of the U.S. chock full of NYC financial types with New haven as a satellite, merely. He was all about money, making his benefactors who fund the Republican Party still more rich and promoting the interests of elites. BTW lots of those elites are techies. The importance of Liberarian stupidity in Silicon Valley is testament to that. The number of crack pot engineers and business men is classic. People who are spoiled and always will be, people who think themselves superior to everyone else.
You totally miss the point. The real estate market appeals blindly to the biggest profit, forgetting about all other things of value, and the companies want to locate in the Bay Area even if there isn't affordable housing. It is the combination of selfish motives that causes this, not government regulation. You just want the society to write blank checks to elites, and not have decisions made selfishly suffer the consequences. The protests are a sign that their becomes a price to pay, even if it is in the wrath of the Great Unwashed. Come to grips with that silver spoon in your mouth and face the fact that people can cause consequences to selfish behavior. So the companies have to pay a surtax to attract people to come into the outrageously inflated Bay Area housing market, but they also have to pay for the backlash against the unseen hand of supply and demand, too bad!. If profit motive is the blanket justification for business behavior, a reaction to it is justification for disruption of business as usual.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like the babble in programming languages, web standards were supposed to shape human conduct to remove ambiguity and poor practice. Both have failed, Is it because they are designed by a committee and get co-opted, or is it that people find ways to misuse things in ways that undermine the intent of their design? Suppose you were to design a screen reader around Markdown instead of HTML, or convert HTML to Markdown as an intermediate step for a screen reader? Some content on web pages would fail the conversion and if you said that you were going to the immediate step to eliminate spam from the screen reader all the commercial website owners would complain bitterly, especially if you were trying to define a standard for screen readers.
Marshall McCluan pointed out 40+ years ago that a new medium often has the content of an old medium, so lots of web pages driven by advertising look like old print ads. That might be the answer to the issue, people are trying to model old ways to doing things, or designing, in a new medium for which those old ways either are poorly suited, or do not use correctly. I think that is what the minimalist movement in web designs tries to suggest and why commercial sites get it so wrong. Not only are they trying to model something old, they are overplaying their message and are too unaware to see that all they are doing is creating lots of annoying clutter. Being a low vision user, that is painfully, literally, obvious to me. In a nutshell, maybe most people who have ever lived are unaware and selfish, as trite as that may sound.
Oh, never mind!
There are limits to the applicability of the Rule of Law. Yes, Snowden is a "Traitor", for signing an agreement to protect classified materials under the Espnaige Act and then deciding to violate that agreement. That doesn't mean that he hasn't a right to violate that agreement for moral reasons. He felt that the power he was granting to the securing agency was being abused by them and that it was morally wrong and he seems to be accepting the consequence for that, staying out of the U.S. under threat of arrest for violating the law, but he also wants to inform the rest of us of the abuse, for our own good. Now, of course, we have decide if what he is telling us has value above and beyond his violation of the law. Some people, and that includes the AG and other officials, will discredit him primarily because he violated the law while not admitting that they abused the public trust. Snowden has shed light on the problem that regardless of what happens to him will result in a review of the practices and the Congress will have to discharge its duties of oversight. Does that make Snowden a hero? Only time will tell.
I would have probably resigned the position and let the clearances expire, but each of us has to find his own way, and I can tell you that the problem of classification being used to hide imcompetence, political favoritism, and violation of the law is not a new problem at all.
The assessment that polarization of the discussion over whether Edward Snowden is a traitor or hero probably has little to do with the details of the case. It is a process that is always part of our times. It has to do with the broken dialogues that happen in a society polarized over nearly everything and with how the media we have contribute to that sometimes intentionally. The nuances get lost as they do for many issues because of the pressure to arrive at a snap conclusion, it is the speed of the response demanded by instant media; sometimes caused by the conscious rush to be first into print with an opinion no matter how premature. It is kind of like the effect of CNN 24-hour news; people offering their views before all the facts are in, and the Short Attention Span Theater of news and blogs.
In the particular case the thing being overlooked most often and by the government agencies involved that there are no effective checks and balances on what information is justified to be gathered and what information and practices really merit high security. This is not a new problem at all, and if the Congress is supposed to have the oversight, it has not done its job, one of many jobs it has done but poorly.
I am very critical of the blogisphere and social media for their role in degrading civility and public discourse, and it isn't just the self-selection and fragmentation of the media seen most extremely in Fox News. It is the lack of a decent mechanism to really exchange views in a direct and to the point way. Because much of the "discussion" that happens on blogs or blog-like forums, people end up talking past one another and they do not have a structure or an incentive to answer one another's posts point by point. This an unwitting side-effect of social media trying to monetize public discourse, Mark Zuckerberg's stated desire for "Simplicity" and Google's less than honest desire to provide "open" platforms for discussion that it controls in captive market strategy. These factors do more to remove nuance from discussions than merely people shooting from the hip without taking time to think things through. If people replying to one another could really hold each other's feet to the fire, then pride would drive the incentive to stop and think, or even think first, before you spout off. That would be good, and what it would be better for is the vitality of citizenship in a democratic country. I sometimes think that contrary to what they say, lots of the business people who are promoting blogs and social media are anti-democratic conservative elitists.
Good points, Plate tectonics provides a better explanation for Cenozoic Era paleoclimates than just the carbon cycle. The Eocene-Oligocene change has to do with Antarctica drifting over the south pole and icing up. This disrupted ocean circulation and was caused by the breakup of Gondwanaland and the beginning of the circumpolar currents in the Southern Hemisphere. The climate cooled even more in the Miocene and Pliocene because the northern continents surrounded the Arctic and restricted warming sea water from the North Pole. The orbital fluctuations were made critical by the ocean circulation, not the carbon cycle. The carbon cycle is a response to ocean productivity, most carbon fuels are marine in origin. That was very much affected by the land bridges connecting the Americas and Asia, even though the Atlantic opened up. Diverting the Gulf Stream into North Europe, rather than it going from Africa across the Gulf of Mexico and into the Eastern Pacific as it did in Eocene time, would cause greater snow in Northern Europe and Canada that would not melt from season to season and lead to continental glaciation.
As for the cause of the Mass Extinction, the numbers of human in the Americas, only a few thousands, a not enough to explain the collapse of the megafauna, even if people were successful preditors, It is more likely that climate instability and the collapse of food stocks for specialized animals was the real cause. The animals could not adapt, the changes were too fast, happening in decades rather than millenia, and the spieces went extinct.
For our continued existence as megafauna, defined as needing expensive food to survive, it is climate instability that poses the greater risk than ice ages or not. We could have clearly survived in an Eocene climate and we did fine in a Pleistocene one, but to have Eocene in the next 30 years and Pleistocene in the following 30 would be very bad for us.
Screen Readers need the page semantics separated from the style and typography. That is what HTML5 was supposed to allow. Considering the confusion created over the meaning of the new elements, it is doubtful that a good solution for screen readers exists. Responsive design is also supposed to allow accessible designs, except that many web designers driven by commercial pressure violate its generality to get spam first on the page and content way down the page. That is not semantic.
A different perspective. I have poor vision, low visual acuity but not legally blind, and I write my own web pages from scratch using a text editor. The reason is that most templates are too busy for me to look at and process. I want and need simplicity and to be able to zoom the font size, so "sophistication" is for show and not practical.
If truth be told I would de-commercialize the Internet, and that is going to happen on its own as security concerns kill it off. When we revert to older store and forward technology in ad hoc mesh networks, web design will have to become simple again. Minimalism will become necessary. Don't assume that current conditions will persist.
To think yourself exceptional yet being insecure or masking deep-seated insecurity is a combination behind narcissistic personality, which is quite the common disorder in American culture. The third feature, impulse control, counters the mental illness tendency of the first two traits. Its lack is the tale of individuals that founder on the reefs of deception and megalomania, many a public figure, every laughable fall from grace that makes the evening news.
The condition is a transition for an out-group to become an in-group and to have to unlearn the exceptionalism, seem between generations of every ethnic minority that has ever arrived on our shores.
The formula could become lethal for Mankind as he becomes powerful enough to permanently damage the environment when the urge to self-centered greed is not tempered by the damage it does. So being hard-bitten and aggressive can rapidly become lethal. This may be the fate of many technical civilizations that have appeared in the Universe. If we find evidence of intelligent life in the Universe, it may be fossils and ruins of races that evolutionary biology had given competitive tools, but not enough wisdom to temper the lust for power, something religion in our species does not temper. In that since religion is a product of evolutionary biology of this particular omnivour, not a check on it.
I'd like to power my rotory phone using sugar!
Lets be careful to distinguish the UK from other Western countries. The UK is not the USA or France, thank God, although USA seems to be drifting down the same slope the UK has leaped down. I don't know if it is racism or class war or both that motivates the Tories to go so far right, it may be the same urge as the American tea Parties which are being discredited. The UK has a far greater investment in keeping its institutionalized classes separate, at least in the US we can ask "What have you done for ME, lately?" which is the current new question and the watchword of the emerging class war in America.
Idiot! Last I heard the major firms that backed the Nazis were all Capitalist firms. Quit this BS!
First, Nazisim was not a Progressive-Liberal Radical idea. The National Socialist party was rabidly anti-communist and full of Capitalist and German elites. It was racist, not socialist, not collectiveist. Its reaction to WW I and the Treaty of Versallles was convervative, nationalist, and elitist, pitting group against group.
This stupid man has fired another salvo in a class war, and does it for the reason every conservative movement does so, to divide and conquer, to disunite a diverse group of people so that his elite, his Capitalist elite, can come out oh top. He is the Nazi, replete with the Social Aarweinsim invented by American Capitalists in the 1890's and adapted by the Nazis in the 1920's.
So, given the income distribution, lopsided, that he helped to create, for the Great Unwashed to get upset that Google and Facebook are giving their employees perks at the expense of everybody else, of renters in the Bay Area and of MUNI riders in San Francisco, interferring at bus stops for public transportation, is an imposition on the 1%, too bad. People are beginning to keep score if the advantages given to Silicon Valley are reallly worth the sacrifice. If SV has really given back in a meaningful and not created more problems. I am not talking about the token charity that Silicon Valley firms and others have patted themselves on the back ad nauseium with the help of the local media, and drive me to turn off the TV and the local news, propaganda. I am talking about real help with the problems that face California and the nation. The 50 year love affair with Silicon Valley and Stanford University and its economic thinking may be done.
Facebook could easily fail. There are a number of things coming up soon that could cause people to leave and investors to lose interest. The growth potential of the website is limited. There just isn't enough space to support more advertising without that becoming annoyingly intrusive to users. Facebook is going to roll out video ads this year. If that isn't done in the right way, people could leave. Several people have pointed out that Facebook throttles what your friends get to see of what you post so that you are induced to pay for promoting your posts, even though they are intended for your friends. If people get wise to this and realize that Facebook is a third party to their relationships, they could be offended and leave. So, right away there are failure modes that could happen and quickly, this year.
Facebook could reinvent itself if its web page fails. It could fall back to being just the global repository for friends' lists, or it could rely on its messaging apps to carry it through. It could spin off the website and its backend, and a third party could actually do that on a regional scale or in the cloud for much less. You and I do not need a CMS capable of serving 1 billion users at once, only Facebook's current business model needs that. The other thing reducing the backend would do is to allow users more choices about the UI. something Facebook is ruthless about keeping because of the big data model it keeps.
I would like to see the social media model of communication built around the blog, really the textarea, reduced in importance, or to have a two tier approach emerge where most sites persist with it to support their business uses and other sites drop it so that something like discussion forums can be started. The echo chamber effect of the Internet is due to social media and its tendency to suppress discussion and its poor handling of dissent and abuse. If people were to conclude that social media does not help them communicate, in fact it hurts their ability to communicate at a depth beyond a knee-jerk reaction, they wil start abandoning sites like Google and Facebook as what they truly are, shallow, ephemeral.
So, everybody is an advertiser on Facebook. Businesses pay to target you with ads, but users pay to get their posts promoted, and as the video suggests, Facebook manipulates what your followers see so that you are induced to pay Facebook to get attention from your friends.
I have already seen direct evidence that people in my modest circle of friends do not see everything I post, but it didn't occur to me that Facebook is actively manipulating that until I saw that video.
How soon can it be before everybody wises up that their regard for their friends on Facebook is shaped by an unseen hand and that relationships are at risk because of it? When that realization becomes the perception that one should not use Facebook to contact family and friends, that it is dangerous to risk relationships on Facebook, the exodus from it will begin. It is a dangerous game that Facebook plays because people change their habits on perceptions and if more and more come to the realization that it is not fair, they will leave. They will leave even sooner if people's News Feed becomes crowded with spam, and Facebook doesn't have very much leeway before that tips. This year they are introducing auto-running video ads. If they don't do this right, they could piss off lots of people and they will leave even sooner. I think that Facebook's position is for Facebook to lose with any number of missteps. I'll go with the Princeton result and as much as the Face Book was originally a paper dossier for dorm life at Harvard and a way to be hung by your own petard. How it is Facebook's turn.
I can see the validity of the criticism of the Princeton study's methodology, using Google search as a metric for interest in Facebook, and the numerous people here have pointed out that Facebook is accessed in ways that use Google, directly. That is indicative unless Google analytics, which is deployed many places, DOES count visits to Facebook.
Even if the research stands up, the notion that Facebook can adapt to ecosystem changes does complicate the measure. Even if visits to ones's newfeed goes down, the use of other interfaces to use Facebook as a chat or messaging service might keep the use rate up.
I did see a graph that showed the growth of Facebook account numbers, a few months ago, I cannot now give a link, but that chart showed a zero change in slope with the potential to flatten out. Maybe that is the first clue that the current set-up had reached its maximum potential.
More of an impression is that the News Feed has limited potential to take more advertising before it starts to become too disruptive. Facebook is adding automatically run sponsored video this year and that could cause a large back lash if it isn't done right. Facebook has a huge risk to fail right there, and if thye cannot grow their revenues, their economic failure could be fast and furious.
I dislike the structure of Facebook communication and of social media generally. I think that the blog is too unstructured for any kind of meaningful discussion. That is not central to the economic viability of social media directly. If Social media is regarded merely as a commercial tool that people use to find products and services, the blog form is adequate, but if people really want more than that they might lose interest in social media generally, and Facebook in particular. People try to push ideas and causes on Facebook and other social media but unless the appeal has fairly immediate knee-jerk appeal it goes not where. I am not suggesting that such impulsive behavior has no place, just that social media as a dominant force in Internet communication restricts the range of ideas quite a bit. I'd like to see that change, not so much that people use Facebook less or for what it is good at, but that they use it and Social Media less for what they are not good at. In this regard, Google+ is more like LinkedIn as a venue for rather shameless attention-getting and promotion than Facebook and is even less adequate as a forum for discussion. Slashdot fits that need much better, so does reddit, but even these two lack the structure needed for an effective focused discussion. The USENET had what is needed. I'd like to see a re-emergance of that style of discourse, especially in the election season.
One area in which Facebook, the blog, and Social Media are very weak is in dealing with bullying and trolling. If for no other reason, threading and context reply on Facebook would really help to manage abuse, and that includes topic drift and hijacking, which are a normal and expected part of most conversations, but which are particularly poorly handled by the strictly chronoogical form of a blog. I believe that the Big Data application of marketers and the scale of the backend prevents the introduction of the needed structure of a forum, and so I have no hope that the return of these features, that have existed in e-mail and newsgroups long before there were web browsers. Facebook users and other blog users can be very intolerant of the normal distractions people throw into conversations, and the reason is not that people are rude but that the technology doesn't correctly model how people want to communicate. What is preventing this is the commercial uses and the cost of doing searches for the Big Data application.
What Facebook does could be done much cheaper and offer much more flexibility if the CMS application were made more regionally. The claim that Facebook serves 1 Billion users at a time is for the benefit of Facebook's business partners. You and I as users have at most a few hundred friends, and I am p
Thanks for the pointer to the book. I did not know the title. I am well aware of the history and difficulties associated with the Grosse Fuga and having seen it performed, the awe and mystery of it are deserved. If I can get the book you mentioned it will be interesting to read what is said about the possibility of Beethoven's depression.
I have learned about the GF, that it can be approached formally as a Braoque Suite, if not a modified sonata form. The opening in G-minor with its trials of the theme for the fugue is reminiscant of the riternello with bass recitative from the "Ode to Joy" movement of the Ninth Symphony, itself a composite form variations, and sonata-altegro form but owing much to opera.
The exposition of the GF is the standard working out of a fugue with several countersubjects, but unlike Bach, it is not given a final cadence and ending right there. It modulates from G-minor to B-Flat, but is followed immediately by a modulation to G-flat, like the attach to adagio or ternary form show movements in other String Quartets.
The G-flat section with its use of the fugue subject over a simple counterpoint acts like a slow movement in a sonata. Beethoven had marked the separation by a double bar as he does for the following section, a Gigue, quickly exposed, followed by another double bar and modulation to A-Flat where the gigue therme is worked out as a double fugue. It is a diminished (in duration) version of the fugue these worked out against a white note, or augmented version of the fugue theme.
Get the score, public domain, and compare the note values of the opening with these and you will see that this lengthy section, which is also the point furthest removed harmonically and functions like the development section of the sonata form, is a complex double fugue. At the next double bar is a working out of the augmented version of the theme in rectus and inversion against a species counterpoint. This is actually a rhyme of the texture in the G-flat section, whose contrapuntal significance is revealed. This is followed by a rhyme of the Gigue theme, at a double bar, a brief fantasia with trills in the theme and the coda, which also has a rhyme with the introduction section. The introductory bars and its rhyme sound very much like the "Mus es sein?" device in Op 135.
In key area form the last three sections rhyme with the first three, and harmonically suggest a sonata form, but they could also suggest the arch form used by Bartok and we know that he was heavily influeinced by Beethoven.
Lastly recall the history of this work. It was originally the last movement of Op 130 and following immediately the touching Cavatina, but it was separated out, given Op 133 and a replacement Rondo, that is itself a great work, was substituted. I have a pocket score that is old enough to show the GF as an appendix to Op 130, and you can get recordings of the original so-called Galitzin version with the GF followed by the Rondo.
The irony between your comment and your sig is duly noted, Because the FTC is there, a blackball can be enforced on an overzealous sales force. If it were just business, he'd get a promotion.
Man, can I tell that you are ignorant of history, or an elitist. Elitists always think they can get away with something, but real world events have a way of proving them wrong. You may think that the police and rule of law protects you from the wrath of a mob, just like the French Nobility thought themselves immune for the mob in 1791. Even the Great Unwashed deserves deference from you. You haven't been following events in the rest of the world, have you, and you suffer the illusion that it can't happen here. Peace in this nation is due to some realities that you might be helping to upset, but then again, most people, especially some of the smartest. become victim to unintended consequences.
I have been meaning to research the point about depression, whether there is any real evidence for it and if biographers and others have shed any light on it. The contrasts in music may be simply devices, except the intensity of the "dark" passages do point to something experienced I think. Maybe more than Op 18 #6 the Adagio in Op 110 points to that. The evident struggle is pretty obvious as is the possibility that the loud chords at the end before the Fugue and its rhyme seem to indicate how deaf the composer was. I am reminded of this by how Alfred Brendel approaches those chords.
Please redraft your reply to me. It s hard to parse the run-on sentence. There need to be some separation of ideas. That is why we have the period as a punctuation mark.
Sorry, pal. The voting with your wallet is not as effective as harassing people you disagree with. Every business man who thinks he has it made gives that argument. Do away with the vote and with the referendum and the demonstration and let the market decide. The market is rigged and your PR can drown out the dissent, especially if you've bought the media. So I would not fall for your ruse. I'd rather leave open the possibility of a riot than let you shut up people you disagree with.
So do you think that the engineer is above blame, that he isn't part of the problem, or is he simply more entitled to the benefit of the arrangement? I read the protest against Google and Facebook to mean more than just resentment that they are naking it harder for people of ordinary means to live in the Bay Area. I think it is due to the realization that these same ordinary people get whenever they use a computer that these companies are not returning something of value that compensates the impact that there employees have on everybody else. There has been a sea change. People are beginning to doubt the universal good of tech, and so they don't put up with the downside as much as they have. The downside is nothing new. The housing market has been insane in the bay Area since at least 1972. It is the fact that Silicon Valley is no longer seen as opportunity, that is is run by an increasingly closed elite, and that it hasn't realized its promise of benefit to all. In fact the conduct of Google and Facebook has shown everybody, tech or not, that there is a downside, That these companies are business as usual in the sense of malfeisance and greed that typifies more traditional industries, that hiring lots of smart people does not mean a better service. Indeed, in the case of these two companies, it indicates an advesarial relationship to the public at large. So every bit of manipulation, of spying, or effort to deceive that happens undermines the vaunted status of tech, of computer scientists, or software engineers. Ordinary people are less inclined to give tech workers the benefit of the doubt and put up with the downside.
Man, you guys are trying so hard to rationalize this all away. Can it be that you are like the french Noble Class just before the Terror? They never knew what hit them when the revolutionary councils threw them in prison and started lopping off their heads. It is time to come out of your Glass Houses and look at things from the point of view of people who aren't in your elite. You are elitists, you have entitlement, just like the great pride before a fall. Reacting conservatively are spending money on The tea Parties won't save you either, if people who think that you are stealing from them come after you.
So now we know what that 'Mission Accomplished' banner really was about.
Good one, it was that George W. Bush would get to help the banks and financial institutions rob the American Middle Class of equity and destroy the American Dream. Of course the war he was gloating about is still going on and it is a losing proposition that the US. will not win. Leadership is al about good timing and the kind of leaders we create in this country are notoriously bad at it, and the current President is even worse at timing than the last.
But Bush was a Carpetbagger, a Wall Street Republican transplanted to Texas, complete with fake Southern accent, born in New England, and like that part of the U.S. chock full of NYC financial types with New haven as a satellite, merely. He was all about money, making his benefactors who fund the Republican Party still more rich and promoting the interests of elites. BTW lots of those elites are techies. The importance of Liberarian stupidity in Silicon Valley is testament to that. The number of crack pot engineers and business men is classic. People who are spoiled and always will be, people who think themselves superior to everyone else.
You totally miss the point. The real estate market appeals blindly to the biggest profit, forgetting about all other things of value, and the companies want to locate in the Bay Area even if there isn't affordable housing. It is the combination of selfish motives that causes this, not government regulation. You just want the society to write blank checks to elites, and not have decisions made selfishly suffer the consequences. The protests are a sign that their becomes a price to pay, even if it is in the wrath of the Great Unwashed. Come to grips with that silver spoon in your mouth and face the fact that people can cause consequences to selfish behavior. So the companies have to pay a surtax to attract people to come into the outrageously inflated Bay Area housing market, but they also have to pay for the backlash against the unseen hand of supply and demand, too bad!. If profit motive is the blanket justification for business behavior, a reaction to it is justification for disruption of business as usual.