There is still some debate among geologists about which was worse in the K/T extinction event, the asteroid impact or the Deccan Traps flood basalt eruptions. In the case of the Paleozoic/Mesozoic extinction event, which was more severe, it was the Siberian Traps flood basalt eruptions that probably caused that extinction event. A super-caldera fed by a mantle hot spot, Yellowstone, can affect the entire landmass to its east. We know that because the last time the magma chamber was unroofed, some 650,000 years ago, a layer of ash can be correlated all the way to the east coast. Volcanic events of much smaller size are tied in the historical record with global cooling events, time over time. The last large such event was in 1815 in Iceland and the following year was the Year with no Summer, 1816.
Mankind went through a population bottleneck 70,000 years ago due to a supervolcano in Indonesia. Human population collapsed to a few thousand as a result of the global cooling and collapse of the food supply. We aren't talking about the primary blast and pyrroclastic effects here, but the secondary high atmospheric contamination.
A caldera collapse at Yellowstone would directly affect a large area, as is visible in the piles of ash around that 50 mile wide caldera today,
and the airborne ash would affect all of the U.S. and the populated areas of Canada east of it. That ash fall has been found in the record from the last event of 650,000 years ago. A big area around Yellowstone in Montana, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and probably Colorado would be destroyed and not unlike what happened at Mt. St. Helens, but several times the area, directly buried in hot ash falls, and a thick layer of ash fall up to several meters thick. Further away the ash fall is less, but even a couple of inches of ash can be very disruptive. The number of buildings that collapse just because they are not designed to carry ash up to several hundreds of miles away, alone would be a national emergency. I don't think that most of you have the slightest idea of how bad this event could be.
I'm not a real fan of Rap either, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have its place or that it sin't high art in some way. When it first appeared I thought that sometimes it was quite poetic, even with all the dialect and swearing, and like any art form that is current, most of it is pretty hum drum,
What caught my eye is that the application that got Rap Genius in trouble was a linguistics application. I wonder, really, what arm twisting Google was able to do to get Rap Genius to change what it was doing. I don't trust Google anymore, so it must be some kind of Travestry.
Re: "Senseless Death?"
on
Losing Aaron
·
· Score: 1
I am going to disagree with you on both counts. Technology has eliminated or degraded employment for many more people than it benefitted since 1990 or so. The inequalities are far greater and getting dangerous to the haves as the have-nots wise up to the source of the inequality and lack of opportunity for them, so creating elites is a bad thing. I did not put "talanted" in there since I think that doing engineering doesn't take much talent only preserverence, and the effort may be judged to have been misplaced, I am thinking of social media when I call it misplaced.
I offer the frenzy of tech companies trying to associate themselves with charities in Silicon Valley, help the homeless, help the hungry, at a fraction of the cost it would take to solve those problems.
As for spiritual milaise, I offer the profit motive and along with it the consumer society. Even the homeless in this country have it much better than the poor elsewhere, and what you have in life is pretty subjective. I think there are many many people who have quite a bit materially who are lost in this culture of shallow consumerism, every time one of those power mongers posts here about the inviolate rule of the profit motive in decisions, he is speaking of his own hole in the heart and his lack of imagination. There are many more reasons to do things, on your own even, than business pragmatism. I dare say that the level of unhappiness and violence is intimately linked to those same values for aggression unleashed is very destructive and appearantly there isn't enough oppportunity to be created by investors and businesses to soak up all that energy. I am lucky, very lucky, I am retired, and don't have lots of money, but I am rich beyond all compare for having several passions in life that were discouraged by others because they weren't directly profitable, and I have risen above pragmatism and am spiritually alive, unlike many people who are more "successful".
Does this means that Computer Scientists nail their Thesis on the Door? Maybe lisp is talking in tongues, or maybe that is perl with regular expressions. There are many other AWK-ward metaphors. And what about the serpent? Maybe it was python in the garden of Eden, and the devil, Microsoft and Bill Gates, stole the idea of the shell is called it DOS-shell, a stolen and corrupt version of the Bourne Shell.
Let's see, what if the CDC denied the flu shot to those people who said that evolution is false. Then we would know in a few generations if they were right or not; no, the belief itself is not inherited, but the meme that supports the belief might be contagious. There ought to be fewer people who believe evolution doesn't happen because the rapidly evolving flu viris should kill them off at a differential rate.
The other thing that is far easy to do is to eliminate some areas of the country where evangelical Protestantism is more common from the sttistics. That would seem to introduce a bias or a correlated fact connected with belief. For example, just eliminating the Old South from the study might reveal much different statistics, Similarly removing Southern Baptists might have a similar effect on the data. I thought that earlier versions of this sort of study came up with a
higher percentage of Americans saying that they didn't believe in evolution, say 30 years ago, than now. That is progress.
Creationism is a ruse. It is a rhetorical position and like any such argument it is designed to substitute a strategic point of view to defend a weak permise. In this case belief that God created the static universe depicted in Genesis defends the weak permise that authority of The Word is an absolute and defendable. The term used by these bigots is "inerrancy in Scripture" and it comes from the preliterate belief that written words are exactly what they are said to mean and not crude approximations to fact. The world's religions are rooted in a time when most people did not read and had an almost magical belief in the wisdom of people who could read. Now, we know that words can easily be twisted and that semantics and meaning can change over time and be manipulated, something not accepted through out much of the history of the Bible from Rabbinic times up to past the beginning of the Reformation. Some parts of America were settled by refugees from Europe at a time before this distinction was widely accepted in the 17th Century, and these people are relics of the earlier way of thinking. They have been sheltered from the outside world by their own imposed isolation and by living in rural and isolated parts of what had been a sparcely populated nation. Now, they are being exposed.
Actually the apparent medical ethics case playing out right now in Oakland Ca. might have something to do with this. A 13 year old girl is still on a ventilator two weeks after a surgury caused cardiac arrest and "brain death" meaning that there is no electrical activity in her brain. According to Children's Hospital and a couple of neurologists the girl is deceased, yet her family insists that she is still alive and that a miracle could occur to revive her, and retained a lawyer to fight to keep her on life support and even transfer her to a sub-acute care facility. The hospital insists that the girl has died and that she has no more chance of being revived as does a corpse that is being maintained to be used for organ transplant. The experience of being alive resides in the neural activity of the brain. The outspoken mother believes that because her child is warm and still has a heart beat she is still alive and is a person. Her belief is reinforced by a faith-based community she is part of, probably faith-healing, probably evangelical. I have no issue with the anguish the mother and family feels, the whole thing is tragic and possibly criminal if a routine operation went bad due to carelessness, but the case reveals the pitfalls of ignorance of science and resulting magical thinking. The hospital cannot yield on the science that brain death is death for it would destroy organ donation practice, but the unfounded beliefs of the mother are like the belief in Creationism. It would not surprise me at all of the group that his been supporting her also believes in Creationism or that evolution is false.
You can begin by resensitize yourself to advertising fallacies. It turns out that the greatest source of deception is business, and that dulls our razor to cut through other forms of bull-shit. The specialized cable news channels with their propaganda are only an outgrowth of the numbing effect of advertising from mass media on the watchdog of the mind.
Yes, and go back to reading books, or wading through detailed print works on-line. The reason is that with print you have time to think and process ideas and there is space to follow details. Mass media is sometimes intended to prevent you from taking the time to think. You must take the time away from the flow of information, whether you trust it or not, to think about it, and then you can begin to find out why you might trust it or not.
People in business have no obligation to help you develop critical thinking skills, in fact that may be what they want to diminish so that you will be subject to subliminal messages and impulsive behavior. They are under no real obligation to respect your dignity and human rights or to promote democratic institutions, either, dispite the confusion of Capitalism with free institutions, the two are not the same. To be a useful citizen in democratic institution you must have the means to critically think and analyse the choices before you, and unless you wish to practice your freedom on a desert island or far away from others in the wilderness, you have some amount of obligation to decide matters with the welfare of others in mind. Selfishness is not a sufficient guiding motive in a democracy or in society in general.
The lack of critical thinking when it comes to the mass media goes far beyond political distinctions. It has to do with what is information an what is propaganda or public relations, the two are really the same, and whereas your antennae might be attuned to the different propaganda in political memes, caught up in the liberal and conservative false dichotomy, you may miss the conflating of news with promotion that is rampet in news media.
One thing social media has done is to increase the confusion, not only is that the obvious problem of a lie that has legs, a hoax, but the fact that journalists are getting lazy and using social media as a source when it has no rights to be a source. This is the larger problem of charity promotions being injected as news items, which is now happening all the time, and with it the cat-video trend of low hanging fruit items getting time on the local and national news coverage because they are easy. They are used as a lead on to promotions as well. I think there is big money behind this and the source is corporate motivated by the 1%ers who want the positive publicity to show that they care about the millions their greed has displaced from the economy. So every firm in Silicon Valley gets to promote its efforts to help the homeless and feed the starving that its technology is creating and to do so for pennies on the dollar of the cost it would reallt take to fix these issues.
All of these would be effectively dealt with by going back and learning how lies are made and why we might forget to notice them, and to rediscover that we have the means to.
With all the heat here, and little light, on two separate issues, the risks of the government procurement process, and how law, most law, subsidizes private business and always had, a problem emerges. The privileged position of business special interests is a big historical problem for the U.S. System, and the Right Winger's here running simple interference on the rights of individuals vs. government, are not as forth coming when it comes to business subsidized by government whether it is a contract or the granting of a charter, as to the railroad lands, or aircraft landing rights, or mineral rights in the national commonwealth. There is huge interplay between private economic interest and public policy, and it is business who has greater access to the Congress and for whom Congress passes most of its legislation than do the people. So the Right Wingers here are also the same people who say here over and over again that decisions always boil down to business profitability and they argue here as though there was never any other standard of value.
And so Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act is basically a subsidy to the insurance industry, and does not address the cost side of the health care industry. I see no effort to hold the fees changed by hospitals, clinics, and doctors up to scrutiny, and although the law says that insurers cannot under the law discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, there is no assurance that premiums charged with be affordable. The activity in the exchanges is revealing that the demographic problem that started the cost escalation, young people not buying insurance and spreading the risk for insurers, is not being solved by the mandate in the law. There is a good chance that the law is based on an economic structure that was failing and will continue to fail and that people once more will not be able to get adequate health care. The result is inevatable, either we let people get sick more and die, or we provide socialized medicine in a two tier system in which we have the current system but we do things in the public health sphere and the subsidized medical sector to serve the majority who will become underserved by the current economic model. In a way, this mirrors the more general economic disadvantages emerging in the economy and could be the touchstone for a social revolution in which the selfish Right Wingers, like many of the people who post here will become targets of some sort,
The disadantages of the economy, the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer and the decline of spending power, job security, for the vast majority of people in the U.S. are having and will continue to have a negative impact on the nation as long as the underlying causes aren't addressed in economic and public policy, and in which the political rhetoric does not create a dialogue and solutions. I blame the cost of energy, the peak of oil, but also the digital revolution for this imbalance. The rise of elites who behave selfishly and act as conservatives have reason to spoil the discussion, as I think that some of them are paid by public relations companies paid for by Republican and Tea Party super PACS to cruise the internet and troll against conversation that may generate solutions and make misleading and simplistic conundrums about individual vs. government, when the real issue is what are the responsibility of being a member of society instead of going to live as a selfish hermit in the wilderness, a rapidly diminishing wilderness at that. There are fewer and fewer places to run and hide and techies, who may be antisocial and avoidant to start with, have a problem if the future is that they have to live with a much higher population density and learn to cope with other people's problems in a compassionate and cooperative way. The Luxery of Rugged Individualism and avoident selfishness, a loaner's mentality, may do for the mountians of Colorado or Alaska, but more and more of us live in cities. This is the lesson of the Gun Control Debate, that an idiot with a firearm in the city is far more dangerous than the same idiot in the wildlands, The standards for living in a city are different from going off by yourself in the country.
I have been hoping for a big tablet for a long time. As a visually impaired person I'd like very much to put sheet music on one that I could hope to see and read at the piano, and to read orchestra scores anywhere. Music poses some challenges that text does not, to read and play at any speed, or to follow a performance required that scrolling the document not get in the way, although that is not a problem for any tablet that properly support gestures, size is. So, I am looking forward to big tablets and hopefully not just in a student's desk, either.
Maybe because i DIDN'T see it in Applications was why I immediately thought to open a terminal and do either 'which python' or 'ls/usr/bin/python', or even just 'python'. I've have had Mac OS X systems in the past but at heart I am an old UNIX guy running Linux right now. Thanks. My son would have had to install Idle as an applications bundle and then he would see it in the Applications folder even though a usable python interpeter is already there in/usr/bin.
Make text-only USENET groups available for free on the web! What is old is new again, and a decent answer to social media. C'mon you venture capitalists. Are you afraid to have a debate?
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.
But of course we all know that adoption of standards is shaped by businesses trying to create captive markets. A very good example is Google Docs. That is a dumbed down environment that supports no widely used standards and is no more sophisticated than Word 2000. The web tools is particular are very like Front Page 2000, in fact I think that some old Grey Beard form Microsoft of that vintage designed it.
That is because the blog is bad for any extended or complex conversation. It should be killed off as a medium, or replaced with more complex conversation formats and tools.
Blogging is a failure for a conversation with any complexity at all. The inefficiency cited here is due to the requirement that you have to read every post and try not to be destracted. There is no structure other than the chronological order or some other single sorting criterion. All the social media varaitions suffer the same flaw because Google Analytics and other data mining applications do not work well with another than the text array that comes from a javascript textarea, nothing more complex.
This cripples communication between people. The lack of context and topic drift or hijacking annoys people and colors their perception of one another. It is one of the factors for why social media can be so dangerous to relationships, but because of the business model and the technology cost limitations it is not going to change at the will of the social media corporations, They are going to keep it as it is until people realize how the technology hurts them and they decide to stop using social media.
The alternative is to improve the complexity in the conversation beyond what the blog allows. The odd thing is that this was solved long ago before the GUI and the Web were important, in the old days of glass TTYs and e-mail. Your average mail UI had all the tools needed to give a conversation the needed structure. Add the USENET after 1985 and you have the other ingredient, the topic thread and the means in the message header to store metadata on the message. The USENET newsreader, even old rn(1) of about 1988, had much better features for organizing communication than any social media interface ever offered. And the really telling thing is that Google got the archive of those text newsgroups and undid all that complexity to allow for marketers to spy on you. There was no advertising allowed in the ARPANET and earliest Internet, that was the original meaning of spam, and if Google's motto is "Do No Evil" I'd say that is a shadowed sentiment that Google is all about doing evil as is Facebook, as is most other social media.
An answer to the social media would be to bring back USENET style communication in a web interface with all the compleity of the newsgroups, restrict it to text and links, and make it highly regional with some latent interconnects between servers, and make the heirarchy topical, not social. The reason the USENET is served for a fee is so the providers can make a profit vending binary traffic, which is the bulk of their volume, that is not legal or suitable for many people, especially children. If you do not allow any of that, you get text only discussion groups, you can restore something of value to the nation other than flash-in-the-pan social media faddism, and you might provide a means to actually solve some important problems.
Some of this happens right now on Slashdot, which is why I am here and not on social media. But Slashdot had the flaw that like a web site with a blog, the owner or an editorial board controls what topics get notice. On the USENET the hiererarchy is topical and that is what works best for regional or national discussion and debate.
Ironically, Facebook has the germ of wide-spread discussion, but it is the wrong way around. Were it easier to allow for topic change to create new pages and there was a better mechanism that page creation and likes to link topics together, Facebook would have more like a discussion hiererarchy, but I doubt that Facebook would ever go so far. They experimented briefly with reply quoting, a feature that would help with context management and replying directly to another comment, but they suddenly abandoned it. I think that the reason is that their data mining applications couldn't deal with that added complexity.
Context and threading is a tool for dealing with abuse, such as trolling, or other abuse, because with a sub-thread and context quoting you can take abuse to task directly and you can shunt it off into a junkable thread where it belongs. The other metadata it is possible to create about a messag
Hell, If I was teaching Web Design, I'd make the students code the HTML, CSS, and scripting by hand. Using a templating environment is fine for the small business person who hasn't the time to learn the nuts and bolts, but if that is going to be your profession, I'd make you code by hand and you'd do it from the command-line. Go look at Koding. That gives you a virtualized Linux, a command tool and a web server and browser.
Well put. And why does the conversation lead to the profitability of some business? Who cares? If Social Media is a Marketing tool and what people use it for is incidental for marketers to spy on them as the business model for the corporations, Google, Facebook, etc. etc. in the business. then why should we care that that business model succeeds? I argue that it would be good for it to fail and the lot of them to go out of business. The reason is that to get that Big data application they have crippled communication and stiefled conversation in favor of shallow ephemera and fads. And I hardly care that marketers need fads, what they need is push back and criticism and to be challenged for being stupid and fallaceous, so does the whole industry.
Nothing will discredit tech more than this, because when the 80% of people see that their livelihoods have been threatened by a digital revolution whose visibility to them is fraud by banks allowed to speculate in markets, and marketing fraud in social media, they will begin to doubt the idea that tech was meant to benefit everyone, and they will begin to seek restrictions on the applications computers are being used for. If they will simply not use or will boycott abusive technology or seek direct remedies in the courts against companies, I do not know, but I think that the reputations of tech companies and tech people is now tarnished in a way that we have never seen before.
" If you really think your kid has a harmful addiction, you should really do something about it."
Indeed. Join Facebook yourself with your wife and granny and peepaw an mimmy and gramps and befriend the brat.
Post annoying and embarrassing messages and pictures when they were kids throughout the day.
They'll fall over each other to leave FB posthaste.
Just saw a link from Gizmoto to a study in Europe that claimed this was exactly what was happending, kids are moving to other social media sites that are "cooler".
Moderation requires manpower. Nobody in their right mind volunteers to moderate comments for for-profit businesses, so they have to pay moderators. Which they don't want to do.
Which means either you get spam, flames and shitposting, or forced registration/real id.
But business models fail all the time, because customers get turned off, So if you goal is to learn somebody's preferences to target advertising at then, if something that happens on your site hurts them and they don't come back, you lose.
People have a way of spoiling the best laid business plans of CEO's and VC's. You still lose.
Because they are blogs. Blog streams cannot be managed the way USENET Newsgroups and mail archives could. Since there is not contest quoting, offenders can't be taken to task directly, The reason for the shift in attitude is CYA in a situation where Social Media companies do not want to give up the simple text block format of a blog post because it is so cheap to mine for keywords. Moderation would actually require much more structure to posts that would make automatic classification easier. This would include thread and sub-thread information, topic lines, character or word count. quote percentage, and other data, such as reader ratings. Some things that are here on Slashdot.
Google got the deJaVuous USENET archive in about 2004, and turned right around and ignored its moderation features. Facebook and its ilk, routinely ire users because the strictly lineal structure of conversations there does not allow for any context at all, and no real way to avoid and answer trolls. Trolls have always been a problem, but a good pointed response to one tends to diminish their effect. So outing people is the only tool a blog manager has against abuse, and it doesn't really solve the problem which is to allow for threads and to help people pick and choose which threads they want to read or not, and then respond to other's comments directly, which means to quote them.
One separate problem is that social media sites and blogs set the agenda for each discussion by setting its topic. Real people like to change topics, and to some extant they should be allowed to. This is very clumsy on Facebook and not really allowed on other blogs. In fact topic drift and topic hyjacking are reasons people get attacked on otherwise civil conversations because blogging doesn't handle this well. The other thing that is missing is a topic heirarchy, like USENET mewsgroups. That could be introduced to replace or augment social media, and since the large social media sites want a global reach that isn't really necessary for the way topics develop, a regional approach to most discussions would work.
I know the USENET still exists, but you pay for it everywhere because of the media files and porn on it. A text only USENET could easily be done on a regional scale for text only groups, only text and links allowed, and no ads and no multimedia. It could be free with a good web-based reader that has a good editor and good navigation tools. In the interest of free speech not controlled by the social media companies and not dominated by advertizing, it could be made for free.
I think it is important to bring back the USENET style discussion board with good filtering and moderation tools for the sake of civic discussions, political and social debate, problem solving and collaborative writings, remember the FAQ files of the USENET, as if the future of democracy in the world depends on it. It may not even be necessary to have the Big Data backends of the social media companies, or instant propagation of the messages, just like in the old days of NNTP servers, but if it is done right it could be redone on a small scale and for cheap. Really, all it needs is a good web interface, one much better than Google Groups, which is a joke.
java would do as an alternative also. not quite sure why it's gone out of fashion.
Because Sun blew the design of the class libraries. The language and its APIs are too expensive to learn and manage,
and the JRE requires too much processor specific tuning to run effectively everywhere, so the language, Java, sucks for clean development, it is security through obfescation, and dicy performance in many places.
Sun sold it to the corporate glass houses because it was clunky and hard to learn. If you don't believe me, look at acm.jar, the alternative interface for the top level cousole. That archive appeared at the instant java went opensource and with good reason. Sun had intended to make java an elitist language. This is not to say that many people didn't master it in the time froma 1995-2005, but it quickly fell out of favor. I think I know why.
I get your point, but it is all about expectations and selfishness. China is clearly a place of Haves and Have Nots, and the gap between then is far greater than in the U.S., even Americans below the poverty line have more than even the average Chinese, or as much. But the Chinese have lower expectations for one another. The nation could do OK with the disparities, with only a tiny elite getting most of the rewards to the economic and social system.
America suffers from the opposite problem. It has advertised that it is more egalitarian than other nations and that there is more opportunity, when its fortunes run counter to that. It has more to lose on the level of expectations, especially if there is a meme shift in the bottom of the income curve, that the opportunities have ended and that the top is an exclusive oligarchy, which by the way is not that different from China now. But it is the expectations that are reversed. Americans still believe that it is easy to achieve the goal of being on a par with one another in a fair economic and political system, whether or not that is still true. I dare say that the average Chinese might believe that he fortunes will go up as prosperity trickles down to him. We shall see on both accounts.
Don't count America out and China in, necessarily. There are cultural differences that oppose the trends. America is still, for all its disparities, a much less conformist culture than China, capable of grater innovation. That may give the Chinese more patience to let their economic fortunes improve, but it puts China at a disadvantage like that of Japan before WW II if the competition between the two nations becomes serious. The worst thing that could happen to China is political and economic isolation. It would not be able to compete technically with Europe and America if it became isolated. Even the USSR couldn't keep up, and it had more hightly trained people per capita than the U.S. but less ability to execute business plans, which is why it failed. It is a good thing that China and the U.S. have the current economic relationship, but we all need to be aware of where it works and where it doesn't, and to help one another if we can.
Slashdot Mirror
There is still some debate among geologists about which was worse in the K/T extinction event, the asteroid impact or the Deccan Traps flood basalt eruptions. In the case of the Paleozoic/Mesozoic extinction event, which was more severe, it was the Siberian Traps flood basalt eruptions that probably caused that extinction event. A super-caldera fed by a mantle hot spot, Yellowstone, can affect the entire landmass to its east. We know that because the last time the magma chamber was unroofed, some 650,000 years ago, a layer of ash can be correlated all the way to the east coast. Volcanic events of much smaller size are tied in the historical record with global cooling events, time over time. The last large such event was in 1815 in Iceland and the following year was the Year with no Summer, 1816.
Mankind went through a population bottleneck 70,000 years ago due to a supervolcano in Indonesia. Human population collapsed to a few thousand as a result of the global cooling and collapse of the food supply. We aren't talking about the primary blast and pyrroclastic effects here, but the secondary high atmospheric contamination.
A caldera collapse at Yellowstone would directly affect a large area, as is visible in the piles of ash around that 50 mile wide caldera today, and the airborne ash would affect all of the U.S. and the populated areas of Canada east of it. That ash fall has been found in the record from the last event of 650,000 years ago. A big area around Yellowstone in Montana, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and probably Colorado would be destroyed and not unlike what happened at Mt. St. Helens, but several times the area, directly buried in hot ash falls, and a thick layer of ash fall up to several meters thick. Further away the ash fall is less, but even a couple of inches of ash can be very disruptive. The number of buildings that collapse just because they are not designed to carry ash up to several hundreds of miles away, alone would be a national emergency. I don't think that most of you have the slightest idea of how bad this event could be.
Ay, Fidelio, you are a seingspiel!
I'm not a real fan of Rap either, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have its place or that it sin't high art in some way. When it first appeared I thought that sometimes it was quite poetic, even with all the dialect and swearing, and like any art form that is current, most of it is pretty hum drum,
What caught my eye is that the application that got Rap Genius in trouble was a linguistics application. I wonder, really, what arm twisting Google was able to do to get Rap Genius to change what it was doing. I don't trust Google anymore, so it must be some kind of Travestry.
Brave words for an AC.
I am going to disagree with you on both counts. Technology has eliminated or degraded employment for many more people than it benefitted since 1990 or so. The inequalities are far greater and getting dangerous to the haves as the have-nots wise up to the source of the inequality and lack of opportunity for them, so creating elites is a bad thing. I did not put "talanted" in there since I think that doing engineering doesn't take much talent only preserverence, and the effort may be judged to have been misplaced, I am thinking of social media when I call it misplaced.
I offer the frenzy of tech companies trying to associate themselves with charities in Silicon Valley, help the homeless, help the hungry, at a fraction of the cost it would take to solve those problems.
As for spiritual milaise, I offer the profit motive and along with it the consumer society. Even the homeless in this country have it much better than the poor elsewhere, and what you have in life is pretty subjective. I think there are many many people who have quite a bit materially who are lost in this culture of shallow consumerism, every time one of those power mongers posts here about the inviolate rule of the profit motive in decisions, he is speaking of his own hole in the heart and his lack of imagination. There are many more reasons to do things, on your own even, than business pragmatism. I dare say that the level of unhappiness and violence is intimately linked to those same values for aggression unleashed is very destructive and appearantly there isn't enough oppportunity to be created by investors and businesses to soak up all that energy. I am lucky, very lucky, I am retired, and don't have lots of money, but I am rich beyond all compare for having several passions in life that were discouraged by others because they weren't directly profitable, and I have risen above pragmatism and am spiritually alive, unlike many people who are more "successful".
I like, "Researches using Hubble Telescope confirm THAT exoplanet has clouds"
Does this means that Computer Scientists nail their Thesis on the Door? Maybe lisp is talking in tongues, or maybe that is perl with regular expressions. There are many other AWK-ward metaphors. And what about the serpent? Maybe it was python in the garden of Eden, and the devil, Microsoft and Bill Gates, stole the idea of the shell is called it DOS-shell, a stolen and corrupt version of the Bourne Shell.
Let's see, what if the CDC denied the flu shot to those people who said that evolution is false. Then we would know in a few generations if they were right or not; no, the belief itself is not inherited, but the meme that supports the belief might be contagious. There ought to be fewer people who believe evolution doesn't happen because the rapidly evolving flu viris should kill them off at a differential rate.
The other thing that is far easy to do is to eliminate some areas of the country where evangelical Protestantism is more common from the sttistics. That would seem to introduce a bias or a correlated fact connected with belief. For example, just eliminating the Old South from the study might reveal much different statistics, Similarly removing Southern Baptists might have a similar effect on the data. I thought that earlier versions of this sort of study came up with a higher percentage of Americans saying that they didn't believe in evolution, say 30 years ago, than now. That is progress.
Creationism is a ruse. It is a rhetorical position and like any such argument it is designed to substitute a strategic point of view to defend a weak permise. In this case belief that God created the static universe depicted in Genesis defends the weak permise that authority of The Word is an absolute and defendable. The term used by these bigots is "inerrancy in Scripture" and it comes from the preliterate belief that written words are exactly what they are said to mean and not crude approximations to fact. The world's religions are rooted in a time when most people did not read and had an almost magical belief in the wisdom of people who could read. Now, we know that words can easily be twisted and that semantics and meaning can change over time and be manipulated, something not accepted through out much of the history of the Bible from Rabbinic times up to past the beginning of the Reformation. Some parts of America were settled by refugees from Europe at a time before this distinction was widely accepted in the 17th Century, and these people are relics of the earlier way of thinking. They have been sheltered from the outside world by their own imposed isolation and by living in rural and isolated parts of what had been a sparcely populated nation. Now, they are being exposed.
Actually the apparent medical ethics case playing out right now in Oakland Ca. might have something to do with this. A 13 year old girl is still on a ventilator two weeks after a surgury caused cardiac arrest and "brain death" meaning that there is no electrical activity in her brain. According to Children's Hospital and a couple of neurologists the girl is deceased, yet her family insists that she is still alive and that a miracle could occur to revive her, and retained a lawyer to fight to keep her on life support and even transfer her to a sub-acute care facility. The hospital insists that the girl has died and that she has no more chance of being revived as does a corpse that is being maintained to be used for organ transplant. The experience of being alive resides in the neural activity of the brain. The outspoken mother believes that because her child is warm and still has a heart beat she is still alive and is a person. Her belief is reinforced by a faith-based community she is part of, probably faith-healing, probably evangelical. I have no issue with the anguish the mother and family feels, the whole thing is tragic and possibly criminal if a routine operation went bad due to carelessness, but the case reveals the pitfalls of ignorance of science and resulting magical thinking. The hospital cannot yield on the science that brain death is death for it would destroy organ donation practice, but the unfounded beliefs of the mother are like the belief in Creationism. It would not surprise me at all of the group that his been supporting her also believes in Creationism or that evolution is false.
You can begin by resensitize yourself to advertising fallacies. It turns out that the greatest source of deception is business, and that dulls our razor to cut through other forms of bull-shit. The specialized cable news channels with their propaganda are only an outgrowth of the numbing effect of advertising from mass media on the watchdog of the mind.
Yes, and go back to reading books, or wading through detailed print works on-line. The reason is that with print you have time to think and process ideas and there is space to follow details. Mass media is sometimes intended to prevent you from taking the time to think. You must take the time away from the flow of information, whether you trust it or not, to think about it, and then you can begin to find out why you might trust it or not.
People in business have no obligation to help you develop critical thinking skills, in fact that may be what they want to diminish so that you will be subject to subliminal messages and impulsive behavior. They are under no real obligation to respect your dignity and human rights or to promote democratic institutions, either, dispite the confusion of Capitalism with free institutions, the two are not the same. To be a useful citizen in democratic institution you must have the means to critically think and analyse the choices before you, and unless you wish to practice your freedom on a desert island or far away from others in the wilderness, you have some amount of obligation to decide matters with the welfare of others in mind. Selfishness is not a sufficient guiding motive in a democracy or in society in general.
The lack of critical thinking when it comes to the mass media goes far beyond political distinctions. It has to do with what is information an what is propaganda or public relations, the two are really the same, and whereas your antennae might be attuned to the different propaganda in political memes, caught up in the liberal and conservative false dichotomy, you may miss the conflating of news with promotion that is rampet in news media.
One thing social media has done is to increase the confusion, not only is that the obvious problem of a lie that has legs, a hoax, but the fact that journalists are getting lazy and using social media as a source when it has no rights to be a source. This is the larger problem of charity promotions being injected as news items, which is now happening all the time, and with it the cat-video trend of low hanging fruit items getting time on the local and national news coverage because they are easy. They are used as a lead on to promotions as well. I think there is big money behind this and the source is corporate motivated by the 1%ers who want the positive publicity to show that they care about the millions their greed has displaced from the economy. So every firm in Silicon Valley gets to promote its efforts to help the homeless and feed the starving that its technology is creating and to do so for pennies on the dollar of the cost it would reallt take to fix these issues.
All of these would be effectively dealt with by going back and learning how lies are made and why we might forget to notice them, and to rediscover that we have the means to.
With all the heat here, and little light, on two separate issues, the risks of the government procurement process, and how law, most law, subsidizes private business and always had, a problem emerges. The privileged position of business special interests is a big historical problem for the U.S. System, and the Right Winger's here running simple interference on the rights of individuals vs. government, are not as forth coming when it comes to business subsidized by government whether it is a contract or the granting of a charter, as to the railroad lands, or aircraft landing rights, or mineral rights in the national commonwealth. There is huge interplay between private economic interest and public policy, and it is business who has greater access to the Congress and for whom Congress passes most of its legislation than do the people. So the Right Wingers here are also the same people who say here over and over again that decisions always boil down to business profitability and they argue here as though there was never any other standard of value.
And so Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act is basically a subsidy to the insurance industry, and does not address the cost side of the health care industry. I see no effort to hold the fees changed by hospitals, clinics, and doctors up to scrutiny, and although the law says that insurers cannot under the law discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, there is no assurance that premiums charged with be affordable. The activity in the exchanges is revealing that the demographic problem that started the cost escalation, young people not buying insurance and spreading the risk for insurers, is not being solved by the mandate in the law. There is a good chance that the law is based on an economic structure that was failing and will continue to fail and that people once more will not be able to get adequate health care. The result is inevatable, either we let people get sick more and die, or we provide socialized medicine in a two tier system in which we have the current system but we do things in the public health sphere and the subsidized medical sector to serve the majority who will become underserved by the current economic model. In a way, this mirrors the more general economic disadvantages emerging in the economy and could be the touchstone for a social revolution in which the selfish Right Wingers, like many of the people who post here will become targets of some sort,
The disadantages of the economy, the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer and the decline of spending power, job security, for the vast majority of people in the U.S. are having and will continue to have a negative impact on the nation as long as the underlying causes aren't addressed in economic and public policy, and in which the political rhetoric does not create a dialogue and solutions. I blame the cost of energy, the peak of oil, but also the digital revolution for this imbalance. The rise of elites who behave selfishly and act as conservatives have reason to spoil the discussion, as I think that some of them are paid by public relations companies paid for by Republican and Tea Party super PACS to cruise the internet and troll against conversation that may generate solutions and make misleading and simplistic conundrums about individual vs. government, when the real issue is what are the responsibility of being a member of society instead of going to live as a selfish hermit in the wilderness, a rapidly diminishing wilderness at that. There are fewer and fewer places to run and hide and techies, who may be antisocial and avoidant to start with, have a problem if the future is that they have to live with a much higher population density and learn to cope with other people's problems in a compassionate and cooperative way. The Luxery of Rugged Individualism and avoident selfishness, a loaner's mentality, may do for the mountians of Colorado or Alaska, but more and more of us live in cities. This is the lesson of the Gun Control Debate, that an idiot with a firearm in the city is far more dangerous than the same idiot in the wildlands, The standards for living in a city are different from going off by yourself in the country.
So, Mr., Paid for by GOP and Tea Party, PR company to troll these groups, come out like a man and identify yourself.
I have been hoping for a big tablet for a long time. As a visually impaired person I'd like very much to put sheet music on one that I could hope to see and read at the piano, and to read orchestra scores anywhere. Music poses some challenges that text does not, to read and play at any speed, or to follow a performance required that scrolling the document not get in the way, although that is not a problem for any tablet that properly support gestures, size is. So, I am looking forward to big tablets and hopefully not just in a student's desk, either.
Maybe because i DIDN'T see it in Applications was why I immediately thought to open a terminal and do either 'which python' or 'ls /usr/bin/python', or even just 'python'. I've have had Mac OS X systems in the past but at heart I am an old UNIX guy running Linux right now. Thanks. My son would have had to install Idle as an applications bundle and then he would see it in the Applications folder even though a usable python interpeter is already there in /usr/bin.
Make text-only USENET groups available for free on the web! What is old is new again, and a decent answer to social media. C'mon you venture capitalists. Are you afraid to have a debate?
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.
But of course we all know that adoption of standards is shaped by businesses trying to create captive markets. A very good example is Google Docs. That is a dumbed down environment that supports no widely used standards and is no more sophisticated than Word 2000. The web tools is particular are very like Front Page 2000, in fact I think that some old Grey Beard form Microsoft of that vintage designed it.
That is because the blog is bad for any extended or complex conversation. It should be killed off as a medium, or replaced with more complex conversation formats and tools.
Blogging is a failure for a conversation with any complexity at all. The inefficiency cited here is due to the requirement that you have to read every post and try not to be destracted. There is no structure other than the chronological order or some other single sorting criterion. All the social media varaitions suffer the same flaw because Google Analytics and other data mining applications do not work well with another than the text array that comes from a javascript textarea, nothing more complex.
This cripples communication between people. The lack of context and topic drift or hijacking annoys people and colors their perception of one another. It is one of the factors for why social media can be so dangerous to relationships, but because of the business model and the technology cost limitations it is not going to change at the will of the social media corporations, They are going to keep it as it is until people realize how the technology hurts them and they decide to stop using social media.
The alternative is to improve the complexity in the conversation beyond what the blog allows. The odd thing is that this was solved long ago before the GUI and the Web were important, in the old days of glass TTYs and e-mail. Your average mail UI had all the tools needed to give a conversation the needed structure. Add the USENET after 1985 and you have the other ingredient, the topic thread and the means in the message header to store metadata on the message. The USENET newsreader, even old rn(1) of about 1988, had much better features for organizing communication than any social media interface ever offered. And the really telling thing is that Google got the archive of those text newsgroups and undid all that complexity to allow for marketers to spy on you. There was no advertising allowed in the ARPANET and earliest Internet, that was the original meaning of spam, and if Google's motto is "Do No Evil" I'd say that is a shadowed sentiment that Google is all about doing evil as is Facebook, as is most other social media.
An answer to the social media would be to bring back USENET style communication in a web interface with all the compleity of the newsgroups, restrict it to text and links, and make it highly regional with some latent interconnects between servers, and make the heirarchy topical, not social. The reason the USENET is served for a fee is so the providers can make a profit vending binary traffic, which is the bulk of their volume, that is not legal or suitable for many people, especially children. If you do not allow any of that, you get text only discussion groups, you can restore something of value to the nation other than flash-in-the-pan social media faddism, and you might provide a means to actually solve some important problems.
Some of this happens right now on Slashdot, which is why I am here and not on social media. But Slashdot had the flaw that like a web site with a blog, the owner or an editorial board controls what topics get notice. On the USENET the hiererarchy is topical and that is what works best for regional or national discussion and debate.
Ironically, Facebook has the germ of wide-spread discussion, but it is the wrong way around. Were it easier to allow for topic change to create new pages and there was a better mechanism that page creation and likes to link topics together, Facebook would have more like a discussion hiererarchy, but I doubt that Facebook would ever go so far. They experimented briefly with reply quoting, a feature that would help with context management and replying directly to another comment, but they suddenly abandoned it. I think that the reason is that their data mining applications couldn't deal with that added complexity.
Context and threading is a tool for dealing with abuse, such as trolling, or other abuse, because with a sub-thread and context quoting you can take abuse to task directly and you can shunt it off into a junkable thread where it belongs. The other metadata it is possible to create about a messag
Hell, If I was teaching Web Design, I'd make the students code the HTML, CSS, and scripting by hand. Using a templating environment is fine for the small business person who hasn't the time to learn the nuts and bolts, but if that is going to be your profession, I'd make you code by hand and you'd do it from the command-line. Go look at Koding. That gives you a virtualized Linux, a command tool and a web server and browser.
Well put. And why does the conversation lead to the profitability of some business? Who cares? If Social Media is a Marketing tool and what people use it for is incidental for marketers to spy on them as the business model for the corporations, Google, Facebook, etc. etc. in the business. then why should we care that that business model succeeds? I argue that it would be good for it to fail and the lot of them to go out of business. The reason is that to get that Big data application they have crippled communication and stiefled conversation in favor of shallow ephemera and fads. And I hardly care that marketers need fads, what they need is push back and criticism and to be challenged for being stupid and fallaceous, so does the whole industry.
Nothing will discredit tech more than this, because when the 80% of people see that their livelihoods have been threatened by a digital revolution whose visibility to them is fraud by banks allowed to speculate in markets, and marketing fraud in social media, they will begin to doubt the idea that tech was meant to benefit everyone, and they will begin to seek restrictions on the applications computers are being used for. If they will simply not use or will boycott abusive technology or seek direct remedies in the courts against companies, I do not know, but I think that the reputations of tech companies and tech people is now tarnished in a way that we have never seen before.
" If you really think your kid has a harmful addiction, you should really do something about it."
Indeed. Join Facebook yourself with your wife and granny and peepaw an mimmy and gramps and befriend the brat.
Post annoying and embarrassing messages and pictures when they were kids throughout the day.
They'll fall over each other to leave FB posthaste.
Just saw a link from Gizmoto to a study in Europe that claimed this was exactly what was happending, kids are moving to other social media sites that are "cooler".
Slashdot moderation is among the best (or perhaps just least bad) of all the sites I regularly visit.
Slashdot supports many of the features I'd like to be much more widespread at the expnse of Google
Moderation requires manpower. Nobody in their right mind volunteers to moderate comments for for-profit businesses, so they have to pay moderators. Which they don't want to do. Which means either you get spam, flames and shitposting, or forced registration/real id.
But business models fail all the time, because customers get turned off, So if you goal is to learn somebody's preferences to target advertising at then, if something that happens on your site hurts them and they don't come back, you lose.
People have a way of spoiling the best laid business plans of CEO's and VC's. You still lose.
Because they are blogs. Blog streams cannot be managed the way USENET Newsgroups and mail archives could. Since there is not contest quoting, offenders can't be taken to task directly, The reason for the shift in attitude is CYA in a situation where Social Media companies do not want to give up the simple text block format of a blog post because it is so cheap to mine for keywords. Moderation would actually require much more structure to posts that would make automatic classification easier. This would include thread and sub-thread information, topic lines, character or word count. quote percentage, and other data, such as reader ratings. Some things that are here on Slashdot.
Google got the deJaVuous USENET archive in about 2004, and turned right around and ignored its moderation features. Facebook and its ilk, routinely ire users because the strictly lineal structure of conversations there does not allow for any context at all, and no real way to avoid and answer trolls. Trolls have always been a problem, but a good pointed response to one tends to diminish their effect. So outing people is the only tool a blog manager has against abuse, and it doesn't really solve the problem which is to allow for threads and to help people pick and choose which threads they want to read or not, and then respond to other's comments directly, which means to quote them.
One separate problem is that social media sites and blogs set the agenda for each discussion by setting its topic. Real people like to change topics, and to some extant they should be allowed to. This is very clumsy on Facebook and not really allowed on other blogs. In fact topic drift and topic hyjacking are reasons people get attacked on otherwise civil conversations because blogging doesn't handle this well. The other thing that is missing is a topic heirarchy, like USENET mewsgroups. That could be introduced to replace or augment social media, and since the large social media sites want a global reach that isn't really necessary for the way topics develop, a regional approach to most discussions would work.
I know the USENET still exists, but you pay for it everywhere because of the media files and porn on it. A text only USENET could easily be done on a regional scale for text only groups, only text and links allowed, and no ads and no multimedia. It could be free with a good web-based reader that has a good editor and good navigation tools. In the interest of free speech not controlled by the social media companies and not dominated by advertizing, it could be made for free.
I think it is important to bring back the USENET style discussion board with good filtering and moderation tools for the sake of civic discussions, political and social debate, problem solving and collaborative writings, remember the FAQ files of the USENET, as if the future of democracy in the world depends on it. It may not even be necessary to have the Big Data backends of the social media companies, or instant propagation of the messages, just like in the old days of NNTP servers, but if it is done right it could be redone on a small scale and for cheap. Really, all it needs is a good web interface, one much better than Google Groups, which is a joke.
java would do as an alternative also. not quite sure why it's gone out of fashion .
Because Sun blew the design of the class libraries. The language and its APIs are too expensive to learn and manage, and the JRE requires too much processor specific tuning to run effectively everywhere, so the language, Java, sucks for clean development, it is security through obfescation, and dicy performance in many places.
Sun sold it to the corporate glass houses because it was clunky and hard to learn. If you don't believe me, look at acm.jar, the alternative interface for the top level cousole. That archive appeared at the instant java went opensource and with good reason. Sun had intended to make java an elitist language. This is not to say that many people didn't master it in the time froma 1995-2005, but it quickly fell out of favor. I think I know why.
I get your point, but it is all about expectations and selfishness. China is clearly a place of Haves and Have Nots, and the gap between then is far greater than in the U.S., even Americans below the poverty line have more than even the average Chinese, or as much. But the Chinese have lower expectations for one another. The nation could do OK with the disparities, with only a tiny elite getting most of the rewards to the economic and social system.
America suffers from the opposite problem. It has advertised that it is more egalitarian than other nations and that there is more opportunity, when its fortunes run counter to that. It has more to lose on the level of expectations, especially if there is a meme shift in the bottom of the income curve, that the opportunities have ended and that the top is an exclusive oligarchy, which by the way is not that different from China now. But it is the expectations that are reversed. Americans still believe that it is easy to achieve the goal of being on a par with one another in a fair economic and political system, whether or not that is still true. I dare say that the average Chinese might believe that he fortunes will go up as prosperity trickles down to him. We shall see on both accounts.
Don't count America out and China in, necessarily. There are cultural differences that oppose the trends. America is still, for all its disparities, a much less conformist culture than China, capable of grater innovation. That may give the Chinese more patience to let their economic fortunes improve, but it puts China at a disadvantage like that of Japan before WW II if the competition between the two nations becomes serious. The worst thing that could happen to China is political and economic isolation. It would not be able to compete technically with Europe and America if it became isolated. Even the USSR couldn't keep up, and it had more hightly trained people per capita than the U.S. but less ability to execute business plans, which is why it failed. It is a good thing that China and the U.S. have the current economic relationship, but we all need to be aware of where it works and where it doesn't, and to help one another if we can.