Apart from a bunch of data pages on locally prominent sports, Whirlpool is very much a now reference.
Delimiter seems to be aiming more for a sociological view of Australian IT.
For me the simple test was Microbee, the only locally developed computer which ever gained significant market share and which is prominent in Delimiter's wiki but absent from Whirlpool.
Clearly the publicity here is already doing some Delimiter good as there are already quite a few more pages and categories than when I looked a few hours ago, including one on Whirlpool.
I'm much more inclined towards dumping my archives and knowledge of the Australian computer industry, especially from the 1980s when I was in the loop with many key players, into something like this than trying to make more than the most minor edits to Wikipedia itself.
For some time I've been saying it would be best if Wikipedia could connect relatively seamlessly with specialised wikis where each local or narrow community could manage their own authentication process.
If I could find some way of better covering living expenses short of selling my soul to assist somebody else's agenda, I could easily spend a hopefully longish retirement working mostly on similar projects. The only problem is that I'm sitting on at least half a dozen other areas where I have more again that should be made available and I doubt Aubrey de Grey is going to keep me alive long enough to get them all done.
The only time that exists is now. The universe is everywhere and always engaged in creating its next local state from its current local state within whatever supervenient constraints apply (like being part of a ball of rock).
The past is an extremely useful and widely deployed conception of pattern recognising systems based on traces left in the current state, largely through the necessarily conservative* nature of the universal update function. That conception of past grounds intentional action in the forever now.
Privacy was always a goner if we were going to take the bait of better connectivity and information that we hoped might enable us to improve the world.
The Black Swan for those of us encultured by the optimism of the 'sixties, was a resurgent authoritarian rump, led by a lost generation with more fears of hippies than of fascists. The rump steamrolled any notion of "Law as last resort" and degraded the once honourable notion of justice into demands for pro-active revenge against any perceived difference or insult. Meanwhile we gained reason and capacity to skew the population age curve and stretch consumer economics so far that children became major investments, too precious and too miss-perceived as reflecting on their parenting not to be smothered in over-protection from testing boundaries and learning about risk and responsibility.
So we finish up with the nanny-state left wanting to equally privilege any group of muddled thinkers and the intellectually-challenged right wanting to foist their ever-narrowing "values" on everybody else. And we too often feel constrained that they can so easily track us dissenters down and find some pointless law to trip us with whenever we stir too hard.
25 years ago I had a placeholder for a chapter that has never been written: "No Secrets (...) And No Need For Secrets," but even then it was 25 years too late.
I hate posting negatively, even more so about the dead, but it really is time the legend was buried with the man.
Back when it was still possible I was in a fortunate position which gave me access to many of the Valley's elite.
Raskin still sticks out in my mind as far and away the least credible.
Put simply, he suffered problems I've seen afflict other failed would-be futurists in other places. His ideas were all grounded on a past that had never existed. And when the world didn't turn out to match his dreams, it was everybody else's fault.
On a more positive note, I'm looking forward to forming an opinion of the tablet next Thursday (my time) but don't have over-inflated expectations. At launch, the Touch was clearly the most important user interface innovation since 1984 and the only product in recent years I both ordered and received on the first possible day. But applying Stuart Kauffman's analysis of navigation strategies for rugged fitness landscapes, there is ever less scope for radical innovation and more likelihood of gain from incremental strategies, the bleedingly obvious double click on a word resolution of the supposed problem of a selection interface being a case in point.
Leaving aside the media capabilities that we can safely assume, my judgment of the tablet will be based on whether it looks likely that it will eventually run a few litmus test applications well enough: Bento, OmniGraffle, Keynote, TextWrangler and Perl 6. I won't need all of them, but might find it harder to justify without at least a couple.
I have Google News with several custom panels open in a tab 24-7 to look at when I'm distracted.
Where it is a choice I click to items I'm interested in in The Age (Melbourne) in the hope that there might be other, often unrelated, local-interest articles there worth on-clicking to. But half the time the latest Fairfax site revision makes that process near impossible. Other times it can be half good.
But I'm also trying to act on the recognition that for political stuff The Guardian is the only English language paper that tries any more and certainly the only one I'd be willing to seriously consider paying something for. Most of the rest have clearly been overrun by the shock-horror=entertainment/ratings meme, witness the Haiti security beat ups, with exceptions like Christian Science Monitor usually being too allergic to any passion.
Beyond them, I try to opt for publications with local or domain-specific credibility like the San Jose Mercury.
Making sense of my Google News reading/click through statistics would take something a lot smarter than their search algorithm.
"Web designers" keep not wanting to know the most critical single factor in Google's original success... no clutter.
I've got way too many placeholder pages which vary from one liners, to blatant lies about "coming soon", to a single link to some other discussion of the site's intended topic.
Lately, with bandwidth being cheap and no shortage of photos to choose from, I've been tending to add a single image which speaks for itself.
(Was going to also add the parent's exact suggestion so replied rather than duplicating.)
Which is a good thing, because my priorities have moved on anyway.
All I ever wanted the never really started TransForum 2.0 for was a tool for communication and collaboration about other, potentially media-rich, projects.
Now a decade on from when TransForum 0.99 was momentarily state-of-the-art, I have a dozen projects ready to try surfing this next Southern Ocean Wave... as always too much choice.
Now if only Google will finally complete what has long been their obvious mission and provide a guaranteed permanent URI for everything ever worth citing.
If you, as I, accept Lynn Margulis's hypothesis, parasitic and symbiotic interactions with microbes play a much stronger role in driving evolutionary diversification than "random" mutations of the genome.
In early MacPaint successor FullPaint by Ann Arbor Softworks, back in those days of single bit graphics, clicking command-L applied one iteration of John Horton Conway's Game of Life to the current selection rectangle.
Trying it idly one day on a screen grab that included a MacDraw ruler soon lead to the discovery that a long straight line with every 17th cell live on the next row generated a field of pulsars and I was hooked on what was effectively the study of Life in a narrow cylindrical universe.
The idea of filling space so easily soon also had me playing with agars where the early Mac's reliance on 8x8 patterns in the absence of colours largely confined my options to finding something close enough to a critical density that it would sustain interesting erosion from a single changed cell, eventually settling mostly on a pair of beacons, either in or our of phase: 11000000 11000000 00110000 00110000 00000011 00000001 00001000 00001100
I've resumed playing around with these every time I've found a better tool. That experience informs my strong position on disagreements over the border of order-edge of chaos and has very much informed my last few months' work with the much more productive tool of Golly 2.0 running the Generations 345/3/6 rule which Mirek Wojtowicz christened "LivingOnTheEdge" in 2001 and commented only: "In this very chaotic rule it's hard to tell if patterns will survive or die out." It may have been neglected for seven years but I'm making up for that now, and still discovering something unexpected emerging more days than not.
Relying on Wikipedia for the dates to save my overtaxed head, we've had no-booth tolling in Melbourne (Australia, not Florida) since CityLink was opened: "The decision to use only electronic toll collection was made in 1992, when there was no real field experience in the field. The first of the sections opened to traffic in August 1999, with tolling commencing on January 3, 2000".
More than twenty years ago another of the second ranked Australian cities had grand plans to develop a Multifunction Polis which became mired in controversy and eventually gave rise to the modern suburb of Mawson Lakes which I drive past most years and which houses a campus of the University of South Australia and Technology Park Adelaide.
Twenty years ago nobody would have been surprised at Brisbane being twenty years behind Adelaide and an order of magnitude less ambitious, but things have pretty much reversed in the interim, though entirely through public confidence -- Adelaide's rust belt manufacturing versus Brisbane's lack of organising themes which proved attractive to many go-getters.
This remains one of the more interesting open questions. Did galaxies aggregate central black holes or did primeval black holes catalyse the formation of galaxies? A definitive answer would be at least worth a physics Nobel. It's also why I bothered reading this thread to the bottom.
Two of their five "criteria" do not sit well together:
Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
Longevity: How long will the idea's impact last?
The rapid implementation requirement kills anything I would want to bring to the table, that is stuff we haven't been able to fix in a generation though the need has been increasingly evident because it requires a more patient approach than markets will tolerate (even while they burn googillions in retirement savings without a thought that we might like some priority to investments which at least try to provide a "better" world we might retire into.)
Unless it was accompanied by rapid technique training (something highly unlikely that the US military would think about) there might still be plenty of blood shed from certain parts of the anatomy.
Worldwide, careerist hacks have hijacked almost every political organisation to provide their own meal ticket and empire building opportunity. Grass roots membership has been condemned to irrelevance and largely withered away, making it much easier for branch stacking based even more often on personality than on single issue "moral" agendas.
It's nice to dream that this is a sign of end game for the tyranny of 51% of 51% and so on recursively that is the blight of overscaled representative democracy in parallel with the end game for capitalist triumphalism and just behind the end game for mass media influence, but in reality their relics will all keep blundering along in our increasingly internet-mediated world.
Politicians of every stripe exist to mind your business. It hasn't been left-right for years, just which flavour of authoritarian meddling. The US Democratic Party has no concept of left-wing. Money is a good rough measure of what you owe nature.
Way too late in life I realised it would be handy if I could at least start to visualise in higher dimensions, so I knocked up a pair of scripts to explore the sphere packing problem in higher dimensions stochastically, basically by moving as far away as possible from the centres of close-packed n-dimensional spheres.
(While six circles pack tightly in two dimensions, there is some wiggle room even in three where 12 spheres can touch another sphere of equal radius, with a rhombahedral grid being the most symmetric solution though not the only.)
It has long been well known that following the most symmetric grid path to eight dimensions you reach a point where the gaps are big enough to fit an identical second set of 8-spheres, doubling the packing density, but still interesting to follow via numeric data in a terminal window. (In mid 2002 I chose to run it remotely on hosted Linux rather than push the then boundaries of OS X.)
The n-dimensional sphere packing problem has long been interesting to communications theory, error detection and correction.
Tasmanian scientists are examining the teeth of 100 whales and believe their research shows whaling impacts the mental health of other whales in the pod.
Any culture that wants to be above criticism surely should not be.
Though coming from very different directions, both LQG pioneer Lee Smolin and Stephen Wolfram, who needs no introduction here, have opined that the best candidate as the fundamental level of a discrete physics (i.e. where the appearance of being continuous is emergent) is a graph theoretic network of nodes and links where it ceases to make sense to ask what they are made of. (This is also explored in Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder.) The basic idea is that there is some simple enough but cosmologically consistent transformation rule which produces the next local state of the graph from the current local state, supposedly at the Planck scale (of order 10^43 times per second).
A likely scenario is that "somewhere" long unreachable beyond our event horizons, there was a region of network sustaining chaotic inflationary expansion in which a bubble of more conservative physics emerged. Our conservative bubble only exhibits polynomial (near cubic) growth but that was enough to separate it from the exponentially growing seed graph.
My current betting is that Type 1a Supernovae, or at least some more precise analogue thereof in our parent cosmos, seed new outbreaks of chaotic inflation in which a new generation of more conservative bubble cosmoses arise, the whole process being susceptible to selection for fecundity and constrained only by the need for a viable history to some initial conditions simple enough to have just happened, presumably for no better reason than because nothing is unstable.
It is based on a judgment of those who presume power that any resilience in aboriginal culture after generations of occupation must be inherently inferior to our preoccupations with created money and invented fears (including fear of young people and fear of sex) and thereby gives us the right to continue our attrition of aboriginal communities.
And, no, Too Many Tears isn't self-published. As publisher, I'm a "pure" descendant of the invaders, living a continent away from the half-caste author. In the process I have learnt hard lessons that those addicted to a continuity of the lazy lies of the dysfunctional surviving remnant of the once proud Liberal Party will never willingly learn.
at a recent conspicuous addition to the front page of my 'Memes' website will make it clear that I have considerable knowledge of stolen generation issues.
Sure DOCS arguably leaves too many white kids at risk with their parents, but they still follow all the old prejudices about aboriginal culture, at least in the states and regions where it matters.
That is never a good criteria for judging anything which is (i) subject to uncritisable political positions (and thus biased research funding) and/or (ii) likely to be based on samples drawn from dysfunctional (clinical) populations.
S(ocial s)cience, like democracy, is at best a least bad methodology. It is extremely vulnerable to financial and public relations imperatives, to the systemic maintenance of empire building delusions like the wars on drugs, Muslims, etc. It would make more sense to me if we were "fighting" the absence of quality control and accurate information with the same vigour.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from a bunch of data pages on locally prominent sports, Whirlpool is very much a now reference.
Delimiter seems to be aiming more for a sociological view of Australian IT.
For me the simple test was Microbee, the only locally developed computer which ever gained significant market share and which is prominent in Delimiter's wiki but absent from Whirlpool.
Clearly the publicity here is already doing some Delimiter good as there are already quite a few more pages and categories than when I looked a few hours ago, including one on Whirlpool.
I'm much more inclined towards dumping my archives and knowledge of the Australian computer industry, especially from the 1980s when I was in the loop with many key players, into something like this than trying to make more than the most minor edits to Wikipedia itself.
For some time I've been saying it would be best if Wikipedia could connect relatively seamlessly with specialised wikis where each local or narrow community could manage their own authentication process.
If I could find some way of better covering living expenses short of selling my soul to assist somebody else's agenda, I could easily spend a hopefully longish retirement working mostly on similar projects. The only problem is that I'm sitting on at least half a dozen other areas where I have more again that should be made available and I doubt Aubrey de Grey is going to keep me alive long enough to get them all done.
The only time that exists is now. The universe is everywhere and always engaged in creating its next local state from its current local state within whatever supervenient constraints apply (like being part of a ball of rock).
The past is an extremely useful and widely deployed conception of pattern recognising systems based on traces left in the current state, largely through the necessarily conservative* nature of the universal update function. That conception of past grounds intentional action in the forever now.
It also makes a complete nonsense of predeterminism.
*This is an almost circular argument. If it wasn't conservative, pattern recognition would be impossible and we would not exist.
Privacy was always a goner if we were going to take the bait of better connectivity and information that we hoped might enable us to improve the world.
The Black Swan for those of us encultured by the optimism of the 'sixties, was a resurgent authoritarian rump, led by a lost generation with more fears of hippies than of fascists. The rump steamrolled any notion of "Law as last resort" and degraded the once honourable notion of justice into demands for pro-active revenge against any perceived difference or insult. Meanwhile we gained reason and capacity to skew the population age curve and stretch consumer economics so far that children became major investments, too precious and too miss-perceived as reflecting on their parenting not to be smothered in over-protection from testing boundaries and learning about risk and responsibility.
So we finish up with the nanny-state left wanting to equally privilege any group of muddled thinkers and the intellectually-challenged right wanting to foist their ever-narrowing "values" on everybody else. And we too often feel constrained that they can so easily track us dissenters down and find some pointless law to trip us with whenever we stir too hard.
25 years ago I had a placeholder for a chapter that has never been written: "No Secrets (...) And No Need For Secrets," but even then it was 25 years too late.
I hate posting negatively, even more so about the dead, but it really is time the legend was buried with the man.
Back when it was still possible I was in a fortunate position which gave me access to many of the Valley's elite.
Raskin still sticks out in my mind as far and away the least credible.
Put simply, he suffered problems I've seen afflict other failed would-be futurists in other places. His ideas were all grounded on a past that had never existed. And when the world didn't turn out to match his dreams, it was everybody else's fault.
On a more positive note, I'm looking forward to forming an opinion of the tablet next Thursday (my time) but don't have over-inflated expectations. At launch, the Touch was clearly the most important user interface innovation since 1984 and the only product in recent years I both ordered and received on the first possible day. But applying Stuart Kauffman's analysis of navigation strategies for rugged fitness landscapes, there is ever less scope for radical innovation and more likelihood of gain from incremental strategies, the bleedingly obvious double click on a word resolution of the supposed problem of a selection interface being a case in point.
Leaving aside the media capabilities that we can safely assume, my judgment of the tablet will be based on whether it looks likely that it will eventually run a few litmus test applications well enough: Bento, OmniGraffle, Keynote, TextWrangler and Perl 6. I won't need all of them, but might find it harder to justify without at least a couple.
I have Google News with several custom panels open in a tab 24-7 to look at when I'm distracted.
Where it is a choice I click to items I'm interested in in The Age (Melbourne) in the hope that there might be other, often unrelated, local-interest articles there worth on-clicking to. But half the time the latest Fairfax site revision makes that process near impossible. Other times it can be half good.
But I'm also trying to act on the recognition that for political stuff The Guardian is the only English language paper that tries any more and certainly the only one I'd be willing to seriously consider paying something for. Most of the rest have clearly been overrun by the shock-horror=entertainment/ratings meme, witness the Haiti security beat ups, with exceptions like Christian Science Monitor usually being too allergic to any passion.
Beyond them, I try to opt for publications with local or domain-specific credibility like the San Jose Mercury.
Making sense of my Google News reading/click through statistics would take something a lot smarter than their search algorithm.
"Web designers" keep not wanting to know the most critical single factor in Google's original success ... no clutter.
I've got way too many placeholder pages which vary from one liners, to blatant lies about "coming soon", to a single link to some other discussion of the site's intended topic.
Lately, with bandwidth being cheap and no shortage of photos to choose from, I've been tending to add a single image which speaks for itself.
(Was going to also add the parent's exact suggestion so replied rather than duplicating.)
Which is a good thing, because my priorities have moved on anyway.
All I ever wanted the never really started TransForum 2.0 for was a tool for communication and collaboration about other, potentially media-rich, projects.
Now a decade on from when TransForum 0.99 was momentarily state-of-the-art, I have a dozen projects ready to try surfing this next Southern Ocean Wave ... as always too much choice.
Now if only Google will finally complete what has long been their obvious mission and provide a guaranteed permanent URI for everything ever worth citing.
If you, as I, accept Lynn Margulis's hypothesis, parasitic and symbiotic interactions with microbes play a much stronger role in driving evolutionary diversification than "random" mutations of the genome.
The only reasonable ref I could find quickly is from 1991: Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis.
In early MacPaint successor FullPaint by Ann Arbor Softworks, back in those days of single bit graphics, clicking command-L applied one iteration of John Horton Conway's Game of Life to the current selection rectangle.
Trying it idly one day on a screen grab that included a MacDraw ruler soon lead to the discovery that a long straight line with every 17th cell live on the next row generated a field of pulsars and I was hooked on what was effectively the study of Life in a narrow cylindrical universe.
The idea of filling space so easily soon also had me playing with agars where the early Mac's reliance on 8x8 patterns in the absence of colours largely confined my options to finding something close enough to a critical density that it would sustain interesting erosion from a single changed cell, eventually settling mostly on a pair of beacons, either in or our of phase:
11000000
11000000
00110000
00110000
00000011
00000001
00001000
00001100
I've resumed playing around with these every time I've found a better tool. That experience informs my strong position on disagreements over the border of order-edge of chaos and has very much informed my last few months' work with the much more productive tool of Golly 2.0 running the Generations 345/3/6 rule which Mirek Wojtowicz christened "LivingOnTheEdge" in 2001 and commented only: "In this very chaotic rule it's hard to tell if patterns will survive or die out." It may have been neglected for seven years but I'm making up for that now, and still discovering something unexpected emerging more days than not.
Relying on Wikipedia for the dates to save my overtaxed head, we've had no-booth tolling in Melbourne (Australia, not Florida) since CityLink was opened: "The decision to use only electronic toll collection was made in 1992, when there was no real field experience in the field. The first of the sections opened to traffic in August 1999, with tolling commencing on January 3, 2000".
More than twenty years ago another of the second ranked Australian cities had grand plans to develop a Multifunction Polis which became mired in controversy and eventually gave rise to the modern suburb of Mawson Lakes which I drive past most years and which houses a campus of the University of South Australia and Technology Park Adelaide.
Twenty years ago nobody would have been surprised at Brisbane being twenty years behind Adelaide and an order of magnitude less ambitious, but things have pretty much reversed in the interim, though entirely through public confidence -- Adelaide's rust belt manufacturing versus Brisbane's lack of organising themes which proved attractive to many go-getters.
This remains one of the more interesting open questions. Did galaxies aggregate central black holes or did primeval black holes catalyse the formation of galaxies? A definitive answer would be at least worth a physics Nobel. It's also why I bothered reading this thread to the bottom.
Two of their five "criteria" do not sit well together:
The rapid implementation requirement kills anything I would want to bring to the table, that is stuff we haven't been able to fix in a generation though the need has been increasingly evident because it requires a more patient approach than markets will tolerate (even while they burn googillions in retirement savings without a thought that we might like some priority to investments which at least try to provide a "better" world we might retire into.)
[...] a gigantic orgy would commence. [...]
Imagine: no more bloodshed on the battle field.
Unless it was accompanied by rapid technique training (something highly unlikely that the US military would think about) there might still be plenty of blood shed from certain parts of the anatomy.
Worldwide, careerist hacks have hijacked almost every political organisation to provide their own meal ticket and empire building opportunity. Grass roots membership has been condemned to irrelevance and largely withered away, making it much easier for branch stacking based even more often on personality than on single issue "moral" agendas.
It's nice to dream that this is a sign of end game for the tyranny of 51% of 51% and so on recursively that is the blight of overscaled representative democracy in parallel with the end game for capitalist triumphalism and just behind the end game for mass media influence, but in reality their relics will all keep blundering along in our increasingly internet-mediated world.
Politicians of every stripe exist to mind your business. It hasn't been left-right for years, just which flavour of authoritarian meddling. The US Democratic Party has no concept of left-wing. Money is a good rough measure of what you owe nature.
Way too late in life I realised it would be handy if I could at least start to visualise in higher dimensions, so I knocked up a pair of scripts to explore the sphere packing problem in higher dimensions stochastically, basically by moving as far away as possible from the centres of close-packed n-dimensional spheres.
(While six circles pack tightly in two dimensions, there is some wiggle room even in three where 12 spheres can touch another sphere of equal radius, with a rhombahedral grid being the most symmetric solution though not the only.)
It has long been well known that following the most symmetric grid path to eight dimensions you reach a point where the gaps are big enough to fit an identical second set of 8-spheres, doubling the packing density, but still interesting to follow via numeric data in a terminal window. (In mid 2002 I chose to run it remotely on hosted Linux rather than push the then boundaries of OS X.)
The n-dimensional sphere packing problem has long been interesting to communications theory, error detection and correction.
Japanese whaling considered culturally insensitive by almost everywhere else.
And those who don't think whales have culture need to check today's news report from Tasmania.
Any culture that wants to be above criticism surely should not be.
Nicole was a recognised leader at the then novel junction of hypertext and user interface. Good to see she is still actively building on that.
Fifty years ago, purple people were the staple food of a visiting alien, so presumably they at least made a decent lunch.
Though coming from very different directions, both LQG pioneer Lee Smolin and Stephen Wolfram, who needs no introduction here, have opined that the best candidate as the fundamental level of a discrete physics (i.e. where the appearance of being continuous is emergent) is a graph theoretic network of nodes and links where it ceases to make sense to ask what they are made of. (This is also explored in Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder .) The basic idea is that there is some simple enough but cosmologically consistent transformation rule which produces the next local state of the graph from the current local state, supposedly at the Planck scale (of order 10^43 times per second).
A likely scenario is that "somewhere" long unreachable beyond our event horizons, there was a region of network sustaining chaotic inflationary expansion in which a bubble of more conservative physics emerged. Our conservative bubble only exhibits polynomial (near cubic) growth but that was enough to separate it from the exponentially growing seed graph.
My current betting is that Type 1a Supernovae, or at least some more precise analogue thereof in our parent cosmos, seed new outbreaks of chaotic inflation in which a new generation of more conservative bubble cosmoses arise, the whole process being susceptible to selection for fecundity and constrained only by the need for a viable history to some initial conditions simple enough to have just happened, presumably for no better reason than because nothing is unstable.
It is based on a judgment of those who presume power that any resilience in aboriginal culture after generations of occupation must be inherently inferior to our preoccupations with created money and invented fears (including fear of young people and fear of sex) and thereby gives us the right to continue our attrition of aboriginal communities.
And, no, Too Many Tears isn't self-published. As publisher, I'm a "pure" descendant of the invaders, living a continent away from the half-caste author. In the process I have learnt hard lessons that those addicted to a continuity of the lazy lies of the dysfunctional surviving remnant of the once proud Liberal Party will never willingly learn.
at a recent conspicuous addition to the front page of my 'Memes' website will make it clear that I have considerable knowledge of stolen generation issues.
Sure DOCS arguably leaves too many white kids at risk with their parents, but they still follow all the old prejudices about aboriginal culture, at least in the states and regions where it matters.
I'm sorry!
of the stolen generations methodology since the disbandment of Native Affairs.
Enough said, especially on Sorry eve.
That is never a good criteria for judging anything which is (i) subject to uncritisable political positions (and thus biased research funding) and/or (ii) likely to be based on samples drawn from dysfunctional (clinical) populations.
S(ocial s)cience, like democracy, is at best a least bad methodology. It is extremely vulnerable to financial and public relations imperatives, to the systemic maintenance of empire building delusions like the wars on drugs, Muslims, etc. It would make more sense to me if we were "fighting" the absence of quality control and accurate information with the same vigour.