Why is a college president reading I Am Charlotte Simmons, a book about the sex life of a college co-ed?
Two reasons: 1) It's written by the well known and respected Tom Wolfe -- it's not a sleaze book, but an attempt to seriously address the subject.
2) Co-eds are ~50% of the student population. Lots of problems on campuses (unwanted pregnancies, unethical relationships between professors and students, etc.) originate from their sexual activities. Wouldn't be his job to understand the situation better?
I'd like to introduce them to something called integration. I know it might be a foreign concept for some people, but the idea that I have an "out-of-the-box" computer that will handle just about every form of media, and can easily view webpages is nice.
In The Soviet Union they'd say 'I know it might be a foreign concept for some people, but the idea that there's only one Party is nice. I know exactly which Party my politicians belong to'
Just as I'd like to chose what party to vote for, I'd like to choose which Web Browser and media players are on my system. "Integration" is just MS-speak for making the applications as difficult as spyware to remove.
If you don't like IE or WMP, simply don't use it! Ah, but you can't do this and still use Windows. Even if you have a superior browser such as Firefox, IE still runs needlessly as the Finder equivalent, for example, and it is the whole point of the EU's current complaint is that Office won't accept third-party media players.
I believe the EU is simply being bullheaded and stupid, trying to show just how "powerful" they are by making a US company with a large industrial footprint do their bidding
Heaven forbid that the EU should actually try to enforce its laws! Doesn't the EU know that anti-trust laws are meant for mere mortals and not Bill Gates?
why is is a bad thing that Media Player is integrated with Windows and Office?
Because the *whole point* of Microsoft doing this is not to "help the user" (as if MS cared) but to make the lives of third party media player developers difficult. This strategy worked for killing off Netscape and its obvious that MS won't be happy until they are the sole software producer on Earth.
What's weirder is that IMAX theaters normally are *in* science museums. You'd think that the Fundies wouldn't set foot in such "ungodly" places and that the people who do go are those interested in science.
I would recommend Pauker -- it is probably the best free flashcard system around -- it keeps track of when you last answered a flashcard correctly, so that you don't fall into the trap of learning a series of words and then forgetting them afterwards.
Rosetta Stone is very attractive to beginners because it seems so easy -- why learn grammar when you can just listen and click on the picture? Except for the problem that people are lazy. It is just too easy to cheat from context. For example, a typical question in Rosetta Stone is listening to a voice say "This is a red car" in a foreign language and then having you click the picture of the red car. But the other pictures may be of kittens, boats and frogs. If you know the word for "red" or "car" you can easily get the right answer without understanding the full sentence.
And nothing beats really learning grammar. It's tedious, but just as there isn't a royal road to geometry, there isn't one for languages.
And certainly without a time machine, learning classical languages (which is what the article is about) by immersion is not practical. Even for modern languages immersion isn't that helpful for learning to read serious literature in that language. Many languages have entire tenses that are rarely spoken but play a major role in the literary form of the language.
Making the datafiles may be tedious, but that actually helps you learn. It's like taking notes in class. I rarely ever looked at my notes afterwards, but the the act of notetaking itself helped me internalize the information.
The parent doesn't understand what "author pays" means. It doesn't mean that the author can publish whatever he or she wants -- the articles have to go through peer review exactly like "reader pays" journals. The only difference is that anyone can access the final product.
It might seem to the uninitiated that societies like the IEEE are unbiased on the issue of open access, but they are about as biased about open access as Microsoft is about Linux. The fact is, while being "non-profit", these societies (and particularly their staff), make tons of money off journals. There was a a scandal recently when the head of a similar society, the ACS, was shown to be making $750,000/year. Therefore, they spread FUD about open access. They don't care about science; it's the bottom line they care about, and open access threatens those cushy salaries.
The standard myths about open access just aren't true. There aren't people doing worthwhile science that can't afford to publish it. Even in the third world scientists are supported by grants. Author payment is the logical way to fund scientific publication. Heck, the IEEE *itself* charges page fees (basically the same thing) for papers published in its conference proceedings (and then turns around and charges twice!) . And it's not like the authors have to pay out of their own pockets -- just like attending conferences, grants can be used. And it's a trivial part of the grant. Typical grants these days are hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions. The $1500 needed to publish a paper in PLoS is a trivial cost compared to the cost of doing science (such as equipment, supplies for experiments, and paying grad student and postdoc salaries). What isn't trivial is the millions of dollars a year a typical university has to pay in journal subscriptions to "closed access" journals. The universities win with open access , the public wins (the get to see what their taxes pay for), the scientists win (more people read their papers) . The only losers are the publishers of closed access journals. Boo hoo hoo!
First of all, whatever impact Franklin had on science has absolutely no influence on his political influence. The great work of the American revolution, the Declaration of Independence, wasn't in any way contributed to by Franklin. Secondly, his scientific influence is rather inflated by Americans. Most studies nowadays (such as Tom Tucker's "Bolt of Fate") doubt that he ever performed the key and kite experiment.
We'll see how important Marx still appears 75 years from now, when his distance from the present is similar to Franklin's.
Do you have paid vacations at your place of employment? Are child workers employed there? Do women get maternity leaves? If you get injured at work, will the company pay for your hospital bills? In early 19th century Europe and America these things weren't true. Because of Marx these things are now true -- the capitalist elite feared the possibility of Marxist revolt (a real possibility in the 1880's and 1930's) and made capitalism more humane to try to placate the masses. Without Marx we'd still be living in a Dickensian hell.
Perhaps the difference is that Franklin was a doer, not merely a thinker. His, and the other founding fathers' ideas, worked, unlike Marx's.
Don't equate Marxism with the fiasco of the Soviet Union and its puppets. That's like equating Christianity with the Spanish Inquistion or the Crusades. Many socialist ideas such as government support of retired and disabled people, free or subsidized health care, free education, etc, have been implemented in many democratic regimes, including the US (although to a lesser degree than other first-world nations).
The US has been the single most powerful political influence in the world for the last two centuries, whether you think the influence is good or bad.
That's just silly. The US didn't really become influential outside North America until after WWII. In the 19th and early 20th century, the German and French cultures and languages were far more important worldwide than American culture and the English language. Yes, German scientists tend to write their papers in English now, but it's worth remembering that Einstein's famous papers on relativity were all in German, and he expected that all educated physicists could read German.
A great example of this filtering can be seen at University Libraries. A researcher pointed out to me that my local universities had almost two full bookcases dedicated to studies of Marx, and not a full shelve concerned with Benjamin Franklin.
Gasp! Even worse, I bet they didn't have a full shelf on Josiah Bartlett! The point is despite your political beliefs, the more minor founding fathers of the US aren't even particularly important to world, or even US history.
Not even Thomas Jefferson is as important to history as Marx, although the Declaration of Independence, much like the Communist Manifesto, is indeed a great historical document. Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac" isn't. I doubt few people outside of the US even know who Benjamin Franklin is.
It isn't a case of "cultural filters", but simply a reflection on the significance of a major political thinker vs. a pedlar of tired maxims like "a penny saved is a penny earned"
So you don't believe. Why "taunt" them? For what it's worth, I don't think postmodern philosophers are trying to convert you to postmodernism if that's what you're afraid of.
Well, why else would they write? When I write my scientific papers, which most recently assert that Hyphomonas is more closely related to Caulobacter than to Silicibacter I want to "convert" people to that belief. But I do give the data which led me to to that belief -- I don't ramble on about the "erectile functions of sqrt(-1)" as some post-modernists do.
I'm also curoius what using the Internet has to do with the value of religion or philosophy.
Because it is is clearly a result of science and not any of the other things. Data packets aren't carried by angels or by Telihard de Chardin's philosophic noosphere. Plus, it clearly functions for people of different religions or philosophy.
Also consider that history is littered with ideological problems science has had. Phrenology is one obvious example, but there are others. Eugenics also comes to mind.
While some even some scientists (including the late Stephen Jay Gould) tend to miss this, in general things like phrenology and eugenics were supported not by actual scientists, but pop science writers like Herbert Spencer. Indeed, legitimate scientists like J.B.S Haldane were crucial in pointing out the logical flaws in such pseudosciences.
I'm also curoius what using the Internet has to do with the value of religion or philosophy. For example, writing was preserved from the 14th through 16th centuries by monasteries. Does that mean they were "better" than science back then?
Science didn't exist then. While people often talk about "ancient science", they really mean things that were discovered by trial and error, rather than genuine science. The Romans did build wonderful aqueducts, but they are all pretty much the same because they didn't understand the physics behind their design.
Your problem, Jonathan, seems to be that you see no value in anything but science. At least that's what you seem to be saying.
Nah, I like other things, like languages too, but even then I tend to prefer languages like Esperanto and Bahasa Melayu (Malay) which either by design (the former) or chance (the latter) tend to be elegantly and logically formed.
You are clearly defensive about what postmodernism has to say regarding science.
This is such a tired argument it is amazing that post-modernists still try to make it. It reminds me of the assertions by Creationists that assume that evolutionary biologists are defensive. There's no need for scientists to get defensive -- we've won the battle already. Its the philosophers and religious people who are defensive. Both post-modernism and Creationism derive from the same source -- the simple fact that religion and philosophy, while perhaps interesting from the historical perspective, are simply outmoded relics in the modern scientific era. There is nothing "culturally relative" about science -- while the Soviet Union tried to create "Proletarian Science" by banning the "Bourgeois" works of Mendel and Einstein, they eventually had to give that up because without genetics and relativity you can't do modern agriculture or nuclear weapons. Science is Science is Science whether you revere Marx or Adam Smith.
I like to battle with post-modernists for the same reason it's fun to taunt Jehovah's Witnesses -- there's no need for me to get defensive -- the fact that we are communicating through the Internet is proof enough that science and not religion or philosophy is the real thing.
Do you hang out with the exNeXT crowd?? I know there are people like that (I work for/with severa of them), but I would hardly call it common among Linux users.
More like the "crowd that always wanted NeXT" but couldn't afford it. And that crowd is sufficiently large -- Windowmaker is one of the most popular window managers by any standard.
I don't get this "it's ugly" attitude. Practically everyone I know who uses Linux uses Windowmaker as their WM, so I would imagine that most people *like* the NeXT look and feel. Heck, if I could get a decent theme engine working on OS X, I'd dump Aqua in a second to get back to the clean NeXT look.
Problem was when they dropped it, a whole bunch of Apple customers got marooned. It would have been much smarter to get those schoolkids on the Macintosh platform from the very beginning.
Without a time machine that would have been impossible. The successful days of Apple in education were pre-Mac. They basically ruled the education market in the early to mid 1980's. Logically, if they had wanted to keep the market, they should have maintained the ][ series rather than launching an incompatible computer. There's no real reason why we couldn't have 3Ghz 32-bit descendants of the 6502 today.
I assume (like practically all scientific projects) grad students were involved in the design. While the failure to turn on the experiment may be an embarrassment to the primary investigator, how does it affect the grad students? Do they just leave the "results" section of their dissertations blank? Do they need to restart their graduate research with another project?
Yep. It's sometimes amusing that people here like to show they've been around by saying things like "I remember when Appleworks was called Clarisworks" -- When Appleworks was an integrated package on the Apple ][ seems to have been when most of these people were in nappies.
Part of Gates' argument is that in China prior to market reform, musicians were not paid. That's simply stupid. Anyone who knows anything about "Communist" regimes knows that all the ones that have existed, including China, still had money, and people got paid for their work (usually by the government). Now, you can certainly argue that musicians may not have been paid as *much* as they would have been in a market economy, but that's a different issue.
I see your point in that, having first used the Internet/Usenet in 1990, I sometimes miss the level of discussion then. On the other hand, it *was* pretty narrow -- with just geeks and professors online, science, math, and science-fiction were the dominant subjects. I mean, did anyone use the Internet to talk about weird stuff like the influence of Mexican music on Yugoslavian culture back then?
Seriously though, why is it such a horible thing to have an alternate view presented. Do you realy think these children can only handle one view, or that thay are completely incapable of making there own desisions on who they are going to believe.
No, I don't believe children are capable of making their own decisions. That's why they aren't allowed to vote or marry. It's up to adults to make wise decisions on what to teach them. Trying to convince children that the scientific community has any doubts about evolution is simply dishonest.
As an evolutionary genomicist specializing in microbes, I have contributed to Wikipedia and always explained in the discussion why I changed things and mentioned my (easily verified) credentials relating to the topic. In general, people are quite willing to accept changes if someone can explain *why* the current information is out of date or just plain wrong. Maybe affairs like the status of Taiwan or Tibet will be biased in Wikipedia, but they will be in normal encyclopedias too, because in such cases there are no "right answers", just political opinions.
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Why is a college president reading I Am Charlotte Simmons, a book about the sex life of a college co-ed?
Two reasons: 1) It's written by the well known and respected Tom Wolfe -- it's not a sleaze book, but an attempt to seriously address the subject.
2) Co-eds are ~50% of the student population. Lots of problems on campuses (unwanted pregnancies, unethical relationships between professors and students, etc.) originate from their sexual activities. Wouldn't be his job to understand the situation better?
I'd like to introduce them to something called integration. I know it might be a foreign concept for some people, but the idea that I have an "out-of-the-box" computer that will handle just about every form of media, and can easily view webpages is nice.
In The Soviet Union they'd say 'I know it might be a foreign concept for some people, but the idea that there's only one Party is nice. I know exactly which Party my politicians belong to'
Just as I'd like to chose what party to vote for, I'd like to choose which Web Browser and media players are on my system. "Integration" is just MS-speak for making the applications as difficult as spyware to remove.
If you don't like IE or WMP, simply don't use it!
Ah, but you can't do this and still use Windows. Even if you have a superior browser such as Firefox, IE still runs needlessly as the Finder equivalent, for example, and it is the whole point of the EU's current complaint is that Office won't accept third-party media players.
I believe the EU is simply being bullheaded and stupid, trying to show just how "powerful" they are by making a US company with a large industrial footprint do their bidding
Heaven forbid that the EU should actually try to enforce its laws! Doesn't the EU know that anti-trust laws are meant for mere mortals and not Bill Gates?
why is is a bad thing that Media Player is integrated with Windows and Office?
Because the *whole point* of Microsoft doing this is not to "help the user" (as if MS cared) but to make the lives of third party media player developers difficult. This strategy worked for killing off Netscape and its obvious that MS won't be happy until they are the sole software producer on Earth.
What's weirder is that IMAX theaters normally are *in* science museums. You'd think that the Fundies wouldn't set foot in such "ungodly" places and that the people who do go are those interested in science.
I would recommend Pauker -- it is probably the best free flashcard system around -- it keeps track of when you last answered a flashcard correctly, so that you don't fall into the trap of learning a series of words and then forgetting them afterwards.
Rosetta Stone is very attractive to beginners because it seems so easy -- why learn grammar when you can just listen and click on the picture? Except for the problem that people are lazy. It is just too easy to cheat from context. For example, a typical question in Rosetta Stone is listening to a voice say "This is a red car" in a foreign language and then having you click the picture of the red car. But the other pictures may be of kittens, boats and frogs. If you know the word for "red" or "car" you can easily get the right answer without understanding the full sentence.
And nothing beats really learning grammar. It's tedious, but just as there isn't a royal road to geometry, there isn't one for languages.
And certainly without a time machine, learning classical languages (which is what the article is about) by immersion is not practical. Even for modern languages immersion isn't that helpful for learning to read serious literature in that language. Many languages have entire tenses that are rarely spoken but play a major role in the literary form of the language.
Making the datafiles may be tedious, but that actually helps you learn. It's like taking notes in class. I rarely ever looked at my notes afterwards, but the the act of notetaking itself helped me internalize the information.
The parent doesn't understand what "author pays" means. It doesn't mean that the author can publish whatever he or she wants -- the articles have to go through peer review exactly like "reader pays" journals. The only difference is that anyone can access the final product.
It might seem to the uninitiated that societies like the IEEE are unbiased on the issue of open access, but they are about as biased about open access as Microsoft is about Linux. The fact is, while being "non-profit", these societies (and particularly their staff), make tons of money off journals. There was a a scandal recently when the head of a similar society, the ACS, was shown to be making $750,000/year. Therefore, they spread FUD about open access. They don't care about science; it's the bottom line they care about, and open access threatens those cushy salaries.
The standard myths about open access just aren't true. There aren't people doing worthwhile science that can't afford to publish it. Even in the third world scientists are supported by grants. Author payment is the logical way to fund scientific publication. Heck, the IEEE *itself* charges page fees (basically the same thing) for papers published in its conference proceedings (and then turns around and charges twice!) . And it's not like the authors have to pay out of their own pockets -- just like attending conferences, grants can be used. And it's a trivial part of the grant. Typical grants these days are hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions. The $1500 needed to publish a paper in PLoS is a trivial cost compared to the cost of doing science (such as equipment, supplies for experiments, and paying grad student and postdoc salaries). What isn't trivial is the millions of dollars a year a typical university has to pay in journal subscriptions to "closed access" journals. The universities win with open access , the public wins (the get to see what their taxes pay for), the scientists win (more people read their papers) . The only losers are the publishers of closed access journals. Boo hoo hoo!
First of all, whatever impact Franklin had on science has absolutely no influence on his political influence. The great work of the American revolution, the Declaration of Independence, wasn't in any way contributed to by Franklin. Secondly, his scientific influence is rather inflated by Americans. Most studies nowadays (such as Tom Tucker's "Bolt of Fate") doubt that he ever performed the key and kite experiment.
We'll see how important Marx still appears 75 years from now, when his distance from the present is similar to Franklin's.
Do you have paid vacations at your place of employment? Are child workers employed there? Do women get maternity leaves? If you get injured at work, will the company pay for your hospital bills? In early 19th century Europe and America these things weren't true. Because of Marx these things are now true -- the capitalist elite feared the possibility of Marxist revolt (a real possibility in the 1880's and 1930's) and made capitalism more humane to try to placate the masses. Without Marx we'd still be living in a Dickensian hell.
Perhaps the difference is that Franklin was a doer, not merely a thinker. His, and the other founding fathers' ideas, worked, unlike Marx's.
Don't equate Marxism with the fiasco of the Soviet Union and its puppets. That's like equating Christianity with the Spanish Inquistion or the Crusades. Many socialist ideas such as government support of retired and disabled people, free or subsidized health care, free education, etc, have been implemented in many democratic regimes, including the US (although to a lesser degree than other first-world nations).
The US has been the single most powerful political influence in the world for the last two centuries, whether you think the influence is good or bad.
That's just silly. The US didn't really become influential outside North America until after WWII. In the 19th and early 20th century, the German and French cultures and languages were far more important worldwide than American culture and the English language. Yes, German scientists tend to write their papers in English now, but it's worth remembering that Einstein's famous papers on relativity were all in German, and he expected that all educated physicists could read German.
A great example of this filtering can be seen at University Libraries. A researcher pointed out to me that my local universities had almost two full bookcases dedicated to studies of Marx, and not a full shelve concerned with Benjamin Franklin.
Gasp! Even worse, I bet they didn't have a full shelf on Josiah Bartlett! The point is despite your political beliefs, the more minor founding fathers of the US aren't even particularly important to world, or even US history.
Not even Thomas Jefferson is as important to history as Marx, although the Declaration of Independence, much like the Communist Manifesto, is indeed a great historical document. Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac" isn't. I doubt few people outside of the US even know who Benjamin Franklin is.
It isn't a case of "cultural filters", but simply a reflection on the significance of a major political thinker vs. a pedlar of tired maxims like "a penny saved is a penny earned"
Freeside. Villia Straylight was in Freeside...
So you don't believe. Why "taunt" them? For what it's worth, I don't think postmodern philosophers are trying to convert you to postmodernism if that's what you're afraid of.
Well, why else would they write? When I write my scientific papers, which most recently assert that Hyphomonas is more closely related to Caulobacter than to Silicibacter I want to "convert" people to that belief. But I do give the data which led me to to that belief -- I don't ramble on about the "erectile functions of sqrt(-1)" as some post-modernists do.
I'm also curoius what using the Internet has to do with the value of religion or philosophy.
Because it is is clearly a result of science and not any of the other things. Data packets aren't carried by angels or by Telihard de Chardin's philosophic noosphere. Plus, it clearly functions for people of different religions or philosophy.
Also consider that history is littered with ideological problems science has had. Phrenology is one obvious example, but there are others. Eugenics also comes to mind.
While some even some scientists (including the late Stephen Jay Gould) tend to miss this, in general things like phrenology and eugenics were supported not by actual scientists, but pop science writers like Herbert Spencer. Indeed, legitimate scientists like J.B.S Haldane were crucial in pointing out the logical flaws in such pseudosciences.
I'm also curoius what using the Internet has to do with the value of religion or philosophy. For example, writing was preserved from the 14th through 16th centuries by monasteries. Does that mean they were "better" than science back then?
Science didn't exist then. While people often talk about "ancient science", they really mean things that were discovered by trial and error, rather than genuine science. The Romans did build wonderful aqueducts, but they are all pretty much the same because they didn't understand the physics behind their design.
Your problem, Jonathan, seems to be that you see no value in anything but science. At least that's what you seem to be saying.
Nah, I like other things, like languages too, but even then I tend to prefer languages like Esperanto and Bahasa Melayu (Malay) which either by design (the former) or chance (the latter) tend to be elegantly and logically formed.
You are clearly defensive about what postmodernism has to say regarding science.
This is such a tired argument it is amazing that post-modernists still try to make it. It reminds me of the assertions by Creationists that assume that evolutionary biologists are defensive. There's no need for scientists to get defensive -- we've won the battle already. Its the philosophers and religious people who are defensive. Both post-modernism and Creationism derive from the same source -- the simple fact that religion and philosophy, while perhaps interesting from the historical perspective, are simply outmoded relics in the modern scientific era. There is nothing "culturally relative" about science -- while the Soviet Union tried to create "Proletarian Science" by banning the "Bourgeois" works of Mendel and Einstein, they eventually had to give that up because without genetics and relativity you can't do modern agriculture or nuclear weapons. Science is Science is Science whether you revere Marx or Adam Smith.
I like to battle with post-modernists for the same reason it's fun to taunt Jehovah's Witnesses -- there's no need for me to get defensive -- the fact that we are communicating through the Internet is proof enough that science and not religion or philosophy is the real thing.
Do you hang out with the exNeXT crowd?? I know there are people like that (I work for/with severa of them), but I would hardly call it common among Linux users.
More like the "crowd that always wanted NeXT" but couldn't afford it. And that crowd is sufficiently large -- Windowmaker is one of the most popular window managers by any standard.
I don't get this "it's ugly" attitude. Practically everyone I know who uses Linux uses Windowmaker as their WM, so I would imagine that most people *like* the NeXT look and feel. Heck, if I could get a decent theme engine working on OS X, I'd dump Aqua in a second to get back to the clean NeXT look.
Problem was when they dropped it, a whole bunch of Apple customers got marooned. It would have been much smarter to get those schoolkids on the Macintosh platform from the very beginning.
Without a time machine that would have been impossible. The successful days of Apple in education were pre-Mac. They basically ruled the education market in the early to mid 1980's. Logically, if they had wanted to keep the market, they should have maintained the ][ series rather than launching an incompatible computer. There's no real reason why we couldn't have 3Ghz 32-bit descendants of the 6502 today.
I assume (like practically all scientific projects) grad students were involved in the design. While the failure to turn on the experiment may be an embarrassment to the primary investigator, how does it affect the grad students? Do they just leave the "results" section of their dissertations blank? Do they need to restart their graduate research with another project?
Or "Blood Music" by Greg Bear (the last part -- the first part is about intelligent blood cells!)
I don't have the 80-column card!
Yep. It's sometimes amusing that people here like to show they've been around by saying things like "I remember when Appleworks was called Clarisworks" -- When Appleworks was an integrated package on the Apple ][ seems to have been when most of these people were in nappies.
Part of Gates' argument is that in China prior to market reform, musicians were not paid. That's simply stupid. Anyone who knows anything about "Communist" regimes knows that all the ones that have existed, including China, still had money, and people got paid for their work (usually by the government). Now, you can certainly argue that musicians may not have been paid as *much* as they would have been in a market economy, but that's a different issue.
This is a bad thing?
I can feel the Internet's collective IQ rising...
I see your point in that, having first used the Internet/Usenet in 1990, I sometimes miss the level of discussion then. On the other hand, it *was* pretty narrow -- with just geeks and professors online, science, math, and science-fiction were the dominant subjects. I mean, did anyone use the Internet to talk about weird stuff like the influence of Mexican music on Yugoslavian culture back then?
Seriously though, why is it such a horible thing to have an alternate view presented. Do you realy think these children can only handle one view, or that thay are completely incapable of making there own desisions on who they are going to believe.
No, I don't believe children are capable of making their own decisions. That's why they aren't allowed to vote or marry. It's up to adults to make wise decisions on what to teach them. Trying to convince children that the scientific community has any doubts about evolution is simply dishonest.
As an evolutionary genomicist specializing in microbes, I have contributed to Wikipedia and always explained in the discussion why I changed things and mentioned my (easily verified) credentials relating to the topic. In general, people are quite willing to accept changes if someone can explain *why* the current information is out of date or just plain wrong. Maybe affairs like the status of Taiwan or Tibet will be biased in Wikipedia, but they will be in normal encyclopedias too, because in such cases there are no "right answers", just political opinions.