So my mother has a Ph.D in experimental psychology and knows a thing or two about how to design experiments, how to avoid systematic bias, how to distinguish that from random error, and in the admittedly non-objective opinion of her son, is quite sharp about identifying sources of those in methodologies. After raising three children she tries to restart her career. At first the only work she could find was a lowly temp job entering survey responses from a drug trial into a database. Turns out that the forms completed by the doctors and patients surveyed left answers to many questions blank. So how is she instructed by those managing the data entry to handle those cases? She is told to systematically select particular answers to particular questions. And which answers? The answers consistent with the drug being effective and harmless.
Now you do not have to be a Ph.D. to spot a problem with that. Hell, my German Shepherd could probably do that. But maybe as a scientist herself the violation of scientific integrity stung too strongly and my mother insistently raised complaints within the company. And how far did those go to correct the "mistaken" guidelines for data entry? Absolutely nowhere.
"The participants were first asked about their wealth, schooling, social background, religious persuasions and attitudes to money in an attempt to establish their perceived social class."
Interesting experiment. The methodology is broken.
Because of the possibility that dishonest people will lie about their own income and social status the conclusion that wealthy people are more dishonest is unfounded. According to the description of the experimental methods, subjects categorized as "wealthy" in the study would have included both the genuinely wealthy and the non-wealthy liars. That is, the study misidentifies poor liars as wealthy liars. And with some degree of idiocy; The experimenters simultaneously identify a group as dishonest and believe their self reports of income, without recognizing the contradiction in that reasoning.
Then, also, more intelligent subjects would seem more likely both to be wealthy and to recognize that lying and cheating within the artificial context of a human psychology experiment causes no real harm and is part of the game. Human subject guidelines would mandate that these experiments be performed with informed consent of the subjects, so no doubt the smarter ones understood this was not real life. Snookering others in games vs real life is a similar distinction to killing others in video games vs real life. Just because you murder others in virtual online environments does not make you more prone to do that in real life. So does lying in games contrived by psychologists make you more prone to lie in real life?
Over at the Wall Street Journal Bret Stephens questions the claim that as many as 1,023 Palestinian lives have been lost in the conflict. The column is paywalled but can be accessed for free via the WSJ Opinion Facebook Page.
Consider the media obsession with the body count. According to a daily tally in the New York Times, NYT -6.42% as of July 27 the war in Gaza had claimed 1,023 Palestinian lives as against 46 Israelis. How does the Times keep such an accurate count of Palestinian deaths? A footnote discloses "Palestinian death tallies are provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs."
OK. So who runs the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza? Hamas does. As for the U.N., it gets its data mainly from two Palestinian agitprop NGOs, one of which, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, offers the remarkably precise statistic that, as of July 27, exactly 82% of deaths in Gaza have been civilians. Curiously, during the 2008-09 Gaza war, the center also reported an 82% civilian casualty rate.
When minutely exact statistics are provided in chaotic circumstances, it suggests the statistics are garbage. When a news organization relies—without clarification—on data provided by a bureaucratic organ of a terrorist organization, there's something wrong there, too.
The American Association for Justice, formerly and more accurately known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, gave 96 percent of all its contributions so far this year to Democrats. A fluke? They gave Democrats 96 percent in 2012, 97 percent in 2010, and 95 percent in 2008. The Washington Examiner’s 2011 investigative reporting showed that, of political contributions given in 2010 by the employees and partners at the top 110 plaintiff’s firms in the United States, 97 percent went to Democrats.
Democrats’ reliance on this legal gravy train was highlighted two years ago when Sherry Sylvester of Texans for Lawsuit Reform wrote an article claiming that 80 percent of all contributions to the state Democratic Party over the previous decade came from trial lawyers. The bean counters at Politifact weighed in to declare that she was mostly right, but that the real fraction was closer to 75 percent. Read that again: Three-quarters of the Texas Democratic Party’s cash came from trial lawyers.
..Obama..continues to appoint lobbyists with clear conflicts of interest to important positions rather than actually think about his choice... What causes him to keep doing this?
The IRS employees responsisble for the "lost" emails and Tea Party persecution are praying to heaven that Hillary Clinton wins in 2016. If a Republican takes office there will be an independent council, grand jury indictment, a trial, likely conviction and jail time. Also Republican political appointess to the IRS who would make damn sure that the IRS stopped stonewalling and that every shred of evidence would be turned over to congress.
If Hillary wins and the culprits recieve no punishment that would be license for the IRS to engage in open and rampant corruption. Once the IRS knows that it can engage in criminally corrupt conduct without reprecussions then the floodgates will be wide open to unrestrained corruption, discrimiation and repression in the IRS and any othe federal agency. I though those Republicans crazys stockpiling ammunition and AR-15s, screaming "The gooberment's gonna get us" were, well, crazy. And I still do. It's just that reality is changing to conform to their delusions.
"But the Republicans will be doing it for partisan motives!" scream the Democrats. Why should I give a shit about that, so long as justice is served?
The sounds similar to the Napoleon Dynamite Problem, the problem encountered in the Netflix Prize challenge of predicting user ratings for some particular films. For most films knowledge of an individuals preferences for some films were good predictors for their preferences of other films. Yet preferences for some particular films were hard to predict, notably the eponymous Napoleon Dynamite.
Neural network identification and automated prediction of individual film ratings are both classification tasks. Example sets for both of these problems contain particular difficult-to-classify examples. So perhaps this phenomena of "adversarial examples" described in the Szegedy et. al. article is more generally a property of datasets and classification, not an artifact of implementing classification using neural networks.
'Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn't.'"
It is noteworthy that Wales is not arguing for excluding pseudoscience from Wikipedia on the basis of Wikipedia's own guidelines. According to Wikipedia itself, status as pseudoscience is not a criterion for exclusion from Wikipedia. Rather,the criterion for acceptance is NPOV. Wikipedia's guidelines permit dishonest, fictitious and untruthful content so long as it is NPOV.
Because the rules of Wikipedia would allow the inclusion pseudoscience this is a "gotcha" for Wales, revealing a fundamental limit in Wikipedia: With NPOV, the contents of Wikipedia can never be more veridical than is the social consensus. A purportedly objective guideline which immediately reduces to subjective value judgments, NPOV is a ruse; What constitutes "Significant views," or "reliable sources on a topic" is in the eye of the beholder. Or, as Wales would have it in this case, whatever he says they are.
Wikipedia was an unexpected success because the popular expectation, a priori, was that if you just let anyone edit an encyclopedia then predominantly non-experts would contribute falsehoods. A posteriori, after Wikipedia had actually worked, the reasoning about why it had was that it was unexpectedly accurate because, well, experts are really not so good at getting stuff right anyway, and maybe spontaneous social organization really does work better than structured regulation and those dead Austrian economists and their crazy Libertarian fan club might actually have been right about something.
Though perhaps the secret to Wikipedia's success is not really that open encyclopedias are unexpectedly accurate, but rather that accuracy is not, as had been assumed, paramount. Rather, it is the appearance of accuracy which is essential for success. NPOV is a codification of a strategy for creating the popular appearance of accuracy without achieving genuine accuracy. Wikipedia is winning the encyclopedia contest by gaming the system. It matched the same flawed criterion function for accuracy as used by its customers, the test of asking: "is this what respectable people believe?" So now Wales has the problem that, according to the very rules of Wikipedia which have been the recipe for its success, it must permit pseudoscientific content which is popularly believed. This explains why Wales can shoot that down only outside of Wikipedia's own guidelines.
For every assassination bounty hosted they should also host a corresponding anti-assassination bounty. The assassin would be paid the net pro-assassination value, that is, the difference between the two bounties, and the bounty hosting site would keep the remainder. For opposing interests of equal magnitude in a bidding war this would be hugely profitable for the bounty hosting site and also result in nobody actually getting assassinated. It would also be more equitable because it represents the opinions of both pro-assassination and anti-assassination sides, not just the pro-assassination side.
Though seriously, the entire subject is revolting. Almost every American, love Obama or hate Obama, love Bush or hate Bush, agrees that they do not want their President to be assassinated. Despite disagreements in American politics, there are essential fundamental core values which unite us all, and that we do not assassinate our leaders is one of them.
This is the problem with non-free airplanes. If the blueprints had been free under a freedom preserving license I'm sure the problem that caused the hiccup had been found.
. . . and the plane could have been printed on an off the shelf 3D printer . ..
. ..and from the MakerPlane website: "MakerPlane is an open source aviation organization which will enable people to build and fly their own safe, high quality, reasonable cost plane using advanced personal manufacturing equipment such as...3D printers."
Why would the freest country in the world (except, perhaps, Iceland) be against it?
According to the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom, produced by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, the United States and Iceland are, respectively, the 10th and 23rd freest countries.
The top 10 positions are:
1. Hong Kong 2. Singapore 3. Australia 4.New Zealand 5. Switzerland 6. Canada 7. Chile 8. Mauritius 9. Denmark 10. United States.
In addition to current rankings the index also reports trends. For example, economic freedom in the United States has declined since 2009, according to the graph on this page. In comparison, freedom in Chile is high and continues to climb, which makes it a popular destination for American expatriates such as "Simon Black" over at his Sovereign Man website.
... property owners frustrated with the US's endangered species act find it's easier to hunt and kill such species on their property, rather than lose access to that property.
It could be reasonably argued that government officials hava a legitimate need for both publicly-facing published email addresses and private, unpublished email addresses for inter-governmental communication. Presumably the former would be handled by their staffs for public communication and the latter used for professional communications between government officials.
If that were the issue, there would be no scandal here, merely a difference of opinion between what is good practice. What makes this a scandal is not that the email addresses themselves were secret, but that 1). The practice of maintaining secret email accounts was itself secret 2.) With one single exception the agencies exempted the contents of the secret email accounts from FOI searches. 3) In violation of its own policy agencies sought to charge the AP fee, and quite a hight one.
So this looks like a widespread attempt by government officials to avoid transparency and accountability, not a pragmatic attempt to manage their inboxes efficiently.
Crowdsourcing did not fail because what occurred was not crowdsourcing.
There is a distinction between, on the one hand, the emergent behavior which spontaneously arises from ungoverned social interaction and, on the other hand, the management practice of dividing and framing a problem such that it can be solved by large, loosely-affiliated groups of anonymous individuals working in parallel. The latter is crowdsourcing. The former, in the case of attempts to identify Boston Marathon suspects in online fora such as reddit, is a vigilante mob.
At least that interpretation is consistent with the conventional usage of the term "crowdsourcing" up to this point. Consider well-known examples such as the Mechanical Turk, the search for the wreckage of Steve Fosset's plane and prediction markets such as Iowa Electonic Markets. In all case the role of any individual in the crowd is predefined and constrained in advance by design. Constraints can include the dimension of response and the information to be evaluated.
And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. And it gets worse: the average IQ of African blacks is lower still, not far above what is considered the threshold of mental retardation in the U.S. And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about 85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather than nurturance effects.
For anyone who believe that racial equality is an important goal, this is absolutely horrible news. Which is why a lot of well-intentioned people refuse to look at these facts, and will attempt to shout down anyone who speaks them in public. There have been several occasions on which leading psychometricians have had their books canceled or withdrawn by publishers who found the actual scientific evidence about IQ so appalling that they refused to print it.
Unfortunately, denial of the facts doesn’t make them go away.
The secret billionaires are just trying to even the playing field against those fat cat scientists who are rolling in their trillions from government grants. Exxon is David against the NSF Goliath, man.
Actual figures comparing private and government funding on climate issues are given here.
-More recently Daniel Kessler has assessed the promises Obama made when selling Obamacare, concluding "Every one of the main claims made for the law is turning out to be false."
-Gun and ammunition sales surged immediately following Obama's reelection.
-We have just learned President Obama has secretly granted himself the power to assassinate U.S citezens without due process.
Some people, with reasonable cause, do not trust Obama. Their suspicions have been vindicated.
So I live in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. Google fiber is not in offered in Overland Park yet, but because it is close by and spreading I checked out the prices and signed up for email notification when their service becomes available in my area.
The prices. Holy cow. It's free. A one time $300.00 installation fee but then it is free. So I was wondering for months how is that possible? Is Google taking a massive loss? Did Google invent a new technology which allows them to undercut their competitors?
Then on a drive across town to the local Fablab I was listening to the local public radio station which just happened to be interviewing Susan Crawford, author of the recently published book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. As the summary at Amazon states:
This important book by leading telecommunications policy expert Susan Crawford explores why Americans are now paying much more but getting much less when it comes to high-speed Internet access.
Well as you might guess from the subtitle of the book, what she finds out when she explores is that internet and cable service in the U.S. are regional monopolies. Even when multiple internet and cable service providers operate in the same city they divide up the city into regions of monopolistic coverage and only overlap on small percentages of territory.
So Google offers such spectacularly low prices by undercutting monopolists, having enough clout to overcome barriers to entry which block startups, and Moore's law has reduced the cost of providing internet service to something pretty close to free. The inflated prices for internet broadband service which we have paid in the U.S. have not followed Moore's law because service provider are monopolies. Now with the disruption of that monopoly in one regional market prices are back on track with Moore's law there.
In his novel Mostly Harmless the late Douglas Adams wrote:
“In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.”
Is the practice of astrology acceptable to you on those terms?
Skeptics seem to divide into two categories. First, those who publicly reveal falsehoods and loudly denounce them as deceptions. Second, those who silently observe the willingness of the public to believe in absurd falsehoods and regard that as a financial opportunity.
As an example of the latter category, the golf industry has deceived the the public into the belief that hitting little white balls around in the grass with expensive sticks is very, very important. This falsehood is enormously lucrative. Tiger Woods earned $120 million from prize money and sponsorships during 2009. Between July 2011 and July 2012 the ten top-earning golf players made $236 million collectively.
A golf skeptic would claim that the positions of small white balls in grass fields is actually of no consequence whatsoever , that golfers are peddling flim-flam, and that the public is fooled out of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. A golfing apologist would say it is a personal preference and fans should have the freedom to spend on golf because they enjoy it.
Parapsychology, like an interest in golfing, is a personal lifestyle choice. If we denounce parapsychology, religion and astrology as irrational does not consistency demand that we also denounce all other manner of irrational human behavior such as golf? You denounce some forms of irrational behavior but undoubtedly carve out exceptions for other forms which you tolerate or even practice yourself. So like you, I could carve out an an exception to what forms of irrational behavior I will tolerate by selling Mayan end-of-the-world advent calendars. Why are specifically both gullibility and its financial exploitation not acceptable life style choices in a society which generally tolerates unquestioningly the financial exploitation of irrational behavior?
When offerring a $1 million reward to anyone who successfully demonstrates proof of the paranormal you risk failing to debunk some paranormal claims, not because paranormal activity actually exists, but because the ruse is either so technologically advanced or clever that investigators fail to identify the means of deception. How concerned were you about this possibility and have you ever had any "close calls" where you almost failed to discover the trick?
Slashdot Mirror
So my mother has a Ph.D in experimental psychology and knows a thing or two about how to design experiments, how to avoid systematic bias, how to distinguish that from random error, and in the admittedly non-objective opinion of her son, is quite sharp about identifying sources of those in methodologies. After raising three children she tries to restart her career. At first the only work she could find was a lowly temp job entering survey responses from a drug trial into a database. Turns out that the forms completed by the doctors and patients surveyed left answers to many questions blank. So how is she instructed by those managing the data entry to handle those cases? She is told to systematically select particular answers to particular questions. And which answers? The answers consistent with the drug being effective and harmless.
Now you do not have to be a Ph.D. to spot a problem with that. Hell, my German Shepherd could probably do that. But maybe as a scientist herself the violation of scientific integrity stung too strongly and my mother insistently raised complaints within the company. And how far did those go to correct the "mistaken" guidelines for data entry? Absolutely nowhere.
from your Puffington Host link:
"The participants were first asked about their wealth, schooling, social background, religious persuasions and attitudes to money in an attempt to establish their perceived social class."
Interesting experiment. The methodology is broken.
Because of the possibility that dishonest people will lie about their own income and social status the conclusion that wealthy people are more dishonest is unfounded. According to the description of the experimental methods, subjects categorized as "wealthy" in the study would have included both the genuinely wealthy and the non-wealthy liars. That is, the study misidentifies poor liars as wealthy liars. And with some degree of idiocy; The experimenters simultaneously identify a group as dishonest and believe their self reports of income, without recognizing the contradiction in that reasoning.
Then, also, more intelligent subjects would seem more likely both to be wealthy and to recognize that lying and cheating within the artificial context of a human psychology experiment causes no real harm and is part of the game. Human subject guidelines would mandate that these experiments be performed with informed consent of the subjects, so no doubt the smarter ones understood this was not real life. Snookering others in games vs real life is a similar distinction to killing others in video games vs real life. Just because you murder others in virtual online environments does not make you more prone to do that in real life. So does lying in games contrived by psychologists make you more prone to lie in real life?
Over at the Wall Street Journal Bret Stephens questions the claim that as many as 1,023 Palestinian lives have been lost in the conflict. The column is paywalled but can be accessed for free via the WSJ Opinion Facebook Page.
..What causes [Obama] to keep doing this?
Maybe this has something to do with it:
..Obama ..continues to appoint lobbyists with clear conflicts of interest to important positions rather than actually think about his choice... What causes him to keep doing this?
It is because he has not seen it in the news yet.
The IRS employees responsisble for the "lost" emails and Tea Party persecution are praying to heaven that Hillary Clinton wins in 2016. If a Republican takes office there will be an independent council, grand jury indictment, a trial, likely conviction and jail time. Also Republican political appointess to the IRS who would make damn sure that the IRS stopped stonewalling and that every shred of evidence would be turned over to congress.
If Hillary wins and the culprits recieve no punishment that would be license for the IRS to engage in open and rampant corruption. Once the IRS knows that it can engage in criminally corrupt conduct without reprecussions then the floodgates will be wide open to unrestrained corruption, discrimiation and repression in the IRS and any othe federal agency. I though those Republicans crazys stockpiling ammunition and AR-15s, screaming "The gooberment's gonna get us" were, well, crazy. And I still do. It's just that reality is changing to conform to their delusions.
"But the Republicans will be doing it for partisan motives!" scream the Democrats. Why should I give a shit about that, so long as justice is served?
The sounds similar to the Napoleon Dynamite Problem, the problem encountered in the Netflix Prize challenge of predicting user ratings for some particular films. For most films knowledge of an individuals preferences for some films were good predictors for their preferences of other films. Yet preferences for some particular films were hard to predict, notably the eponymous Napoleon Dynamite.
Neural network identification and automated prediction of individual film ratings are both classification tasks. Example sets for both of these problems contain particular difficult-to-classify examples. So perhaps this phenomena of "adversarial examples" described in the Szegedy et. al. article is more generally a property of datasets and classification, not an artifact of implementing classification using neural networks.
quoth ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein
"Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world.""
Note that the guy in charge of all the nuclear missiles in the United States invokes a security-though-obscurity argument to justify obsolete systems.
So how could the IRS fund their Microsoft Custom Support? By seizing tax refunds.
Quoth Wales:
It is noteworthy that Wales is not arguing for excluding pseudoscience from Wikipedia on the basis of Wikipedia's own guidelines. According to Wikipedia itself, status as pseudoscience is not a criterion for exclusion from Wikipedia. Rather,the criterion for acceptance is NPOV. Wikipedia's guidelines permit dishonest, fictitious and untruthful content so long as it is NPOV.
Because the rules of Wikipedia would allow the inclusion pseudoscience this is a "gotcha" for Wales, revealing a fundamental limit in Wikipedia: With NPOV, the contents of Wikipedia can never be more veridical than is the social consensus. A purportedly objective guideline which immediately reduces to subjective value judgments, NPOV is a ruse; What constitutes "Significant views," or "reliable sources on a topic" is in the eye of the beholder. Or, as Wales would have it in this case, whatever he says they are.
Wikipedia was an unexpected success because the popular expectation, a priori, was that if you just let anyone edit an encyclopedia then predominantly non-experts would contribute falsehoods. A posteriori, after Wikipedia had actually worked, the reasoning about why it had was that it was unexpectedly accurate because, well, experts are really not so good at getting stuff right anyway, and maybe spontaneous social organization really does work better than structured regulation and those dead Austrian economists and their crazy Libertarian fan club might actually have been right about something.
Though perhaps the secret to Wikipedia's success is not really that open encyclopedias are unexpectedly accurate, but rather that accuracy is not, as had been assumed, paramount. Rather, it is the appearance of accuracy which is essential for success. NPOV is a codification of a strategy for creating the popular appearance of accuracy without achieving genuine accuracy. Wikipedia is winning the encyclopedia contest by gaming the system. It matched the same flawed criterion function for accuracy as used by its customers, the test of asking: "is this what respectable people believe?" So now Wales has the problem that, according to the very rules of Wikipedia which have been the recipe for its success, it must permit pseudoscientific content which is popularly believed. This explains why Wales can shoot that down only outside of Wikipedia's own guidelines.
For every assassination bounty hosted they should also host a corresponding anti-assassination bounty. The assassin would be paid the net pro-assassination value, that is, the difference between the two bounties, and the bounty hosting site would keep the remainder. For opposing interests of equal magnitude in a bidding war this would be hugely profitable for the bounty hosting site and also result in nobody actually getting assassinated. It would also be more equitable because it represents the opinions of both pro-assassination and anti-assassination sides, not just the pro-assassination side.
Though seriously, the entire subject is revolting. Almost every American, love Obama or hate Obama, love Bush or hate Bush, agrees that they do not want their President to be assassinated. Despite disagreements in American politics, there are essential fundamental core values which unite us all, and that we do not assassinate our leaders is one of them.
This is the problem with non-free airplanes. If the blueprints had been free under a freedom preserving license I'm sure the problem that caused the hiccup had been found.
. . . and the plane could have been printed on an off the shelf 3D printer . . .
. . .and from the MakerPlane website:
"MakerPlane is an open source aviation organization which will enable people to build and fly their own safe, high quality, reasonable cost plane using advanced personal manufacturing equipment such as...3D printers."
Why would the freest country in the world (except, perhaps, Iceland) be against it?
According to the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom, produced by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, the United States and Iceland are, respectively, the 10th and 23rd freest countries.
The top 10 positions are:
In addition to current rankings the index also reports trends. For example, economic freedom in the United States has declined since 2009, according to the graph on this page. In comparison, freedom in Chile is high and continues to climb, which makes it a popular destination for American expatriates such as "Simon Black" over at his Sovereign Man website.
... property owners frustrated with the US's endangered species act find it's easier to hunt and kill such species on their property, rather than lose access to that property.
The term for this is "shoot, shovel and shut up."
It could be reasonably argued that government officials hava a legitimate need for both publicly-facing published email addresses and private, unpublished email addresses for inter-governmental communication. Presumably the former would be handled by their staffs for public communication and the latter used for professional communications between government officials.
If that were the issue, there would be no scandal here, merely a difference of opinion between what is good practice. What makes this a scandal is not that the email addresses themselves were secret, but that 1). The practice of maintaining secret email accounts was itself secret 2.) With one single exception the agencies exempted the contents of the secret email accounts from FOI searches. 3) In violation of its own policy agencies sought to charge the AP fee, and quite a hight one.
So this looks like a widespread attempt by government officials to avoid transparency and accountability, not a pragmatic attempt to manage their inboxes efficiently.
Crowdsourcing did not fail because what occurred was not crowdsourcing.
There is a distinction between, on the one hand, the emergent behavior which spontaneously arises from ungoverned social interaction and, on the other hand, the management practice of dividing and framing a problem such that it can be solved by large, loosely-affiliated groups of anonymous individuals working in parallel. The latter is crowdsourcing. The former, in the case of attempts to identify Boston Marathon suspects in online fora such as reddit, is a vigilante mob.
At least that interpretation is consistent with the conventional usage of the term "crowdsourcing" up to this point. Consider well-known examples such as the Mechanical Turk, the search for the wreckage of Steve Fosset's plane and prediction markets such as Iowa Electonic Markets. In all case the role of any individual in the crowd is predefined and constrained in advance by design. Constraints can include the dimension of response and the information to be evaluated.
Open source advocate Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming has entered the Nature-Nurture debate, stating here:
So it looks like communities which choose to harm the environment by banning plastic bags might be killing themselves off with bacterial infections.
Environmentalism is self-correcting.
The secret billionaires are just trying to even the playing field against those fat cat scientists who are rolling in their trillions from government grants. Exxon is David against the NSF Goliath, man.
Actual figures comparing private and government funding on climate issues are given here.
A few observations:
Some people, with reasonable cause, do not trust Obama. Their suspicions have been vindicated.
So I live in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. Google fiber is not in offered in Overland Park yet, but because it is close by and spreading I checked out the prices and signed up for email notification when their service becomes available in my area.
The prices. Holy cow. It's free. A one time $300.00 installation fee but then it is free. So I was wondering for months how is that possible? Is Google taking a massive loss? Did Google invent a new technology which allows them to undercut their competitors?
Then on a drive across town to the local Fablab I was listening to the local public radio station which just happened to be interviewing Susan Crawford, author of the recently published book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. As the summary at Amazon states:
Well as you might guess from the subtitle of the book, what she finds out when she explores is that internet and cable service in the U.S. are regional monopolies. Even when multiple internet and cable service providers operate in the same city they divide up the city into regions of monopolistic coverage and only overlap on small percentages of territory.
So Google offers such spectacularly low prices by undercutting monopolists, having enough clout to overcome barriers to entry which block startups, and Moore's law has reduced the cost of providing internet service to something pretty close to free. The inflated prices for internet broadband service which we have paid in the U.S. have not followed Moore's law because service provider are monopolies. Now with the disruption of that monopoly in one regional market prices are back on track with Moore's law there.
In his novel Mostly Harmless the late Douglas Adams wrote:
Is the practice of astrology acceptable to you on those terms?
Skeptics seem to divide into two categories. First, those who publicly reveal falsehoods and loudly denounce them as deceptions. Second, those who silently observe the willingness of the public to believe in absurd falsehoods and regard that as a financial opportunity.
As an example of the latter category, the golf industry has deceived the the public into the belief that hitting little white balls around in the grass with expensive sticks is very, very important. This falsehood is enormously lucrative. Tiger Woods earned $120 million from prize money and sponsorships during 2009. Between July 2011 and July 2012 the ten top-earning golf players made $236 million collectively.
A golf skeptic would claim that the positions of small white balls in grass fields is actually of no consequence whatsoever , that golfers are peddling flim-flam, and that the public is fooled out of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. A golfing apologist would say it is a personal preference and fans should have the freedom to spend on golf because they enjoy it.
Parapsychology, like an interest in golfing, is a personal lifestyle choice. If we denounce parapsychology, religion and astrology as irrational does not consistency demand that we also denounce all other manner of irrational human behavior such as golf? You denounce some forms of irrational behavior but undoubtedly carve out exceptions for other forms which you tolerate or even practice yourself. So like you, I could carve out an an exception to what forms of irrational behavior I will tolerate by selling Mayan end-of-the-world advent calendars. Why are specifically both gullibility and its financial exploitation not acceptable life style choices in a society which generally tolerates unquestioningly the financial exploitation of irrational behavior?
How does the fictional character Peter Venkman portrayed by Bill Murray in the 1984 hit film Ghostbusters compare to actual parapsychology researches?
When offerring a $1 million reward to anyone who successfully demonstrates proof of the paranormal you risk failing to debunk some paranormal claims, not because paranormal activity actually exists, but because the ruse is either so technologically advanced or clever that investigators fail to identify the means of deception. How concerned were you about this possibility and have you ever had any "close calls" where you almost failed to discover the trick?