I have not read it yet, but I would guess it has one or more of the following people in it.
Diane Feinstein Nancy Pelosi Harry Reid Lindsey Graham Mitch McConnell
Notice how, in the title of TFA, this bill has been approved by a House panel? As in, The US House of Representatives? Of the five people you've listed here, four are US Senators. Nancy Pelosi is the one person in your list who is actually a member of the House. Note also that the bill has been passed by the House Judiciary Committee, of which Nancy Pelosi is not a member, so she could not have participated in this vote. Furthermore, she is not listed as a cosponsor of the bill.
There is a related Senate bill, the "Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2015." None of the cosponsors of that legislation are on your list, either. There's also a House bill corresponding to that Senate bill, which also does not include Pelosi as a cosponsor.
Did you just vomit out a list of politicians that you dislike? This information is in the public record. It's pointless to 'guess' about facts that you can easily look up.
I don't know what to say, man. I also consider myself fairly normal, I wear professional casual attire most of the time. I have short hair and do not wear a beard. No tats, ear-rings or strange attire. I don't smoke.
And I have never perceived that I was getting glares of disgust for existing in Portland, or Seattle, or San Francisco, all quite liberal cities. If you really feel like this is happening to you, I guess you need to evaluate your public behavior. Are you actively doing something to piss off everyone around you? Why is it that when you go out in public in Portland, you get death glares, and I do not?
If it's reaching a point where you feel like you need to stay inside your home to avoid it, you maybe should have a conversation with a mental health professional. It isn't usual to get the impression that everyone hates you whenever you go outside.
I'm not sure why everyone seems to jump to that conclusion.
Well, it seems like 'slashvertisement' is the automatic cry that people raise when a product or service that they don't personally like or use is mentioned in a post. And anyone who disagrees with that judgment is a 'paid shill.'
For what it's worth, I like the new logo. I don't think it's either particularly necessary or helpful, but I don't have any problem with it.
I scratch my head when I see a program like this. The business got a half million dollar grant from the public utilities commission to set up free wifi for underserved areas. But they were missing any kind of authority or leverage to install the equipment, even on city property, and wound up finding local businesses who would agree to let them set up the equipment in their buildings.
What they apparently didn't have was any plan for maintaining the equipment and service once they installed the hardware. TFA says equipment was stolen, or disconnected, or shut down, and the business didn't even know that was the case. Seems to me that if you wanted to build such a system, one of the most basic elements would be a monitoring component that gave you some idea of the state of the equipment you'd installed.
Of course, monitoring and maintenance require ongoing commitment of funds, which are almost never part of these types of grants. The idea, apparently, is that you're going to use the initial grant as start-up money, and before it runs out, you'll find some other source of money. But the approach that these guys took seems so wrong-headed that I don't see why anyone would give them more money.
I knew a guy who had TV cable service. One of the big companies, but I don't remember which--and they probably all do this kind of thing. But he'd set it up from the beginning so that each month, the TV company would take their monthly bill out of his checking account. Time comes when he's moving, and he cancels his service. Which is fine, he's not under contract or anything. He cancels his service, and he brings the cable box and stuff down to the local office and hands it in.
The next month, the cable company takes its fee from his checking account again. He calls to complain, and they say they'll fix it. A month goes by, and they take even more money. This time, he complains a lot more, and they assure him that they've finally managed to cancel his service. And they'll refund his money for the last two months, but it will take 30-60 days. The next month, the cable company takes an amount of money that is multiple times his usual bill amount from his account. This time, they agree that his account is canceled, but they're claiming that he never returned the cable box. This overdrafted his checking account and cost him about $100 in bank fees.
It took him at least six months to get this sorted out. He finally got refunded for all of the cable company charges, but I don't know whether he was able to get them to reimburse him for his overdraft charges.
It's absolutely crazy to give a corporation the ability to just take money from you. I long since closed my PayPal account because it was connected to my bank and I'd heard horror stories about them stealing from people.
I usually face April 01 with dread, knowing that Slashdot and other sites will just be a massive collection of "funny" shitposts all day. It's nice to see this new approach.
Yeah, I won't give AT&T my credit card number because I don't want them just reaching in and taking money whenever they feel like it. I certainly wouldn't give them my debit card money--then the money that they take is the money I'm using to, like, buy food and pay rent.
I use my bank's billpay thing to pay AT&T every month. I'm pretty sure I can set it up to be automated, but I just log in and check it each month to make sure nothing's changed, and then I push the button. Easy, and keeps AT&T from rummaging in my bank accounts.
Anecdotally, I listen to NPR in the car most every day and I make a yearly contribution to my local PBS station. I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, but I do sometimes stream This American Life or Serial when I'm driving long distances. In years when feel like I've done a lot of that, I've also made a contribution to the station that does those (WBEZ, I believe).
I don't really know what NPR One is, and I am unlikely to replace my local station with it or any other podcasts. So from my perspective, this change doesn't seem necessary, but without any real data, how much weight can any of our opinions hold?
You're right, I guess. I'm just bitter about not being able to replace the batteries. I sort of understand it; the whole inside of an iPad is mostly batteries, and all the plastic and stuff that you'd need would make the thing a lot thicker and heavier. Anyway, it's not like I'm going to try to buy new batteries from Apple. I'll probably just order something on eBay or Amazon...
Naturally, sales have declined. Those of us who really wanted one already bought one. I don't need another one. I especially don't care that the newer ones have faster processors and higher resolution because mostly I use it to read email and surf the web. So I plan on using the one I have until it fails. Oh, and I'm planning on replacing the batteries soon, despite Apple's efforts to make that difficult. Maybe that's what they should have planned on: selling us all iPads with replaceable batteries, and then selling us all new batteries in a few years.
I'm sure I'll be in the market for a new tablet one day, but I think Tim Cook and I have very different ideas about the practical lifespan of these devices.
Yeah, it's rare anymore that I go out and actually pay full price for a new game. I'm much more likely to pick up titles that are a few years old when they go on super sale on Steam. I've also kickstarted a few things, which I think is a cool way to support new games from indie developers. But I'm not a big online gamer... I don't really want to spend my free time being verbally abused by children. So a lot of the more popular modern games aren't really for me, anyway.
I totally agree with you. For a long time, I stuck to buying physical media. Despite that, I've amassed a larger Steam collection than I'd ever planned. I understand the problems with DRM, and I get that I could lose my whole Steam collection tomorrow if something goes way wrong. But it's so damned easy. During the last Steam sale, I bought the Skyrim GOTY edition including all the expansions and DLC for something like $5-$10?
I remember when I first began to question my dedication to buying the physical media, and it was when I opened a game box to find that it had the game on DVD in the box, but it also had a Steam code that I needed to be able to play...
Anyway. Yeah, I totally don't think this is the best way to go, but here we are. I realize that I'm guilty of helping it along by participating, but at least I draw the line at UbiSoft's uplay crap.
Yeah, I mean, I still think it sucks. I wouldn't be surprised to see game prices go up like you say. But maybe MS can benefit in other ways? I mean, they get some cut of sales, I suppose. So if they allow this 10% buyback thing, they get to take another cut when you sell back games and buy a new one? I don't know, the actual math of that makes my brain hurt.
As long as you're participating in this digital marketplace in which items, once purchased, have absolutely no resale value, I'd say that 'selling' them back to Microsoft for 10% of the purchase price is better than the nothing that you could otherwise get. I'm sure there are people out there who could recoup hundreds of dollars by shutting off their access to old games that they don't play anymore. I assume this would be in the form of store credit, and they could then buy access to new games with it.
Still I don't give a shit how stupid and gullible people are. They deserve to be informed
I agree with practically all of your post, but I choose this to respond to. It annoys me when my friend announces that she is now on a no-gluten diet even though she doesn't have celiac and is also incapable of explaining why she's excluded gluten from her diet except by vague handwaving about gluten being "bad". At the same time, I recognize that that's certainly her right, and I expend very little effort trying to argue with her about the effects of gluten. It's not my problem. I just wish that shit like this wasn't happening at a national level. I guess that's the price we pay for having a modern, world-wide telecommunications system with 24-hour TV and the Internet.
To which I explicitly stipulated in my comment. GMO property rights have demonstrably caused farmers problems. Those problems may have been brought on more by the farmers than the GMOs, but they have certainly occurred. In addition to those problems, I also anticipate problems in the future. As we cede power to massive agro/chemical corporations, they will inevitably take advantage. This is borne out by all of human history.
Yes, you're right, there isn't any GMO wheat on the market at the moment. But the point was, wheat is valued by measures such as protein content. When wheat grows very large very fast, it increases in bulk but not nutritional content, and it is valued less by weight than wheat with higher protein content.
Anyway, I guess what I was trying to say was that even if there are GMOs involved, the point of the modification is usually not to increase water uptake to make bigger or heavier grains, because we do not value grains by those metrics. So that would be a waste of genetic engineering in those cases.
That is to say, one of the problems with genetic modification is that we can do it a lot faster than selective breeding and find ourselves in bad places with our food much more quickly. It's not typically irreversible, but it is a concern.
At least in cereal grains, it doesn't work that way. Grains are paid out based upon analysis of nutritional content including protein, and not purely by weight. I don't know, it may work that way for fruits and vegetables, but not for wheat and corn. And wheat and corn are usually genetically modified crops.
Anyways, requiring a GMO label is intended for nothing else than to stigmatize.
Translation: People are stupid and must not be allowed to make their own decisions.
Actually: people are stupid and will make decisions based upon spurious information and superstition. People buying food still get to make their own decisions when there is GMO labeling. It's just more likely that they'll make decisions that aren't in their interests based upon their senseless bias against GMOs.
I'm conflicted over this. I agree that the label is intended to stigmatize. But I can't quite see that we shouldn't have them. The people who want the label to be there want it because it's scary sounding and they hope it will dissuade people from buying food that contains GMOs. And those people want to undermine the GMO food industry for a lot of stupid, superstitious, bullshit reasons.
But I do have objections to GMO food. My objections revolve mainly around two things: intellectual property rights and monocultures. I don't think it's a good strategy for our species for corporations to "own" and "license" the right to plant certain seeds. Also, agricultural monocultures can open us up to harm when some plant pest, pathogen, or disease latches on to the monoculture and potentially causes crop failure because our crops are all genetically identical. (The latter problem is possible without GMOs, but is enhanced by GMOs.)
The labels are factual, but when people are dissuaded from buying GMO foods because of the label, they're just buying in to a superstition that GMOs are bad. The people advocating for labels are doing it for the wrong reasons, but I do think we need to put some real thought into how we incorporate GMO foods into our food supply. I'd just rather we did it for the right reasons, because the way we're going now, we're having the wrong conversations about the dangers of GMOs.
Yes, it's a real paper, published in a journal called "Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities". It's a philosophy journal. Since they began in 1996, the journal has an H index of 12, which means that they have published 12 articles that have at least 12 citations. Which is to say, it's not super influential. They seem to largely publish deconstructionist literary criticism. Essentially, it is a nonsense journal that pseudo-intellectual academics publish in to make themselves feel validated about the worth of their "research".
Having read the feminist glaciology article, I can say that actually makes a couple of fair points, although it does so in an unnecessarily florid and contentious way.
Despite their claims, I don't believe that the authors establish a 'feminist glaciology framework' in their paper. They simply point out that the potential contributions to the field of women and indigenous people have been ignored, historically. They provide a reasonable amount of support for this position. And they suggest that we change. I really don't see anything particularly controversial in the actual paper. And I would estimate that this article is far beyond anything that is likely to appear in Angelaki in terms of scholarly value. Faint praise, but I believe that if these people had a decent editor, their paper would have been a lot better.
I read the actual journal article. What the authors seem to be talking about is the low credence that scientists in the past have given to indigenous knowledge about glaciers, which is a valid complaint and one that has been leveled at various branches of natural resources sciences of late. Why recognizing that knowledge counts as 'feminist' I cannot say. There are also observations that women have been excluded from glaciology in the past, and that had women been more involved, we may have done more and different research on, for example, the relationships between indigenous people and glaciers. I think those points are okay, as far as they go.
It's not a 'science' article in the quantitative sense. It's a survey of the state of the domain. It is clearly identified as such in the text. And it was published in a journal where such an article is appropriate.
People are making much of the $400,000 price tag. That money is distributed over the course of 5 years. I don't know what UO's institutional overhead rate is, but it is a reasonable guess that the Carey (the lead author) gets access to around $50,000 per year of this money. He has some budget worked out for that money that likely includes funding some number of hours of his own time, some hours for a graduate student, and then things like computer equipment and travel and so on. This particular paper is not the sole product of that money. In fact, it's not even listed as one of the intended outputs of the project. It is likely something that struck his interest as he was researching, and he chose to write it and see if anyone would publish it.
I do think the writing is florid. Sadly, that is the academic style right now. I believe that he could have made his point with half the word count. I also think that focusing on feminism rather than broader ideas of inclusiveness is likely to cause complaint, and, indeed, that is what we see here on Slashdot and in the reason.com write-up.
I don't think it's a bad article for what it says. I think how it says it could be improved. And I think the press coverage does a disservice with straw-man arguments. They're click-baiting people into raging about positions that the paper doesn't take.
I don't entirely understand the reference, not having read that particular book of Dennett's.
But I don't believe I'm trying to introduce some kind of false dichotomy, which as far as I can make out, is what you're talking about. I'm suggesting that the event of the appointment of a new Librarian of Congress is not a particularly good venue for denigrating the retired one. The old guy already stepped down, and the contextless sniping of the summary just seems spiteful. It's also completely without support, which makes it appear to be editorial.
We can certainly have a conversation about the failings of Billington. But "stuffy" "old" and "out of touch" have more flavor of ad hominem than of criticisms of his job performance.
Slashdot Mirror
I have not read it yet, but I would guess it has one or more of the following people in it.
Diane Feinstein
Nancy Pelosi
Harry Reid
Lindsey Graham
Mitch McConnell
Notice how, in the title of TFA, this bill has been approved by a House panel? As in, The US House of Representatives? Of the five people you've listed here, four are US Senators. Nancy Pelosi is the one person in your list who is actually a member of the House. Note also that the bill has been passed by the House Judiciary Committee, of which Nancy Pelosi is not a member, so she could not have participated in this vote. Furthermore, she is not listed as a cosponsor of the bill.
There is a related Senate bill, the "Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2015." None of the cosponsors of that legislation are on your list, either. There's also a House bill corresponding to that Senate bill, which also does not include Pelosi as a cosponsor.
Did you just vomit out a list of politicians that you dislike? This information is in the public record. It's pointless to 'guess' about facts that you can easily look up.
I don't know what to say, man. I also consider myself fairly normal, I wear professional casual attire most of the time. I have short hair and do not wear a beard. No tats, ear-rings or strange attire. I don't smoke.
And I have never perceived that I was getting glares of disgust for existing in Portland, or Seattle, or San Francisco, all quite liberal cities. If you really feel like this is happening to you, I guess you need to evaluate your public behavior. Are you actively doing something to piss off everyone around you? Why is it that when you go out in public in Portland, you get death glares, and I do not?
If it's reaching a point where you feel like you need to stay inside your home to avoid it, you maybe should have a conversation with a mental health professional. It isn't usual to get the impression that everyone hates you whenever you go outside.
Or maybe they all just really hate your beard?
I'm not sure why everyone seems to jump to that conclusion.
Well, it seems like 'slashvertisement' is the automatic cry that people raise when a product or service that they don't personally like or use is mentioned in a post. And anyone who disagrees with that judgment is a 'paid shill.'
For what it's worth, I like the new logo. I don't think it's either particularly necessary or helpful, but I don't have any problem with it.
I scratch my head when I see a program like this. The business got a half million dollar grant from the public utilities commission to set up free wifi for underserved areas. But they were missing any kind of authority or leverage to install the equipment, even on city property, and wound up finding local businesses who would agree to let them set up the equipment in their buildings.
What they apparently didn't have was any plan for maintaining the equipment and service once they installed the hardware. TFA says equipment was stolen, or disconnected, or shut down, and the business didn't even know that was the case. Seems to me that if you wanted to build such a system, one of the most basic elements would be a monitoring component that gave you some idea of the state of the equipment you'd installed.
Of course, monitoring and maintenance require ongoing commitment of funds, which are almost never part of these types of grants. The idea, apparently, is that you're going to use the initial grant as start-up money, and before it runs out, you'll find some other source of money. But the approach that these guys took seems so wrong-headed that I don't see why anyone would give them more money.
I knew a guy who had TV cable service. One of the big companies, but I don't remember which--and they probably all do this kind of thing. But he'd set it up from the beginning so that each month, the TV company would take their monthly bill out of his checking account. Time comes when he's moving, and he cancels his service. Which is fine, he's not under contract or anything. He cancels his service, and he brings the cable box and stuff down to the local office and hands it in.
The next month, the cable company takes its fee from his checking account again. He calls to complain, and they say they'll fix it. A month goes by, and they take even more money. This time, he complains a lot more, and they assure him that they've finally managed to cancel his service. And they'll refund his money for the last two months, but it will take 30-60 days. The next month, the cable company takes an amount of money that is multiple times his usual bill amount from his account. This time, they agree that his account is canceled, but they're claiming that he never returned the cable box. This overdrafted his checking account and cost him about $100 in bank fees.
It took him at least six months to get this sorted out. He finally got refunded for all of the cable company charges, but I don't know whether he was able to get them to reimburse him for his overdraft charges.
It's absolutely crazy to give a corporation the ability to just take money from you. I long since closed my PayPal account because it was connected to my bank and I'd heard horror stories about them stealing from people.
I usually face April 01 with dread, knowing that Slashdot and other sites will just be a massive collection of "funny" shitposts all day. It's nice to see this new approach.
Yeah, I won't give AT&T my credit card number because I don't want them just reaching in and taking money whenever they feel like it. I certainly wouldn't give them my debit card money--then the money that they take is the money I'm using to, like, buy food and pay rent.
I use my bank's billpay thing to pay AT&T every month. I'm pretty sure I can set it up to be automated, but I just log in and check it each month to make sure nothing's changed, and then I push the button. Easy, and keeps AT&T from rummaging in my bank accounts.
Anecdotally, I listen to NPR in the car most every day and I make a yearly contribution to my local PBS station. I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, but I do sometimes stream This American Life or Serial when I'm driving long distances. In years when feel like I've done a lot of that, I've also made a contribution to the station that does those (WBEZ, I believe).
I don't really know what NPR One is, and I am unlikely to replace my local station with it or any other podcasts. So from my perspective, this change doesn't seem necessary, but without any real data, how much weight can any of our opinions hold?
It's my perception that it has, but I'll check it out. Thanks for the tip.
You're right, I guess. I'm just bitter about not being able to replace the batteries. I sort of understand it; the whole inside of an iPad is mostly batteries, and all the plastic and stuff that you'd need would make the thing a lot thicker and heavier. Anyway, it's not like I'm going to try to buy new batteries from Apple. I'll probably just order something on eBay or Amazon...
Naturally, sales have declined. Those of us who really wanted one already bought one. I don't need another one. I especially don't care that the newer ones have faster processors and higher resolution because mostly I use it to read email and surf the web. So I plan on using the one I have until it fails. Oh, and I'm planning on replacing the batteries soon, despite Apple's efforts to make that difficult. Maybe that's what they should have planned on: selling us all iPads with replaceable batteries, and then selling us all new batteries in a few years.
I'm sure I'll be in the market for a new tablet one day, but I think Tim Cook and I have very different ideas about the practical lifespan of these devices.
Yeah, it's rare anymore that I go out and actually pay full price for a new game. I'm much more likely to pick up titles that are a few years old when they go on super sale on Steam. I've also kickstarted a few things, which I think is a cool way to support new games from indie developers. But I'm not a big online gamer... I don't really want to spend my free time being verbally abused by children. So a lot of the more popular modern games aren't really for me, anyway.
I totally agree with you. For a long time, I stuck to buying physical media. Despite that, I've amassed a larger Steam collection than I'd ever planned. I understand the problems with DRM, and I get that I could lose my whole Steam collection tomorrow if something goes way wrong. But it's so damned easy. During the last Steam sale, I bought the Skyrim GOTY edition including all the expansions and DLC for something like $5-$10?
I remember when I first began to question my dedication to buying the physical media, and it was when I opened a game box to find that it had the game on DVD in the box, but it also had a Steam code that I needed to be able to play...
Anyway. Yeah, I totally don't think this is the best way to go, but here we are. I realize that I'm guilty of helping it along by participating, but at least I draw the line at UbiSoft's uplay crap.
Yeah, I mean, I still think it sucks. I wouldn't be surprised to see game prices go up like you say. But maybe MS can benefit in other ways? I mean, they get some cut of sales, I suppose. So if they allow this 10% buyback thing, they get to take another cut when you sell back games and buy a new one? I don't know, the actual math of that makes my brain hurt.
As long as you're participating in this digital marketplace in which items, once purchased, have absolutely no resale value, I'd say that 'selling' them back to Microsoft for 10% of the purchase price is better than the nothing that you could otherwise get. I'm sure there are people out there who could recoup hundreds of dollars by shutting off their access to old games that they don't play anymore. I assume this would be in the form of store credit, and they could then buy access to new games with it.
Still I don't give a shit how stupid and gullible people are. They deserve to be informed
I agree with practically all of your post, but I choose this to respond to. It annoys me when my friend announces that she is now on a no-gluten diet even though she doesn't have celiac and is also incapable of explaining why she's excluded gluten from her diet except by vague handwaving about gluten being "bad". At the same time, I recognize that that's certainly her right, and I expend very little effort trying to argue with her about the effects of gluten. It's not my problem. I just wish that shit like this wasn't happening at a national level. I guess that's the price we pay for having a modern, world-wide telecommunications system with 24-hour TV and the Internet.
We have monocultures without GMO.
To which I explicitly stipulated in my comment. GMO property rights have demonstrably caused farmers problems. Those problems may have been brought on more by the farmers than the GMOs, but they have certainly occurred. In addition to those problems, I also anticipate problems in the future. As we cede power to massive agro/chemical corporations, they will inevitably take advantage. This is borne out by all of human history.
Here is an example of an IP right causing a problem for farmers:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsvi...
Yes, you're right, there isn't any GMO wheat on the market at the moment. But the point was, wheat is valued by measures such as protein content. When wheat grows very large very fast, it increases in bulk but not nutritional content, and it is valued less by weight than wheat with higher protein content.
Anyway, I guess what I was trying to say was that even if there are GMOs involved, the point of the modification is usually not to increase water uptake to make bigger or heavier grains, because we do not value grains by those metrics. So that would be a waste of genetic engineering in those cases.
This is a problem not just with GMOs, but also with selective breeding:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06...
That is to say, one of the problems with genetic modification is that we can do it a lot faster than selective breeding and find ourselves in bad places with our food much more quickly. It's not typically irreversible, but it is a concern.
At least in cereal grains, it doesn't work that way. Grains are paid out based upon analysis of nutritional content including protein, and not purely by weight. I don't know, it may work that way for fruits and vegetables, but not for wheat and corn. And wheat and corn are usually genetically modified crops.
Anyways, requiring a GMO label is intended for nothing else than to stigmatize.
Translation: People are stupid and must not be allowed to make their own decisions.
Actually: people are stupid and will make decisions based upon spurious information and superstition. People buying food still get to make their own decisions when there is GMO labeling. It's just more likely that they'll make decisions that aren't in their interests based upon their senseless bias against GMOs.
I'm conflicted over this. I agree that the label is intended to stigmatize. But I can't quite see that we shouldn't have them. The people who want the label to be there want it because it's scary sounding and they hope it will dissuade people from buying food that contains GMOs. And those people want to undermine the GMO food industry for a lot of stupid, superstitious, bullshit reasons.
But I do have objections to GMO food. My objections revolve mainly around two things: intellectual property rights and monocultures. I don't think it's a good strategy for our species for corporations to "own" and "license" the right to plant certain seeds. Also, agricultural monocultures can open us up to harm when some plant pest, pathogen, or disease latches on to the monoculture and potentially causes crop failure because our crops are all genetically identical. (The latter problem is possible without GMOs, but is enhanced by GMOs.)
The labels are factual, but when people are dissuaded from buying GMO foods because of the label, they're just buying in to a superstition that GMOs are bad. The people advocating for labels are doing it for the wrong reasons, but I do think we need to put some real thought into how we incorporate GMO foods into our food supply. I'd just rather we did it for the right reasons, because the way we're going now, we're having the wrong conversations about the dangers of GMOs.
Yes, it's a real paper, published in a journal called "Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities". It's a philosophy journal. Since they began in 1996, the journal has an H index of 12, which means that they have published 12 articles that have at least 12 citations. Which is to say, it's not super influential. They seem to largely publish deconstructionist literary criticism. Essentially, it is a nonsense journal that pseudo-intellectual academics publish in to make themselves feel validated about the worth of their "research".
Having read the feminist glaciology article, I can say that actually makes a couple of fair points, although it does so in an unnecessarily florid and contentious way.
Despite their claims, I don't believe that the authors establish a 'feminist glaciology framework' in their paper. They simply point out that the potential contributions to the field of women and indigenous people have been ignored, historically. They provide a reasonable amount of support for this position. And they suggest that we change. I really don't see anything particularly controversial in the actual paper. And I would estimate that this article is far beyond anything that is likely to appear in Angelaki in terms of scholarly value. Faint praise, but I believe that if these people had a decent editor, their paper would have been a lot better.
I read the actual journal article. What the authors seem to be talking about is the low credence that scientists in the past have given to indigenous knowledge about glaciers, which is a valid complaint and one that has been leveled at various branches of natural resources sciences of late. Why recognizing that knowledge counts as 'feminist' I cannot say. There are also observations that women have been excluded from glaciology in the past, and that had women been more involved, we may have done more and different research on, for example, the relationships between indigenous people and glaciers. I think those points are okay, as far as they go.
It's not a 'science' article in the quantitative sense. It's a survey of the state of the domain. It is clearly identified as such in the text. And it was published in a journal where such an article is appropriate.
People are making much of the $400,000 price tag. That money is distributed over the course of 5 years. I don't know what UO's institutional overhead rate is, but it is a reasonable guess that the Carey (the lead author) gets access to around $50,000 per year of this money. He has some budget worked out for that money that likely includes funding some number of hours of his own time, some hours for a graduate student, and then things like computer equipment and travel and so on. This particular paper is not the sole product of that money. In fact, it's not even listed as one of the intended outputs of the project. It is likely something that struck his interest as he was researching, and he chose to write it and see if anyone would publish it.
I do think the writing is florid. Sadly, that is the academic style right now. I believe that he could have made his point with half the word count. I also think that focusing on feminism rather than broader ideas of inclusiveness is likely to cause complaint, and, indeed, that is what we see here on Slashdot and in the reason.com write-up.
I don't think it's a bad article for what it says. I think how it says it could be improved. And I think the press coverage does a disservice with straw-man arguments. They're click-baiting people into raging about positions that the paper doesn't take.
I don't entirely understand the reference, not having read that particular book of Dennett's.
But I don't believe I'm trying to introduce some kind of false dichotomy, which as far as I can make out, is what you're talking about. I'm suggesting that the event of the appointment of a new Librarian of Congress is not a particularly good venue for denigrating the retired one. The old guy already stepped down, and the contextless sniping of the summary just seems spiteful. It's also completely without support, which makes it appear to be editorial.
We can certainly have a conversation about the failings of Billington. But "stuffy" "old" and "out of touch" have more flavor of ad hominem than of criticisms of his job performance.