The paper states: "Republicans who are college graduates are considerably less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change than those who have received less education. These better-educated Republicans could hardly be said to suffer a knowledge deficit". This assumes that being a graduate implies having knowledge about science and/or technology. However, having a degree in theology or politics or English literature is not incompatible with having a "knowledge deficit" in science. Much more useful would be to look at the differences between people who are educated in the basics of science and technology and those who are not.
It seems to me that there is nowadays a cultural problem that goes right back to childhood experiences. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, and my memory is of a time when there was tremendous excitement about science and technology. We would watch the US space programme on television: humans walking on the moon! The shelves in my local newsagent were full of Practical Wireless, Practical Electronics, Everyday Electronics, Amateur Radio, car maintenance magazines and manuals, etc. New Scientist and Scientific American were there on the shelf as well. I could go down to the high street and buy the components to build real, working electronic things, and by the age of 11, I had a basic understanding of what resistors, capacitors, transistors and diodes did. Here in the UK, we had programmes like "How?", "Tomorrow's World", and "Horizon" that were whown on prime-time TV and watched by millions. There are some such programmes now, like "Brainiac", but they wouldn't stand a chance of being in prime-time. All of this stuff seems to have gone now - it's almost as if the free availability of knowledge through the internet has killed off the thirst for knowledge.
I also wonder about the tendency to refer to "Science", "Technology" and "Engineering" together as if they were one and the same. They are actually quite different things that may require quite different approaches. The issue of whether it is socially acceptable to site a wind farm in a particular location has virtually nothing to do with Science, and more to do with art. I happen to find wind farms quite beautiful things myself, but it seems many other people don't. I don't really know why this is, but in many cases, I think people like or dislike what they are told to like or dislike.
But it really pisses me off when I connect to a site on my Nokia Communicator with its 640 pixel-wide screen and the page comes up crippled within only the left hand 120 pixels because some web-developer decided that's what I should have based on his/her ignorant assumptions!
It is sad to say that academics are so hopelessly individual they are highly unlikely to be able to join together to beat the publishers just yet! Not really true. See: http://www.openarchives.org/
Also. ArXiv.org, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ and others.
The tax-payer pays for the research to be carried out. The research results are then given away to the publishers, who get other researchers to carry out quality control (at the tax-payers' expense). The publishers then sell it back to the researchers for a subscription that is paid by the tax-payer.
Quality control of the information collection is done by peer reviewers (who really do it for free), not by publishers, who only exist because it was necessary in the past for someone to organize all the communication, printing and distribution.
It is another example of "disintermediation" - cutting out the middle-man - as a result of the Internet. The publishers no longer add value.
I use SSH (puTTY) on my Nokia Communicator. It works great over WLAN. Over GPRS, the network latency is a bit disconcerting, but you can get used to it.
This seems to be effectively like the whitelist approach to spam blocking, with the CAs becoming the whitelist maintainers (for a fee).
But right now we already have the choice of using blacklists or whitelists, mostly provided free on an open-source kind of philosophy. Basing it on a certificate means that there is less traffic going to DNS blocking list servers, so they don't become a bottleneck, but this doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment anyway.
The proposal drags domain names into the picture, rather than just IP addresses, but what is the point of that? Each server along the path of an email can currently include a received line to identify the IP address that it received the message from, and IP addresses are already identified against their owners by the allocation authorities, so I don't see what the certification adds.
The identification of message types does add something, but either it will be hard to maintain because of all the nuances of types, or else all mail will have to be pigeon-holed into often ill-fitting categories.
We already see the problems caused by (over?)zealous use of blocking when those of us with our own, uncompromised and quite secure web servers are blocked by AOL just because we are on supposedly "dynamic" cable or DSL lines (even though our IP address never changes for years at a time).
We have a system currently whereby an MTA is just that: a Mail Transport Agent, and SMTP only deals with the transport of mail. The standard for mail transport should not be complicated by additional filtering, classification and blocking functions.
Slashdot Mirror
The paper states: "Republicans who are college graduates are considerably less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change than those who have received less education. These better-educated Republicans could hardly be said to suffer a knowledge deficit". This assumes that being a graduate implies having knowledge about science and/or technology. However, having a degree in theology or politics or English literature is not incompatible with having a "knowledge deficit" in science. Much more useful would be to look at the differences between people who are educated in the basics of science and technology and those who are not. It seems to me that there is nowadays a cultural problem that goes right back to childhood experiences. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, and my memory is of a time when there was tremendous excitement about science and technology. We would watch the US space programme on television: humans walking on the moon! The shelves in my local newsagent were full of Practical Wireless, Practical Electronics, Everyday Electronics, Amateur Radio, car maintenance magazines and manuals, etc. New Scientist and Scientific American were there on the shelf as well. I could go down to the high street and buy the components to build real, working electronic things, and by the age of 11, I had a basic understanding of what resistors, capacitors, transistors and diodes did. Here in the UK, we had programmes like "How?", "Tomorrow's World", and "Horizon" that were whown on prime-time TV and watched by millions. There are some such programmes now, like "Brainiac", but they wouldn't stand a chance of being in prime-time. All of this stuff seems to have gone now - it's almost as if the free availability of knowledge through the internet has killed off the thirst for knowledge. I also wonder about the tendency to refer to "Science", "Technology" and "Engineering" together as if they were one and the same. They are actually quite different things that may require quite different approaches. The issue of whether it is socially acceptable to site a wind farm in a particular location has virtually nothing to do with Science, and more to do with art. I happen to find wind farms quite beautiful things myself, but it seems many other people don't. I don't really know why this is, but in many cases, I think people like or dislike what they are told to like or dislike.
There is no such verb as "to sublimate". The verb is "to sublime" --- sheesh!
But it really pisses me off when I connect to a site on my Nokia Communicator with its 640 pixel-wide screen and the page comes up crippled within only the left hand 120 pixels because some web-developer decided that's what I should have based on his/her ignorant assumptions!
The tax-payer pays for the research to be carried out. The research results are then given away to the publishers, who get other researchers to carry out quality control (at the tax-payers' expense). The publishers then sell it back to the researchers for a subscription that is paid by the tax-payer.
Quality control of the information collection is done by peer reviewers (who really do it for free), not by publishers, who only exist because it was necessary in the past for someone to organize all the communication, printing and distribution.
It is another example of "disintermediation" - cutting out the middle-man - as a result of the Internet. The publishers no longer add value.
I use SSH (puTTY) on my Nokia Communicator. It works great over WLAN. Over GPRS, the network latency is a bit disconcerting, but you can get used to it.
This seems to be effectively like the whitelist approach to spam blocking, with the CAs becoming the whitelist maintainers (for a fee).
But right now we already have the choice of using blacklists or whitelists, mostly provided free on an open-source kind of philosophy. Basing it on a certificate means that there is less traffic going to DNS blocking list servers, so they don't become a bottleneck, but this doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment anyway.
The proposal drags domain names into the picture, rather than just IP addresses, but what is the point of that? Each server along the path of an email can currently include a received line to identify the IP address that it received the message from, and IP addresses are already identified against their owners by the allocation authorities, so I don't see what the certification adds.
The identification of message types does add something, but either it will be hard to maintain because of all the nuances of types, or else all mail will have to be pigeon-holed into often ill-fitting categories.
We already see the problems caused by (over?)zealous use of blocking when those of us with our own, uncompromised and quite secure web servers are blocked by AOL just because we are on supposedly "dynamic" cable or DSL lines (even though our IP address never changes for years at a time).
We have a system currently whereby an MTA is just that: a Mail Transport Agent, and SMTP only deals with the transport of mail. The standard for mail transport should not be complicated by additional filtering, classification and blocking functions.