Sanger was paid by Wales to edit Nupedia, and when Wales decided to shift focus to Wikipedia, Sanger's job became editing Wikipedia. The instant he stopped being paid, he left and never returned---he even unsubscribed from all the mailing lists, and his subsequent critiques of Wikipedia were communicated via third parties (slashdot and kuro5hin). As far as I can tell he's still bitter about being fired or something, because he has shown absolutely zero interest in involving himself with Wikipedia or providing constructive feedback or suggestions since the day he stopped being paid to do so. Nobody prevented him from signing up to the mailing lists or making proposals, but he chose not to.
Sanger has been skeptical from the beginning of letting ordinary folk edit an encyclopedia. Wales came up with the idea of letting anyone edit an encyclopedia as an experiment to sit alongside Nupedia, and Sanger has admitted that this was not his idea, and that he didn't particularly promote it. He does appear to have suggested the specific use of wiki software for the experiment, although Wales disputes that Sanger was the first one to suggest wikis to him.
Sanger was then hired as an editor of sorts for Wikipedia, and stopped contributing to it once he stopped being paid to do so.
There are areas of popular culture that are studied academically, e.g. by sociologists. But do we really want the general-audience encyclopedia articles written by academics? Do you want to pull up an article on, say, "gender", and get an academic treatise by a gender theorist? There are people with PhDs in gender studies, but they are not necessarily the only people who should be writing that article.
You seem to have in mind experts who are willing to gently guide laypeople in creating good articles. But such experts can already work on Wikipedia! Especially if they do indeed "gently" guide articles---act politely, point out good sources, etc.---they are generally listened to and respected.
The loudest complaints about Wikipedia from experts have been those, like some in these comments, who abhor the idea of having to work with someone who isn't knowledgeable in their field. Those experts see the participation of non-experts in article writing as the very problem, and having to interact with such laypeople as something to be avoided! So presumably they aren't the gentle guiding experts you're after.
Perhaps such experts exist---people who basically would fit in at Wikipedia, since they don't inherently object to working with non-experts, but would prefer a slightly more organized structure---but I doubt there are tons of them.
The reason academic tenure committees are so politicized is precisely that there are no good objective measures of expertise. Number of publications in peer-reviewed journals---but which journals count? Some journals were founded yesterday, have no prestige, and publish 90% of papers that get submitted. Some journals are run by a small group of editors who publish each others' work. So a tenure committee has to make sure they only count publications in good journals. How do you decide that? One attempt has been the ISI citation ratings, which are mostly objective (though which journals they choose to count for the sample set is subjective) but controversial.
In computer science, for example, journals are actually not the most prestigious publication venue---most top research is published in conferences, the best of which (e.g. SIGGRAPH) are both more selective and more influential than most CS journals. But that makes the job even harder, because nearly anything can be published in some conference (there are tons of them), so you have to limit yourself to "good" conferences again.
This is all not to mention that none of this measures ability to write an encyclopedia article, or even general knowledge of a field, since most academic publications are on some trivially narrow topic. I have a decent track record of publications, but they don't correlate that well with my areas of expertise---I am broadly knowledgeable and up-to-date on the literature in some areas I don't regularly publish in, and only very narrowly knowledgeable in some areas I do regularly publish in. What's more, I have nearly zero interest in volunteering to edit encyclopedia articles on those subjects, which I already work on all day. I prefer to edit articles on subjects in which I am very knowledgeable, but which aren't actually the subject of my academic job.
The most successful move so far has been cultural change (still ongoing) towards requiring verifiable sources for edits, especially major ones. There's no need to track down offenders; their edits will just get reverted, so long as the majority of the community is on board with the verifiability policy.
There are plans, unfortunately taking a long time to be put into action, for stabilizing displayed versions of popular articles. So instead of getting an up-to-the-second version that could be in flux or vandalized, revisions would be periodically blessed as pretty decent (or at least free of obvious crap), and by default people would get displayed the last blessed version.
If there are widely available reputable sources on a subject, then there's no good reason to cite obscure hard-to-find sources. If there are no widely available good sources, then obscure hard-to-find sources are acceptable.
The issue only usually comes up if: 1) it's a really, really obscure source; or 2) it's backing up claims that seem unlikely, or aren't corroborated in any other sources anyone can find.
If you make a significant edit, no matter what your expertise, you must cite a source. The reason is that articles should not only be correct, but verifiable as correct by following up on the sources. The fact that you "know" it is no longer good enough.
If you, as an expert familiar with the literature, make an edit with footnotes citing your sources, then Wikipedia will indeed recognize its superiority to edits that do not cite any relevant sources. If someone comes by and writes some crap with no reference to back it up, or a really shitty reference, then you can indeed revert that person's change, or it will likely be reverted by someone else even if you don't. At most you can post something on the talk page, saying "I wrote [x], which is summarized from [source y]; someone came by and changed it without a source to something I don't think is right"---it will be fixed rather quickly.
The point is that your expertise is not in itself some sort of card to wave around. Your expertise means that you ought to be more familiar with the literature, and thus can easily cite sources for your edits. If you do that, you will indeed be given a degree of deference above those who are less familiar with the literature and do not cite sources (or don't cite good sources) for their edits.
There is plenty of skepticism that Sangers is on the right track, but I don't think people are particularly irritated. The main developer of the MediaWiki software, for example, said on the mailing list that this is a great thing and exactly the sort of use that free-content licenses are supposed to encourage.
If you'll notice, in the offline world parasitic organisms of various sorts are nearly ubiquitous, to the point where at any given time just about every organism of sufficient size has at least one minor infection.
I'm a PhD student who will have a PhD relatively soon, so I apparently find some merit in earning one. However I would hardly think that when I have one I'll have some special standing to write an encyclopedia. A PhD does not in any way prepare you to write encyclopedias (nor, but that's a different problem, to teach intro-level classes). It specifically prepares you to do academic research in a narrow area; no more or less.
I actually heard a new graduate student mention something about how he read something that was "written by a professor in the area, and so probably reasoanble", which was met by riotous laughter from the professors in earshot.
You'll find in most areas that the intelligent people with PhDs tend not to bring that fact up much; it's usually the defensive folks of mediocre intelligence who add comma-PhD to the end of their names at every opportunity.
As someone who's in academia, I can say pretty confidently that nobody ever really uses traditional encyclopedias for anything.
Many people, especially in more technically-minded areas (e.g. computer science) have started using Wikipedia as a quick first look to get their bearings on a subject. Sometimes it's on purpose; sometimes it's because they're still using the previous first-line method of "just google for it" and Wikipedia comes up as the first hit (as it often now does). For that purpose, it's decent; it's certainly an improvement on the previous google-for-it method, since at least it aggregates information from multiple people who review it, instead of being one random author's geocities page. In the best cases, the article is even referenced with some good sources to go to for more information.
The only other encyclopedia I can think of that is in the running for that type of use is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and that only of course in the specific area of philosophy. This is probably also because it's freely available online. However, it doesn't do as good a job summarizing things into small chunks, and so isn't as good for quick orientation (Wikipedia articles are typically written in a hierarchical summarize-and-link-to-details style, while Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles are the more traditional "long essay under one heading").
If you can't get yourself oriented on the internet, you go to a textbook next, or dive into a search of a journal database. Britannica never enters the equation.
I agree that Wikipedia's model has problems, but I think such a thoroughly expert-driven model has other problems. Note that I don't have a solution for an ideal model myself; these are just comments.
The main Wikipedia problem, as you point out, is that especially on complex subjects, articles tend to degrade over time unless a handful of knowledgeable members stick around and are willing to commit significant time (or new ones come by to replace those who wander off).
Having only experts edit and review articles isn't exactly a panacea, though.
First of all, it drastically reduces the volunteer labor. I can claim expertise in some areas of computer science, but I don't edit Wikipedia articles on those for the most part, because it's what I already do all day, so not that fun. I use Wikipedia to indulge my hobbies, in which I don't have formal expertise, but do create pretty good articles if I may say so. I have done significant reading in the areas that are my hobbies, even if I'm not accredited in them, and I make sure all my edits are well-referenced, pay attention to comments on talk pages from others who might have expertise in the area, and generally make a good-faith and well-researched effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage on thos subjects (or in many cases, initiate coverage that was non-existent). Requiring me to edit only in the areas where I have credentials would make the project much less fun, and I would not spend nearly as much time on it.
Secondly, it may make articles unreadable by outsiders. Even well-intentioned specialists have a huge amount of background knowledge they subconsciously assume, and a lot of jargon. Wikipedia articles, for the most part, avoid falling into this trap---although even on Wikipedia there are sometimes arguments over just how formal the first paragraph of a technical article should be (specialists argue for maximally precise definitions; non-specialists tend to push for an informal summary). It's a difficult problem, but Wikipedia forces editors into confronting it, and in most cases the results are that some sort of compromise gets hammered out. I fear that this new project is tilted towards the specialists: by specialists, but also for specialists.
Thirdly, it may bias articles on general subjects towards a particular specialist take on things. There are countless Wikipedia articles that *could* be colonized by a particular field of research, but in principle are broader than that: While "clinical depression", for example, is a medical topic, "depression" is a wider one, and an article on "depression" written solely by psychiatrists would hardly give a very good overview (at the very least, hopefully some historians and sociologists would be added to the list of experts). Some effort would have to be made to stop this sort of "academic colonization".
In any case, I do wish them well, and look forward to copying anything good they do back to Wikipedia.:) I don't think they've found a panacea, though.
It works out pretty well in Japan---the roads, especially in Tokyo, are dense and covered with parked cars, like NYC, and about as good (bad) for biking as NYC. So the standard is that bikers ride on the sidewalks. It's a bit slower, since they have to go at a speed where they can avoid pedestrians, but it's significantly safer: Bike/car collisions can be fatal, while bike/pedestrian collisions rarely even cause serious injury.
I suppose the ideal would be an Amsterdam-style network of separate roads for bikes, complete with their own traffic signals, but given a lack of infrastructure, Tokyo's solution seems more prudent than the standard U.S. solution of bikes riding on the street.
You said: And Lebanese (quite unlike the Israelis) have not been lobbing explosives and rockets onto civilian targets, so it's obvious where the moral high ground is.
If the IDF counts as "the Israelis", why doesn't Hezbollah count as "the Lebanese"?
Lebanese have been lobbing rockets onto civilian targets. Did you miss the part where Hezbollah has been firing hundreds of rockets into Israeli cities?
Have you taken a look at what does get published? Sure, 90% of POD stuff is crap, but easily 90% of major-publisher stuff is crap too. I'm not even sure the major-publisher percentage is lower; the stuff they publish is more likely to be polished, but also more likely to be formulaic.
Music works similarly; most unsigned bands suck, but most bands on MTV suck too.
If you're interested in reducing dependence on foreign oil, what you need is an alternate source of vehicle fuel. Alternate sources for electricity generation don't do much there, because we generate very little of our electricity from oil to begin with---the biggest source of U.S. electricity is burning domestically-mined coal. As far as I can tell, burning methane that cows produce to generate electricity is not somehow going to magically reduce the use of gasoline in cars.
Now there's surely an environmental argument that burning coal isn't too good, but it's not a geopolitical argument and has nothing to do with the middle east.
It costs about $0.50 to manufacture a CD, not $15-20. Nearly the entire cost of the product is the right to own a legal copy of the music; the fact that it comes on a physical disc is not particularly relevant.
You are not however purchasing a "right to use". You are purchasing a legal copy of the music, which you can then do whatever you want with.
Similarly with software you are purchasing a legal copy of the software. It even comes on a disc, the exact same media that music CDs do!
There have been attempts to reform German spelling, and they have not entirely caught on. This is despite a few advantages that attempt has over any potential English spelling reform: 1) There are recognized organizations responsible for the language, at least officially, and they got together in a big conference, agreed upon it, and got all the relevant governments to agree; and 2) the reform was relatively minor, not nearly as enormous a deviation from established spelling norms as these proposed English reforms.
If many German newspapers and normal people simply ignore the reforms under those circumstances, what do you think the chances of English spelling reform ever catching on are?
The problem with that hypothesis is that hurricane frequency currently is still below what it was in the early 20th century, when the world was apparently cooler. Hurricane formation isn't a simple relationship between ocean temperature and storm outcome.
Increased energy dispersion in the Gulf does not automatically mean more intense hurricanes; there's a very tenuous causal link there, and the processes are not well understood.
It's true that there is a lot of disingenuity on the warming-is-fake side, but some of it is caused by disingenuity and outright stupidity on the warming-is-real side.
If you look at places like dailykos.com and other political proponents of "we need to do something", even mainstream ones like Al Gore, they're at huge odds with the scientific literature. For example, you now hear all sorts of nonsense about how increased hurricane frequency proves we need to do something, even though there is no evidence at all of a relationship (some scientists have hypothesized a relationship between warming and hurricane intensity---not frequency---but even that is highly speculative and not generally accepted).
In addition, I've heard claims that severe winters also support global warming, but the UN's general reports on the subject dispel that as a myth, and claim that global warming would result in, on average, slightly less severe winters. (Of course, severe winters don't *disprove* globl warming either---there are still plenty of year-to-year fluctuations even if the average is getting warmer.)
People are also conflating multiple trends. The important issue from a human-change point of view is the extent to which greenhouse gases and other human creations are changing climate. That's a separate question from the *aggregate* climate change. There *is* indeed good evidence for human-caused climate change, but it is still a separate question. For example, glacier retreat is often cited, but is largely a different phenomenon---Canadian glaciers have been retreating since about 1842, long before significant human-caused global warming. Current glacier retreat does appear to be caused or accelerated by global warming, but showing a picture of "glacier in 1840" and "glacier now" is just shady politics, when most of that recession happened from 1840-1930. And, of course, we should also take into account the estimates that about 30% of current warming is caused by an odd increase in solar output.
I think on the whole shoddy pro-global-warming argument is hurting the case. When the facts are on your side, there's no need to embellish them, and it damages credibility. This is why Real Scientists tend not to do it.
*Interest* is the place to start. If no women are interested in a subject, it follows that no women will be involved.
Now if women had applied for GNOME projects for summer of code and been denied, we could talk about why that is. But there were 181 applications, *none* of them from women. Therefore, the obvious question is why no women are even interested.
This is the same in computer science programs, too. IMO it's putting the cart before the horse to ask what percentage of internships should be taken up by women. We ought to first find out why women aren't even interested in computers in nearly as large numbers. Look at what middle school kids do in their spare time. Why are fewer 14-year-old girls than 14-year-old boys puttering around with PHP? Why, for the most part, do they get their male friends to help them with computer problems, instead of vice versa?
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Sanger was paid by Wales to edit Nupedia, and when Wales decided to shift focus to Wikipedia, Sanger's job became editing Wikipedia. The instant he stopped being paid, he left and never returned---he even unsubscribed from all the mailing lists, and his subsequent critiques of Wikipedia were communicated via third parties (slashdot and kuro5hin). As far as I can tell he's still bitter about being fired or something, because he has shown absolutely zero interest in involving himself with Wikipedia or providing constructive feedback or suggestions since the day he stopped being paid to do so. Nobody prevented him from signing up to the mailing lists or making proposals, but he chose not to.
Sanger has been skeptical from the beginning of letting ordinary folk edit an encyclopedia. Wales came up with the idea of letting anyone edit an encyclopedia as an experiment to sit alongside Nupedia, and Sanger has admitted that this was not his idea, and that he didn't particularly promote it. He does appear to have suggested the specific use of wiki software for the experiment, although Wales disputes that Sanger was the first one to suggest wikis to him.
Sanger was then hired as an editor of sorts for Wikipedia, and stopped contributing to it once he stopped being paid to do so.
There are areas of popular culture that are studied academically, e.g. by sociologists. But do we really want the general-audience encyclopedia articles written by academics? Do you want to pull up an article on, say, "gender", and get an academic treatise by a gender theorist? There are people with PhDs in gender studies, but they are not necessarily the only people who should be writing that article.
You seem to have in mind experts who are willing to gently guide laypeople in creating good articles. But such experts can already work on Wikipedia! Especially if they do indeed "gently" guide articles---act politely, point out good sources, etc.---they are generally listened to and respected.
The loudest complaints about Wikipedia from experts have been those, like some in these comments, who abhor the idea of having to work with someone who isn't knowledgeable in their field. Those experts see the participation of non-experts in article writing as the very problem, and having to interact with such laypeople as something to be avoided! So presumably they aren't the gentle guiding experts you're after.
Perhaps such experts exist---people who basically would fit in at Wikipedia, since they don't inherently object to working with non-experts, but would prefer a slightly more organized structure---but I doubt there are tons of them.
The reason academic tenure committees are so politicized is precisely that there are no good objective measures of expertise. Number of publications in peer-reviewed journals---but which journals count? Some journals were founded yesterday, have no prestige, and publish 90% of papers that get submitted. Some journals are run by a small group of editors who publish each others' work. So a tenure committee has to make sure they only count publications in good journals. How do you decide that? One attempt has been the ISI citation ratings, which are mostly objective (though which journals they choose to count for the sample set is subjective) but controversial.
In computer science, for example, journals are actually not the most prestigious publication venue---most top research is published in conferences, the best of which (e.g. SIGGRAPH) are both more selective and more influential than most CS journals. But that makes the job even harder, because nearly anything can be published in some conference (there are tons of them), so you have to limit yourself to "good" conferences again.
This is all not to mention that none of this measures ability to write an encyclopedia article, or even general knowledge of a field, since most academic publications are on some trivially narrow topic. I have a decent track record of publications, but they don't correlate that well with my areas of expertise---I am broadly knowledgeable and up-to-date on the literature in some areas I don't regularly publish in, and only very narrowly knowledgeable in some areas I do regularly publish in. What's more, I have nearly zero interest in volunteering to edit encyclopedia articles on those subjects, which I already work on all day. I prefer to edit articles on subjects in which I am very knowledgeable, but which aren't actually the subject of my academic job.
The most successful move so far has been cultural change (still ongoing) towards requiring verifiable sources for edits, especially major ones. There's no need to track down offenders; their edits will just get reverted, so long as the majority of the community is on board with the verifiability policy.
There are plans, unfortunately taking a long time to be put into action, for stabilizing displayed versions of popular articles. So instead of getting an up-to-the-second version that could be in flux or vandalized, revisions would be periodically blessed as pretty decent (or at least free of obvious crap), and by default people would get displayed the last blessed version.
If there are widely available reputable sources on a subject, then there's no good reason to cite obscure hard-to-find sources. If there are no widely available good sources, then obscure hard-to-find sources are acceptable.
The issue only usually comes up if: 1) it's a really, really obscure source; or 2) it's backing up claims that seem unlikely, or aren't corroborated in any other sources anyone can find.
If you make a significant edit, no matter what your expertise, you must cite a source. The reason is that articles should not only be correct, but verifiable as correct by following up on the sources. The fact that you "know" it is no longer good enough.
If you, as an expert familiar with the literature, make an edit with footnotes citing your sources, then Wikipedia will indeed recognize its superiority to edits that do not cite any relevant sources. If someone comes by and writes some crap with no reference to back it up, or a really shitty reference, then you can indeed revert that person's change, or it will likely be reverted by someone else even if you don't. At most you can post something on the talk page, saying "I wrote [x], which is summarized from [source y]; someone came by and changed it without a source to something I don't think is right"---it will be fixed rather quickly.
The point is that your expertise is not in itself some sort of card to wave around. Your expertise means that you ought to be more familiar with the literature, and thus can easily cite sources for your edits. If you do that, you will indeed be given a degree of deference above those who are less familiar with the literature and do not cite sources (or don't cite good sources) for their edits.
There is plenty of skepticism that Sangers is on the right track, but I don't think people are particularly irritated. The main developer of the MediaWiki software, for example, said on the mailing list that this is a great thing and exactly the sort of use that free-content licenses are supposed to encourage.
If you'll notice, in the offline world parasitic organisms of various sorts are nearly ubiquitous, to the point where at any given time just about every organism of sufficient size has at least one minor infection.
I'm a PhD student who will have a PhD relatively soon, so I apparently find some merit in earning one. However I would hardly think that when I have one I'll have some special standing to write an encyclopedia. A PhD does not in any way prepare you to write encyclopedias (nor, but that's a different problem, to teach intro-level classes). It specifically prepares you to do academic research in a narrow area; no more or less.
I actually heard a new graduate student mention something about how he read something that was "written by a professor in the area, and so probably reasoanble", which was met by riotous laughter from the professors in earshot.
You'll find in most areas that the intelligent people with PhDs tend not to bring that fact up much; it's usually the defensive folks of mediocre intelligence who add comma-PhD to the end of their names at every opportunity.
As someone who's in academia, I can say pretty confidently that nobody ever really uses traditional encyclopedias for anything.
Many people, especially in more technically-minded areas (e.g. computer science) have started using Wikipedia as a quick first look to get their bearings on a subject. Sometimes it's on purpose; sometimes it's because they're still using the previous first-line method of "just google for it" and Wikipedia comes up as the first hit (as it often now does). For that purpose, it's decent; it's certainly an improvement on the previous google-for-it method, since at least it aggregates information from multiple people who review it, instead of being one random author's geocities page. In the best cases, the article is even referenced with some good sources to go to for more information.
The only other encyclopedia I can think of that is in the running for that type of use is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and that only of course in the specific area of philosophy. This is probably also because it's freely available online. However, it doesn't do as good a job summarizing things into small chunks, and so isn't as good for quick orientation (Wikipedia articles are typically written in a hierarchical summarize-and-link-to-details style, while Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles are the more traditional "long essay under one heading").
If you can't get yourself oriented on the internet, you go to a textbook next, or dive into a search of a journal database. Britannica never enters the equation.
I agree that Wikipedia's model has problems, but I think such a thoroughly expert-driven model has other problems. Note that I don't have a solution for an ideal model myself; these are just comments.
:) I don't think they've found a panacea, though.
The main Wikipedia problem, as you point out, is that especially on complex subjects, articles tend to degrade over time unless a handful of knowledgeable members stick around and are willing to commit significant time (or new ones come by to replace those who wander off).
Having only experts edit and review articles isn't exactly a panacea, though.
First of all, it drastically reduces the volunteer labor. I can claim expertise in some areas of computer science, but I don't edit Wikipedia articles on those for the most part, because it's what I already do all day, so not that fun. I use Wikipedia to indulge my hobbies, in which I don't have formal expertise, but do create pretty good articles if I may say so. I have done significant reading in the areas that are my hobbies, even if I'm not accredited in them, and I make sure all my edits are well-referenced, pay attention to comments on talk pages from others who might have expertise in the area, and generally make a good-faith and well-researched effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage on thos subjects (or in many cases, initiate coverage that was non-existent). Requiring me to edit only in the areas where I have credentials would make the project much less fun, and I would not spend nearly as much time on it.
Secondly, it may make articles unreadable by outsiders. Even well-intentioned specialists have a huge amount of background knowledge they subconsciously assume, and a lot of jargon. Wikipedia articles, for the most part, avoid falling into this trap---although even on Wikipedia there are sometimes arguments over just how formal the first paragraph of a technical article should be (specialists argue for maximally precise definitions; non-specialists tend to push for an informal summary). It's a difficult problem, but Wikipedia forces editors into confronting it, and in most cases the results are that some sort of compromise gets hammered out. I fear that this new project is tilted towards the specialists: by specialists, but also for specialists.
Thirdly, it may bias articles on general subjects towards a particular specialist take on things. There are countless Wikipedia articles that *could* be colonized by a particular field of research, but in principle are broader than that: While "clinical depression", for example, is a medical topic, "depression" is a wider one, and an article on "depression" written solely by psychiatrists would hardly give a very good overview (at the very least, hopefully some historians and sociologists would be added to the list of experts). Some effort would have to be made to stop this sort of "academic colonization".
In any case, I do wish them well, and look forward to copying anything good they do back to Wikipedia.
It works out pretty well in Japan---the roads, especially in Tokyo, are dense and covered with parked cars, like NYC, and about as good (bad) for biking as NYC. So the standard is that bikers ride on the sidewalks. It's a bit slower, since they have to go at a speed where they can avoid pedestrians, but it's significantly safer: Bike/car collisions can be fatal, while bike/pedestrian collisions rarely even cause serious injury.
I suppose the ideal would be an Amsterdam-style network of separate roads for bikes, complete with their own traffic signals, but given a lack of infrastructure, Tokyo's solution seems more prudent than the standard U.S. solution of bikes riding on the street.
You said:
And Lebanese (quite unlike the Israelis) have not been lobbing explosives and rockets onto civilian targets, so it's obvious where the moral high ground is.
If the IDF counts as "the Israelis", why doesn't Hezbollah count as "the Lebanese"?
Lebanese have been lobbing rockets onto civilian targets. Did you miss the part where Hezbollah has been firing hundreds of rockets into Israeli cities?
Have you taken a look at what does get published? Sure, 90% of POD stuff is crap, but easily 90% of major-publisher stuff is crap too. I'm not even sure the major-publisher percentage is lower; the stuff they publish is more likely to be polished, but also more likely to be formulaic.
Music works similarly; most unsigned bands suck, but most bands on MTV suck too.
If you're interested in reducing dependence on foreign oil, what you need is an alternate source of vehicle fuel. Alternate sources for electricity generation don't do much there, because we generate very little of our electricity from oil to begin with---the biggest source of U.S. electricity is burning domestically-mined coal. As far as I can tell, burning methane that cows produce to generate electricity is not somehow going to magically reduce the use of gasoline in cars.
Now there's surely an environmental argument that burning coal isn't too good, but it's not a geopolitical argument and has nothing to do with the middle east.
It costs about $0.50 to manufacture a CD, not $15-20. Nearly the entire cost of the product is the right to own a legal copy of the music; the fact that it comes on a physical disc is not particularly relevant.
You are not however purchasing a "right to use". You are purchasing a legal copy of the music, which you can then do whatever you want with.
Similarly with software you are purchasing a legal copy of the software. It even comes on a disc, the exact same media that music CDs do!
There have been attempts to reform German spelling, and they have not entirely caught on. This is despite a few advantages that attempt has over any potential English spelling reform: 1) There are recognized organizations responsible for the language, at least officially, and they got together in a big conference, agreed upon it, and got all the relevant governments to agree; and 2) the reform was relatively minor, not nearly as enormous a deviation from established spelling norms as these proposed English reforms.
If many German newspapers and normal people simply ignore the reforms under those circumstances, what do you think the chances of English spelling reform ever catching on are?
The problem with that hypothesis is that hurricane frequency currently is still below what it was in the early 20th century, when the world was apparently cooler. Hurricane formation isn't a simple relationship between ocean temperature and storm outcome.
Increased energy dispersion in the Gulf does not automatically mean more intense hurricanes; there's a very tenuous causal link there, and the processes are not well understood.
I thought socialism-in-one-country was no longer in fashion amongst Marxists!
It's true that there is a lot of disingenuity on the warming-is-fake side, but some of it is caused by disingenuity and outright stupidity on the warming-is-real side.
If you look at places like dailykos.com and other political proponents of "we need to do something", even mainstream ones like Al Gore, they're at huge odds with the scientific literature. For example, you now hear all sorts of nonsense about how increased hurricane frequency proves we need to do something, even though there is no evidence at all of a relationship (some scientists have hypothesized a relationship between warming and hurricane intensity---not frequency---but even that is highly speculative and not generally accepted).
In addition, I've heard claims that severe winters also support global warming, but the UN's general reports on the subject dispel that as a myth, and claim that global warming would result in, on average, slightly less severe winters. (Of course, severe winters don't *disprove* globl warming either---there are still plenty of year-to-year fluctuations even if the average is getting warmer.)
People are also conflating multiple trends. The important issue from a human-change point of view is the extent to which greenhouse gases and other human creations are changing climate. That's a separate question from the *aggregate* climate change. There *is* indeed good evidence for human-caused climate change, but it is still a separate question. For example, glacier retreat is often cited, but is largely a different phenomenon---Canadian glaciers have been retreating since about 1842, long before significant human-caused global warming. Current glacier retreat does appear to be caused or accelerated by global warming, but showing a picture of "glacier in 1840" and "glacier now" is just shady politics, when most of that recession happened from 1840-1930. And, of course, we should also take into account the estimates that about 30% of current warming is caused by an odd increase in solar output.
I think on the whole shoddy pro-global-warming argument is hurting the case. When the facts are on your side, there's no need to embellish them, and it damages credibility. This is why Real Scientists tend not to do it.
*Interest* is the place to start. If no women are interested in a subject, it follows that no women will be involved.
Now if women had applied for GNOME projects for summer of code and been denied, we could talk about why that is. But there were 181 applications, *none* of them from women. Therefore, the obvious question is why no women are even interested.
This is the same in computer science programs, too. IMO it's putting the cart before the horse to ask what percentage of internships should be taken up by women. We ought to first find out why women aren't even interested in computers in nearly as large numbers. Look at what middle school kids do in their spare time. Why are fewer 14-year-old girls than 14-year-old boys puttering around with PHP? Why, for the most part, do they get their male friends to help them with computer problems, instead of vice versa?
If you figured that out, the rest would follow.