A woman (wo'man) is a man with a womb. Mankind includes both sexes.
A lovely bit of etymology, but, alas, not quite correct. It's from wif-man, where 'wif' originally meant 'female' (the word 'wif', of course, became 'wife'). 'Man' originally had both meanings (male and female), but lost the female sense over time, hence the newer - although still pretty outdated - 'mankind' for both sexes. There's a good discussion of it here.
PS always liked that about Star Trek myself...m'am never sounds right, for some reason.
I'm frankly not entirely sure where the Elgin Marbles were in the Dollhouse, nor who the 'client' was. But, if it was indeed Greece, and they were being stolen from the Britsh Museum (where they actually currently are) and given the ongoing controversy surrounding the fact that Britain has them and Greece doesn't -- well.. I'm sure if Greece were willing to buy them back for a fair market value the British Museum would be happy to return them, especially if a deal to have them return to Britain for exhibitions from time to time could be worked out...
(Meanwhile, if Greece just goes and steals them back that's going to be rather awkward to explain...)
I rather liked the use of the Parthenon marbles (but then, IAAAncientHistorian). There was even a line about "that's one of the metopes, we want the frieze", which was a nice bit of geekery (they are two separate parts of the architectural decoration). But a lot of the explanation was done at speed and in passing. Fine for a geek reference, but maybe not for something that's relatively important to the plot. Whedon/the writers didn't seem sure whether or not he/they wanted it to be a major part of the episode's plot, or just a MacGuffin.
The missing explanation was really simple: there's more bits of the Parthenon around than the bits taken by Elgin. It's one of those monuments where to see all of the surviving sculpture requires a trip to a number of museums (the British Museum, Athens, and 9 others, thanks Wikipedia), and some of it isn't on public display. So the idea that there would be one bit of the frieze that was in circulation makes sense.
As for buying them back, these were black-market artworks, remember? They could, of course, have used law enforcement - Interpol takes these things rather seriously - but given how impressive the "collection" in the vault would have been, I can imagine that not being possible. As for stealing them back, I don't imagine that a Greek politician would be in too much trouble for recovering a piece of national heritage from criminals by staging a daring raid on an international art thief (IF they got the bit back, of course). At least, a Greek politician within a tv-show universe, and possibly IRL as well given how much skullduggery there is on even the legitimate antiquities market.
Oh my, if only this were true!
This happens in the UK too, and has since, well, forever. Politicians brief journalists off the record all the time, and the higher up the politician, the more they do it. What's that quote from 'Yes Minister'? Something like "The ship of state is the only ship that leaks from the top".
Editing, refereeing, and managing the cost of peer review
This is not a trivial cost, indeed, it is a substantial cost. The "first copy cost" of a journal I worked for was 80% of the total cost (that's getting the content ready for the printers, not the cost of printing or distribution). This doesn't mean that printing online is 20% cheaper either: the cost of setting up the web version of the content, and managing access, was higher than the cost of setting up the press. In other words, publishing online alone does not significantly cut the cost of producing the journal. To publish online and in print costs significantly more.
Why are the costs so high? Although journal referees do not get paid, there are plenty of costs involved in peer review. Articles have to be vetted before being sent out to referee, referees have to be found, and chased, editorial decisions have to made, and the entire process has to be administered. Electronic content submission makes life easier and cheaper, but not substantially so. The peer review process costs, for major journals, millions of dollars a year. Then there are the costs for editing (good scientist != good writer), proof reading and sub-editing (there are always edits, and these have to be approved etc., which slows down the process and adds to admin. costs as well), and typesetting (which has to be done regardless of the format the document was submitted in). This is not a cheap process by any means.
Do science journals cost too much?
Generally, yes. Despite the high costs of academic publishing, the prices charged for content are often exorbitant, although some publishers are much better than others. However, there are reasons for this that go beyond simple commercial greed. The advertising revenue from online content is still very small, and display advertising brings in a large amount of any print journal's revenue. Moreover, many journals are/were dependent on revenue from classified advertising (job vacancies), which is becoming less and less necessary for the universities and companies who used to rely on them. In addition, site-wide online subscriptions lead to a drop in personal subscriptions, which takes away further revenue and (equally importantly) advertising dollars.
The print journal has made money for 150 years, and the web is new; no-one's quite sure how journal publication will work in 20 years time. Given the speed of all this change, you can see why many publishers are worried about the long-term future, and are hiking up prices now.
This does not justify the rise in prices we have seen over the past few years, but it does, I hope, explain some of it. Non-commercial open-source-style approaches are being tried, but there are many barriers to their success. Among these: the high cost of academic publishing has to be bourne by someone; and academic careers and salaries (which is the path I'm on now) are often defined by where work is published. I hope they succeed, but I don't think it'll happen soon. More likely we'll see a flattening-out of costs as the market stabilises, and both institutions and publishers work out how much site licenses are really worth.
I don't go about announcing that I'm straight, and I don't appreciate others going about announcing that they're gay.
But you do! Every time you mention your wife, every time you mention your girlfriend (that's an OR statement there, I hope:), every time you mention how attractive a woman is, you display your sexuality. Absolutely nothing wrong with that AT ALL, of course, but please realise that you are doing it! It's just such normal behaviour that it isn't a political statement, or one that normally gets attention.
The difference is whether or not one of their staff did this, or whether they hired a 'professional' firm who assured them that these were accepted practices
If we were talking about a small company, that might be an interesting discussion to have. But this is BMW, for pity's sake! They're not a particularly small operation, and this is their site in their home domain, where they sell a _lot_ of not especially cheap cars. In other words, this is very big business, and they can afford to hire: (a) IT professionals who knew where you cross the line, and (b) consultants who don't advise using shoddy and shady techniques to increase pagerank. No excuse. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero.
And then we banned slavery. Like that made things better. Then you got the whole bloody awful business of chaining all the slaves together so you could sling the whole lot of 'em overboard at once if you catch sight of the Royal Navy on your way across and claim innocence.
Well, it did make things better! We spent a fortune putting warships on the West African coast in order to stop the trade. The "sling the whole lot of them over" trick stopped working as well - simply owning a ship that was rigged for slavery (deck arrangements, etc.) was enough to have you prosecuted.
It took us far, far, too long to make the right decision, but when we did we at least tried to do something about the situation (although owning of slaves in British Dominions wasn't illegal until about a decade or so later [my memory is bad in the mornings, check this if it really matters to you]). Thanks for the Ali quote, BTW, lovely!
Without wishing to stir things up too much, the reason that the US gets so much criticism for slavery, folks, is that a large chunk of your ancestors fought a bloody war to retain their 'right' to use slaves (among other things, yes, I know)! It might also be possible to point to a near-apartheid that continued until the mid-60s, and whose effects are still so demonstrable within US society today, as a reason why some people think that the history and legacy of US slavery needs to be confronted - and, as a happy coincidence, I note that it's black history month (in the US, at least, although my general view on things like this is nicely summed up by Tom Lehrer).
A good funny post. Whatever idiot moderated that as overrated deserves to be shot. Unfortunately, that idiot was me! I could have sworn that I selected "funny". My mistake, sorry. Hopefully, this post will remove my dodgy moderation - and eldavojohn has my apologies.
...was about a month or so ago. One day, a Saturday I'm pretty sure, I found that my email from the last three or so weeks was gone. Just...gone. I poked around for a while and realized that my DNS had changed without any warning! They had moved the server over and changed the DNS and had used a version of my data that was almost a MONTH old. They didn't even send a warning email telling me they would be moving servers. Granted this was personal email, and personal web site, but I was pissed.
Sucks, doesn't it?
This happened to me a while ago (back in the mid 90s, when the web was young). Our site (a science journal) was hosted externally. The hosting company managed to:
Forget to pay for their domain name! Because they wanted to move their ip addresses around, our domain name pointed to their domain, not to an ip (vague way of putting it, I know, but that's how it worked). So we just disappeared for three days while they denied there was a problem. A five figure hosting contract and they couldn't get round to paying a $15 bill!
After this, they (they controlled our dns) set the dns to a specific ip. Unfortunately, due to company decrees, we were using an internal dns system which was caching the site address. They were told, repeatedly, that if they moved the server, they had to tell us (and give us the new ip). They did move the ip. They didn't tell us anything. Instead they copied all the data onto the new server, but left the old server running. We spent a whole week preparing update content on the wrong server, published it on the wrong server, and spent almost a whole day answering phone calls with "no, really, $VALUED_CUSTOMER_PAYING_EXPENSIVE_SUBSCRIPTION, the new content is there - it must be a browser caching issue".
Oh, and frequent site crashes, charging us over a thousand bucks for an sql query to get some subscriber data (which we managed to avoid by, essentially, hacking our own server - just about the only vulnerability they ever patched), and much, much more.
Would you say, "Microsoft are a company" or, "Microsoft is a company"? It is a company. What's the point of putting something into a logical grouping if you're just going to treat it as if it's still separate individuals?
If I were referring to the company as a corporate entity, I'd say "is", if I were referring to the individuals that make up the company, I'd use "are". So: "Microsoft is aiming for Q3 profits of $x" because that's the corporate entity; but "Microsoft are developing new applications" because that's people within the company who are doing the developing, not the entity itself. It's all nuance and usage - but it's perfectly acceptable British English either way.
Oh, and I'm not going to play tit for tat on language usage! That said, the US habit of writing "an historic" does irk me - for me, it's only "an" if the "h" is silent at the start of the word: "an honest man with a horse can do a heck of a lot in an hour". Fact is, there are loads of cases where US usage seems to jar - e.g. "defenced" (as in, "passes succesfully defenced") rather than "defended" - but it would be a dull world if we were all the same, wouldn't it?
The Greeks and Romans were notoriously homosexual, so their being exceptions over male nudity is interesting in this context.
The Greeks, yes, the Romans, no. Roman sexuality was a bit on the odd side, really.
In any case, Greek and Roman sculptors regularly, and deliberately, created statues with small pensises. The logic, iirc, was that a large penis was evidence of being dominated by your sexual drives. This was a bad thing for a number of reasons, and to the Romans this was evidence of femininity, because women are ruled by their emotions, and men by their logic, so an overactive sex drive made you more of a woman then a man - told you they were odd! by our standards at least. Only satyrs etc. tend to get big willies in ancient sculpture.
Oddly enough, and trying not to invoke Godwin, a similar attidute pervaded Nazi attitudes, although their logic was different. Like a lot of Nazi logic it has a grotesque evil beauty to it: white men are superior to black men; black men have big dicks; therefore it must be better to be undersized in the trouser snake department!
I've always loved the idea of SS men in the shower thinking "look at him, he's tiny! Lucky bastard!".
In fact, you get similar ideas throughout western history (can't speak for others, don't know)
No apologies for the length of the post, although I've never had complaints about length before...
A) Publish the number of people who have read the current revision so that users can get a rough heuristic of quality.
I'm not sure that's going to help. A good article on a rare topic might get only a hundred or so views. The number of edits might do something, as an article that has been edited occasionally implies that at least people are looking at it. An article which has only ever had one author work on it is, perhaps, more likely to be libellous than one that has had multiple authors (as people can become aware of problems and flag them to the wider community
B) Educate users about what Wikipedia is and isn't. Wikipedia is not a list of facts, that is what an almanac is for. Wikipedia is a gateway to further information. If one occasionally runs into a "fact" that is PDOMA then it doesn't really matter. So you go to verify the fact, you find that it isn't really true, no harm no foul.
Wikipedia isn't just a link portal, it's an encyclopedia. There's no point in pretending that this isn't what wikipedia is designed to be. That its statements are often externally verifiable makes it more reliable in some respects, but the text matters!
From a publishing standpoint, you simply cannot say "they can check it elsewhere, so no harm, no foul"! For a start, wikipedia has allowed itself to be used to commit an ethically wrong act (it deeply offends my morals as well), and possibly a criminal one (malicious libel can be a criminal offense in the uk), and its reputation has been seriously compromised.
Comparisons to google are flawed (I know you aren't making them, but others are). Google does not write editorial content. Google doesn't tell me what "moon hoax" means, it just provides me links that might. Wikipedia _does_ provide editorial content, and puts its logo, and, I'm sorry to say this, its brand, behind the idea that "wikipedia is a place to find stuff out", not "wikipedia has some useful links". If you call something an encylopedia, then you have to expect people to judge you on your content, not your links. In any case, what is to stop someone making a libellous page and then making up a few satellite sites around it to link to?
To repecap my other post: wikipedia is a great resource that could be the future of reference publishing. It's that good. But to be an encyclopedia means that you can't carry malicious libel for months on end. You just can't. This is a problem, and it has to be fixed fast, and fixed well - they've done it before, and now they have to do it again.
Over the four months it was posted I'm willing to bet less than a thousand people read it. Really it is a tree-falls-in-a-forest issue, if no one is reading incorrect material does it really matter that it's incorrect?
Of course it matters!
I love wikipedia. I think it's a great resource and, having worked for a number of years in online reference publishing (really!), I don't think it's that bad as a source either (it's not as good as one of the good encyclopedias, but I've seen worse pieces of reference publishing that people were charging for, and it generally has good hyperlinks to stuff you can often put your faith in reliably, such as academic websites).
But what makes it _really_ great is the idea behind it. Genuinely free (in both senses) content - created by and for its users. That is a truly fantastic idea, and one well worth struggling for. _That_ is what makes it a resource which I will always use and resuse.
But if you don't strive to uphold the basic ideals, then the whole idea falls apart. Wikipedia was used by a single, maliciously minded, individual to commit libel, and to unfairly tarnish someone's reputation. Its authority and its reputation have been tarnished.
You can't say "we have x million articles" and then say "but the ones that are only read a thousand times in a few months don't matter".
You can't say "we believe in the importance of free speech", and then not abide by the most fundamental responsibility involved in free speech, which is to not endanger it recklessly!
Most of all, you can't say "information is important" and then try to pretend that some of it, which was, again, maliciously posted (that is, the poster knew it was a lie, and did it purposefully to tarnish a reputation), doesn't matter.
Wikipedia has proved startlingly robust and surprisingly good at getting over problems which might have destroyed it before (notably the problem of copyright infringement). This is a serious problem, and Wikipedia has to answer it. I have full confidence that it will, but it's no good ignoring the problem.
If you don't reveal that you've copied it verbatim, agreed. Then you are letting your readers down. If you attribute the release, though...
Oh, and if my editor let me get away with that, I'd be in heaven:) Unfortunately, its more usually a case of: I can take these three press releases, and run them with a little alteration after making sure they're OK, or I can turn one into a proper story, but then drop the others. If none of them merits a full story, so you run the releases. If you do attribute, I don't think you're doing a bad job (well, not a terrible one).
apologies, the other post was horribly formatted, mod parent down.
> Repeat after me, publishing press releases as your own work is not journalism
No, it is journalism. It may be lazy, but it's still legit. Why? Because you're still telling a story that most other people wouldn't otherwise hear about. A journalist has chosen a source that he/she considers reliable, and used it to tell a story. As someone who has seen a lot of specialist journalism (as opposed to mass media coverage) I can tell you that it is very common. It's also not always bad journalism: I don't understand the specifics, I trust the people who have published the release, and I know enough to know it's not a load of waffle. Yes, I make a habit of attributing the release, and yes, I always include a link to the original release, and yes, it is slightly lazy. But sometimes its better than not running the story at all.
Acadmically, it would be plagiarism, and any of my students who did it would be in hot water. But that doesn't mean that it's plagiarism in the journalism world, and it's only chronically lazy if you used the press release and slacked off, if you used that time better on another story, well, that's two worthwhile stories out there.
You may not like this, hell, I don't always like it. But readers do seem to, as do the authors of the releases. So long as you don't publish something that's incorrect, I don't see a great deal of harm in it. Idealism only gets you so far when the deadline looms:)
> Repeat after me, publishing press releases as your own work is not journalism
No, it is journalism. It may be lazy, but it's still legit. Why? Because you're still telling a story that most other people wouldn't otherwise hear about. A journalist has chosen a source that he/she considers reliable, and used it to tell a story. As someone who has seen a lot of specialist journalism (as opposed to mass media coverage) I can tell you that it is very common. It's also not always bad journalism: I don't understand the specifics, I trust the people who have published the release, and I know enough to know it's not a load of waffle. Yes, I make a habit of attributing the release, and yes, I always include a link to the original release, and yes, it is slightly lazy. But sometimes its better than not running the story at all.
Acadmically, it would be plagiarism, and any of my students who did it would be in hot water. But that doesn't mean that it's plagiarism in the journalism world, and it's only chronically lazy if you used the press release and slacked off, if you used that time better on another story, well, that's two worthwhile stories out there.
You may not like this, hell, I don't always like it. But readers do seem to, as do the authors of the releases. So long as you don't publish something that's incorrect, I don't see a great deal of harm in it. Idealism only gets you so far when the deadline looms:)
More than that - have you ever tried writing an article in true tabloid style? A friend of mine is a cricket stringer for one of the broadsheets (hint, still a broadsheet) in the UK - for him the best cricket journalist on the planet is Etheridge, who works for the Sun. No-one else could tell the stories he does, with the word limit (and restriction) he works to. Very, very, clever people indeed.
Just out of interest - were they breaking any kind of press embargo here? Press releases and the like are often put in an obvious place (e.g. www.anysite.com/press/todays_date.html), so Reuters would have had a chance to guess the url based on their knowledge of previous press releases - which would be a breach of trust.
In any case, if it was embargoed, which this kind of release probably would be, it's surely not very ethical to run the story a few hours early for the sake of the scoop.
Slashdot Mirror
sexist assumption noted
A woman (wo'man) is a man with a womb. Mankind includes both sexes.
A lovely bit of etymology, but, alas, not quite correct. It's from wif-man, where 'wif' originally meant 'female' (the word 'wif', of course, became 'wife'). 'Man' originally had both meanings (male and female), but lost the female sense over time, hence the newer - although still pretty outdated - 'mankind' for both sexes. There's a good discussion of it here.
PS always liked that about Star Trek myself...m'am never sounds right, for some reason.
I'm frankly not entirely sure where the Elgin Marbles were in the Dollhouse, nor who the 'client' was. But, if it was indeed Greece, and they were being stolen from the Britsh Museum (where they actually currently are) and given the ongoing controversy surrounding the fact that Britain has them and Greece doesn't -- well.. I'm sure if Greece were willing to buy them back for a fair market value the British Museum would be happy to return them, especially if a deal to have them return to Britain for exhibitions from time to time could be worked out...
(Meanwhile, if Greece just goes and steals them back that's going to be rather awkward to explain...)
I rather liked the use of the Parthenon marbles (but then, IAAAncientHistorian). There was even a line about "that's one of the metopes, we want the frieze", which was a nice bit of geekery (they are two separate parts of the architectural decoration). But a lot of the explanation was done at speed and in passing. Fine for a geek reference, but maybe not for something that's relatively important to the plot. Whedon/the writers didn't seem sure whether or not he/they wanted it to be a major part of the episode's plot, or just a MacGuffin.
The missing explanation was really simple: there's more bits of the Parthenon around than the bits taken by Elgin. It's one of those monuments where to see all of the surviving sculpture requires a trip to a number of museums (the British Museum, Athens, and 9 others, thanks Wikipedia), and some of it isn't on public display. So the idea that there would be one bit of the frieze that was in circulation makes sense.
As for buying them back, these were black-market artworks, remember? They could, of course, have used law enforcement - Interpol takes these things rather seriously - but given how impressive the "collection" in the vault would have been, I can imagine that not being possible. As for stealing them back, I don't imagine that a Greek politician would be in too much trouble for recovering a piece of national heritage from criminals by staging a daring raid on an international art thief (IF they got the bit back, of course). At least, a Greek politician within a tv-show universe, and possibly IRL as well given how much skullduggery there is on even the legitimate antiquities market.
Oh my, if only this were true! This happens in the UK too, and has since, well, forever. Politicians brief journalists off the record all the time, and the higher up the politician, the more they do it. What's that quote from 'Yes Minister'? Something like "The ship of state is the only ship that leaks from the top".
To reply to these points:
Editing, refereeing, and managing the cost of peer review
This is not a trivial cost, indeed, it is a substantial cost. The "first copy cost" of a journal I worked for was 80% of the total cost (that's getting the content ready for the printers, not the cost of printing or distribution). This doesn't mean that printing online is 20% cheaper either: the cost of setting up the web version of the content, and managing access, was higher than the cost of setting up the press. In other words, publishing online alone does not significantly cut the cost of producing the journal. To publish online and in print costs significantly more.
Why are the costs so high? Although journal referees do not get paid, there are plenty of costs involved in peer review. Articles have to be vetted before being sent out to referee, referees have to be found, and chased, editorial decisions have to made, and the entire process has to be administered. Electronic content submission makes life easier and cheaper, but not substantially so. The peer review process costs, for major journals, millions of dollars a year. Then there are the costs for editing (good scientist != good writer), proof reading and sub-editing (there are always edits, and these have to be approved etc., which slows down the process and adds to admin. costs as well), and typesetting (which has to be done regardless of the format the document was submitted in). This is not a cheap process by any means.
Do science journals cost too much?
Generally, yes. Despite the high costs of academic publishing, the prices charged for content are often exorbitant, although some publishers are much better than others. However, there are reasons for this that go beyond simple commercial greed. The advertising revenue from online content is still very small, and display advertising brings in a large amount of any print journal's revenue. Moreover, many journals are/were dependent on revenue from classified advertising (job vacancies), which is becoming less and less necessary for the universities and companies who used to rely on them. In addition, site-wide online subscriptions lead to a drop in personal subscriptions, which takes away further revenue and (equally importantly) advertising dollars.
The print journal has made money for 150 years, and the web is new; no-one's quite sure how journal publication will work in 20 years time. Given the speed of all this change, you can see why many publishers are worried about the long-term future, and are hiking up prices now.
This does not justify the rise in prices we have seen over the past few years, but it does, I hope, explain some of it. Non-commercial open-source-style approaches are being tried, but there are many barriers to their success. Among these: the high cost of academic publishing has to be bourne by someone; and academic careers and salaries (which is the path I'm on now) are often defined by where work is published. I hope they succeed, but I don't think it'll happen soon. More likely we'll see a flattening-out of costs as the market stabilises, and both institutions and publishers work out how much site licenses are really worth.
I don't go about announcing that I'm straight, and I don't appreciate others going about announcing that they're gay.
But you do! Every time you mention your wife, every time you mention your girlfriend (that's an OR statement there, I hope :), every time you mention how attractive a woman is, you display your sexuality. Absolutely nothing wrong with that AT ALL, of course, but please realise that you are doing it! It's just such normal behaviour that it isn't a political statement, or one that normally gets attention.
The difference is whether or not one of their staff did this, or whether they hired a 'professional' firm who assured them that these were accepted practices
If we were talking about a small company, that might be an interesting discussion to have. But this is BMW, for pity's sake! They're not a particularly small operation, and this is their site in their home domain, where they sell a _lot_ of not especially cheap cars. In other words, this is very big business, and they can afford to hire: (a) IT professionals who knew where you cross the line, and (b) consultants who don't advise using shoddy and shady techniques to increase pagerank. No excuse. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero.
And then we banned slavery. Like that made things better. Then you got the whole bloody awful business of chaining all the slaves together so you could sling the whole lot of 'em overboard at once if you catch sight of the Royal Navy on your way across and claim innocence.
Well, it did make things better! We spent a fortune putting warships on the West African coast in order to stop the trade. The "sling the whole lot of them over" trick stopped working as well - simply owning a ship that was rigged for slavery (deck arrangements, etc.) was enough to have you prosecuted.
It took us far, far, too long to make the right decision, but when we did we at least tried to do something about the situation (although owning of slaves in British Dominions wasn't illegal until about a decade or so later [my memory is bad in the mornings, check this if it really matters to you]). Thanks for the Ali quote, BTW, lovely!
Without wishing to stir things up too much, the reason that the US gets so much criticism for slavery, folks, is that a large chunk of your ancestors fought a bloody war to retain their 'right' to use slaves (among other things, yes, I know)! It might also be possible to point to a near-apartheid that continued until the mid-60s, and whose effects are still so demonstrable within US society today, as a reason why some people think that the history and legacy of US slavery needs to be confronted - and, as a happy coincidence, I note that it's black history month (in the US, at least, although my general view on things like this is nicely summed up by Tom Lehrer).
A good funny post. Whatever idiot moderated that as overrated deserves to be shot. Unfortunately, that idiot was me! I could have sworn that I selected "funny". My mistake, sorry. Hopefully, this post will remove my dodgy moderation - and eldavojohn has my apologies.
blue skies
Sucks, doesn't it?
This happened to me a while ago (back in the mid 90s, when the web was young). Our site (a science journal) was hosted externally. The hosting company managed to:
Oh, and frequent site crashes, charging us over a thousand bucks for an sql query to get some subscriber data (which we managed to avoid by, essentially, hacking our own server - just about the only vulnerability they ever patched), and much, much more.
Happy days...
Would you say, "Microsoft are a company" or, "Microsoft is a company"? It is a company. What's the point of putting something into a logical grouping if you're just going to treat it as if it's still separate individuals?
If I were referring to the company as a corporate entity, I'd say "is", if I were referring to the individuals that make up the company, I'd use "are". So: "Microsoft is aiming for Q3 profits of $x" because that's the corporate entity; but "Microsoft are developing new applications" because that's people within the company who are doing the developing, not the entity itself. It's all nuance and usage - but it's perfectly acceptable British English either way.
Oh, and I'm not going to play tit for tat on language usage! That said, the US habit of writing "an historic" does irk me - for me, it's only "an" if the "h" is silent at the start of the word: "an honest man with a horse can do a heck of a lot in an hour". Fact is, there are loads of cases where US usage seems to jar - e.g. "defenced" (as in, "passes succesfully defenced") rather than "defended" - but it would be a dull world if we were all the same, wouldn't it?
The Greeks and Romans were notoriously homosexual, so their being exceptions over male nudity is interesting in this context.
The Greeks, yes, the Romans, no. Roman sexuality was a bit on the odd side, really.
In any case, Greek and Roman sculptors regularly, and deliberately, created statues with small pensises. The logic, iirc, was that a large penis was evidence of being dominated by your sexual drives. This was a bad thing for a number of reasons, and to the Romans this was evidence of femininity, because women are ruled by their emotions, and men by their logic, so an overactive sex drive made you more of a woman then a man - told you they were odd! by our standards at least. Only satyrs etc. tend to get big willies in ancient sculpture.
Oddly enough, and trying not to invoke Godwin, a similar attidute pervaded Nazi attitudes, although their logic was different. Like a lot of Nazi logic it has a grotesque evil beauty to it: white men are superior to black men; black men have big dicks; therefore it must be better to be undersized in the trouser snake department!
I've always loved the idea of SS men in the shower thinking "look at him, he's tiny! Lucky bastard!".
In fact, you get similar ideas throughout western history (can't speak for others, don't know)
No apologies for the length of the post, although I've never had complaints about length before...
A) Publish the number of people who have read the current revision so that users can get a rough heuristic of quality.
I'm not sure that's going to help. A good article on a rare topic might get only a hundred or so views. The number of edits might do something, as an article that has been edited occasionally implies that at least people are looking at it. An article which has only ever had one author work on it is, perhaps, more likely to be libellous than one that has had multiple authors (as people can become aware of problems and flag them to the wider community
B) Educate users about what Wikipedia is and isn't. Wikipedia is not a list of facts, that is what an almanac is for. Wikipedia is a gateway to further information. If one occasionally runs into a "fact" that is PDOMA then it doesn't really matter. So you go to verify the fact, you find that it isn't really true, no harm no foul.
Wikipedia isn't just a link portal, it's an encyclopedia. There's no point in pretending that this isn't what wikipedia is designed to be. That its statements are often externally verifiable makes it more reliable in some respects, but the text matters!
From a publishing standpoint, you simply cannot say "they can check it elsewhere, so no harm, no foul"! For a start, wikipedia has allowed itself to be used to commit an ethically wrong act (it deeply offends my morals as well), and possibly a criminal one (malicious libel can be a criminal offense in the uk), and its reputation has been seriously compromised.
Comparisons to google are flawed (I know you aren't making them, but others are). Google does not write editorial content. Google doesn't tell me what "moon hoax" means, it just provides me links that might. Wikipedia _does_ provide editorial content, and puts its logo, and, I'm sorry to say this, its brand, behind the idea that "wikipedia is a place to find stuff out", not "wikipedia has some useful links". If you call something an encylopedia, then you have to expect people to judge you on your content, not your links. In any case, what is to stop someone making a libellous page and then making up a few satellite sites around it to link to?
To repecap my other post: wikipedia is a great resource that could be the future of reference publishing. It's that good. But to be an encyclopedia means that you can't carry malicious libel for months on end. You just can't. This is a problem, and it has to be fixed fast, and fixed well - they've done it before, and now they have to do it again.
Over the four months it was posted I'm willing to bet less than a thousand people read it. Really it is a tree-falls-in-a-forest issue, if no one is reading incorrect material does it really matter that it's incorrect?
Of course it matters!
I love wikipedia. I think it's a great resource and, having worked for a number of years in online reference publishing (really!), I don't think it's that bad as a source either (it's not as good as one of the good encyclopedias, but I've seen worse pieces of reference publishing that people were charging for, and it generally has good hyperlinks to stuff you can often put your faith in reliably, such as academic websites).
But what makes it _really_ great is the idea behind it. Genuinely free (in both senses) content - created by and for its users. That is a truly fantastic idea, and one well worth struggling for. _That_ is what makes it a resource which I will always use and resuse.
But if you don't strive to uphold the basic ideals, then the whole idea falls apart. Wikipedia was used by a single, maliciously minded, individual to commit libel, and to unfairly tarnish someone's reputation. Its authority and its reputation have been tarnished.
You can't say "we have x million articles" and then say "but the ones that are only read a thousand times in a few months don't matter".
You can't say "we believe in the importance of free speech", and then not abide by the most fundamental responsibility involved in free speech, which is to not endanger it recklessly!
Most of all, you can't say "information is important" and then try to pretend that some of it, which was, again, maliciously posted (that is, the poster knew it was a lie, and did it purposefully to tarnish a reputation), doesn't matter.
Wikipedia has proved startlingly robust and surprisingly good at getting over problems which might have destroyed it before (notably the problem of copyright infringement). This is a serious problem, and Wikipedia has to answer it. I have full confidence that it will, but it's no good ignoring the problem.
If you don't reveal that you've copied it verbatim, agreed. Then you are letting your readers down. If you attribute the release, though...
:) Unfortunately, its more usually a case of: I can take these three press releases, and run them with a little alteration after making sure they're OK, or I can turn one into a proper story, but then drop the others. If none of them merits a full story, so you run the releases. If you do attribute, I don't think you're doing a bad job (well, not a terrible one).
Oh, and if my editor let me get away with that, I'd be in heaven
apologies, the other post was horribly formatted, mod parent down.
:)
> Repeat after me, publishing press releases as your own work is not journalism
No, it is journalism. It may be lazy, but it's still legit. Why? Because you're still telling a story that most other people wouldn't otherwise hear about. A journalist has chosen a source that he/she considers reliable, and used it to tell a story. As someone who has seen a lot of specialist journalism (as opposed to mass media coverage) I can tell you that it is very common. It's also not always bad journalism: I don't understand the specifics, I trust the people who have published the release, and I know enough to know it's not a load of waffle. Yes, I make a habit of attributing the release, and yes, I always include a link to the original release, and yes, it is slightly lazy. But sometimes its better than not running the story at all.
Acadmically, it would be plagiarism, and any of my students who did it would be in hot water. But that doesn't mean that it's plagiarism in the journalism world, and it's only chronically lazy if you used the press release and slacked off, if you used that time better on another story, well, that's two worthwhile stories out there.
You may not like this, hell, I don't always like it. But readers do seem to, as do the authors of the releases. So long as you don't publish something that's incorrect, I don't see a great deal of harm in it. Idealism only gets you so far when the deadline looms
> Repeat after me, publishing press releases as your own work is not journalism No, it is journalism. It may be lazy, but it's still legit. Why? Because you're still telling a story that most other people wouldn't otherwise hear about. A journalist has chosen a source that he/she considers reliable, and used it to tell a story. As someone who has seen a lot of specialist journalism (as opposed to mass media coverage) I can tell you that it is very common. It's also not always bad journalism: I don't understand the specifics, I trust the people who have published the release, and I know enough to know it's not a load of waffle. Yes, I make a habit of attributing the release, and yes, I always include a link to the original release, and yes, it is slightly lazy. But sometimes its better than not running the story at all. Acadmically, it would be plagiarism, and any of my students who did it would be in hot water. But that doesn't mean that it's plagiarism in the journalism world, and it's only chronically lazy if you used the press release and slacked off, if you used that time better on another story, well, that's two worthwhile stories out there. You may not like this, hell, I don't always like it. But readers do seem to, as do the authors of the releases. So long as you don't publish something that's incorrect, I don't see a great deal of harm in it. Idealism only gets you so far when the deadline looms :)
More than that - have you ever tried writing an article in true tabloid style? A friend of mine is a cricket stringer for one of the broadsheets (hint, still a broadsheet) in the UK - for him the best cricket journalist on the planet is Etheridge, who works for the Sun. No-one else could tell the stories he does, with the word limit (and restriction) he works to. Very, very, clever people indeed.
Just out of interest - were they breaking any kind of press embargo here? Press releases and the like are often put in an obvious place (e.g. www.anysite.com/press/todays_date.html), so Reuters would have had a chance to guess the url based on their knowledge of previous press releases - which would be a breach of trust. In any case, if it was embargoed, which this kind of release probably would be, it's surely not very ethical to run the story a few hours early for the sake of the scoop.