>> i have no problem with someone saying the believe in something because they choose to - that's what faith is.
First of all, I agree with your overall sentiments. However, I think that the attitude conveyed in the above quote is actually a problem-- essentially, you are saying that you don't have a problem with people believing things that are contrary to things dictated by logic and things that the human race continues to discover through science.
This IS a problem; brainwashing people should NOT be required to cause people to believe something. FACTS and LOGIC should be enough. Folks who are immune to FACTS and LOGIC are, at best, stupid people to stay away from; at worst, they are gun-wielding fundamentalists whose world-view gives them the right to kill you, an infidel.
And actually, I don't even believe that anyone "chooses" to have faith. I believe that there is an ecosystem in which children are brainwashed into believing dogma, and into thinking that it's their job to spread that dogma. Further, lots of adult "rehabilitation programs" exist that pray on people at low points of their lives who may be criminals or drug addicts; instead of giving them a healthy framework to think about the choices they make, they instead teach these folks to submit their will to God.
Is faith bad? I'm not sure. But I think that when we speak of it, we should think beyond the positive effects it has on a brainwashed automaton and ask whether or not it's really doing us, society, in this day and age, any good? When thinking about this question, also consider that "faith" is mutually exclusive to the concept of "morality," which seems to be something that the "faithful" believe they have a monopoly on.
Personally, I inherited an old laptop that I figured I would just stick a free OS on it and surf the web. I love the web, and it is my main form of entertainment.
However, what I've discovered is that consuming web content often stretches beyond just "surfing"-- especially the ability to download useful software. So half the time I'm annoyed because the natural extension of consuming web content goes beyond what my crappy laptop can do.
That said, for "free" I still have a couple of USB ports; can still route the audio and video to an external media center; still do some decent basic audio recording; still look at Flash-based web sites; still hook into my network and listen to my audio on my choice of software, in multiple formats.
I think that the iPad is a rip-off because I'm guessing that people (non-nerdy techie normal whatever) will discover that it doesn't meet *their* needs, either-- there are certain capabilities that folks take for granted that won't be there. Unless they buy that weird port adapter thing. Which kind of sucks because they already laid out a few hundred bucks as it is.
I agree with your assessment that most folks tend to congregate with others who agree with them. I believe that's okay, though. That's pretty much how society works offline, too.
I would be interested to see some numbers around how many people have "well-rounded" information sources today vs. pre-internet. People interested in seeking out data and alternative viewpoints will probably always be a minority of the population-- but given today's abundance of information, the chances are that the percentage of such people will only increase.
So to answer the original original question: No, personalized news does not lead to ignorance. The mediocrity of most of the population already takes care of that.
There is really no question that the new way of finding information, including the news, is online. The thing that makes online information finding desirable is that you can filter out the crap that you don't want to read.
Old media such as newspapers want to force you to look at things that you aren't interested in. We can debate all we want about the value of The New York Times, but as long as I can get search results on the particular subject I am interested in-- and get feeds about the things I'm interested in-- I don't really care about the New York Times.
I get what you're saying, but actually any formal punishment is just institutional "revenge".
The fact that people are blood-thirsty when it comes to capital crimes may be barbaric, but the fact is that one could make the argument that it's equally barbaric to subject someone to the horror of a life sentence.
In fact, it seems downright cruel to make someone live in a cage.
Agreed. Also, many of your favorite television shows have a staff of several writers, who all manage to consistently keep your interest. Why would this situation be objectionable?
I totally agree with this-- the whole "format" battle was really goofy and useless. I've been using a Roku box to stream Netflix movies-- the experience is flawless.
It seems almost barbaric to buy a disc, or to have to wait for one to come in the mail.
It will be necessary going forward to cultivate profitability for entities accountable for making credibility judgments within the universe of information that is available.
In this model, the designation of "blogger" or "investigative journalist" or whatever will is irrelevant, because the demand for accurate and timely information persists. In turn, this model necessitates that people providing information get compensated for their efforts so that they can keep working.
The people doing the research would own the articulation of their research, and the "critics" of this information who would aggregate that in whatever format they find appropriate and profitable. In other words, the current news media, but completely independent of the medium of delivery.
I currently support web apps for a living; while in real life, I'm not an apologist for poor web design, the nature of my job is troubleshooting problems that often stem from environments that are somewhat outside of our control.
If you've ever worked a significant amount of time support web apps, you are probably painfully aware that, despite any contracts or signed system requirements documents-- and the fact that the products you sell are coded to those specs-- the reality is that users tend to have more control over their browsing experience that you could ever account for in QA testing.
First, QA costs money. So, it is reasonable to limit the scope to something less than the infinite possibilities of combinations presented by browser toolbars and plugins.
Second, even if you were able to roughly approximate testing with lots and lots of plugin combinations, there is the matter of users' environments. Lots of stuff happens between a browser and a web server, some of which, such as proxy caching, can break a web application. Yes, there are proxy directives; no, they are not always effective. It depends on how the proxy is set up. Also, some anti-virus products are known to cause false-positives and block certain code. Also, in general terms, you can never underestimate users' ability to much up their PCs in some manner or another.
So, I empathize with eBay. While in my job I could point to some things, such as working with the IT department, that might mitigate problems, eBay has zero possibility of doing that because most of their customers are consumers, not enterprises. It looks like they have reacted to some feedback to improve the experience of users, but are now suffering from caching and plug-in issues that they did not count on.
Standardization sounds like a very promising concept; but I'm guessing that reality is years away still.
While riding New Jersey Transit the day after this crime took place, I heard a conversation about it. One guy actually said, "What do they expect with only a plate glass window between the outside and all of that stuff?"
I know that this was meant to be funny, but around 1995-ish, my digital camera (a rarity at the time) got stolen. Luckily, the police were able to recover it.
It was damaged, though. Apparently the thief had no clue that it was digital and was trying to pry it open to figure out where the film goes.
I was always satisfied with Doom, as far as first-person shooters. However, I was recently surprised at the level of immersion that happened while playing Asphalt 4 (racing game) on my Nintendo DSi while on the bus. It seems that the relatively meaningless speed while playing the game in a stationary environment actually feels pretty cool while you're actually moving forward...
I can't imagine why this was modded insightful. It seems like the typical "if you know what you're doing, you can achieve anything you want already." This doesn't take into account the growing audience of people who view the Web as an entertainment medium.
It's pretty clear the Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Ubiquity, and technologies like RSS, are centered around content aggregation, and that content is the most important thing. Taken individually, these things are relatively simple to understand. But the fact is that they each require their own learning curve-- and my (admittedly cursory) experience with plug-ins points to a very primitive set of underwhelming individual applications.
I did RTFA and, of course, there is zero detail about this thing. But I see stuff like ning.com, which Andreesen had a large hand in creating, and I believe that there is probably some pretty hefty creative thinking going on. I can only guess that the idea of content aggregation, if built properly into a browser, would be pretty huge.
I definitely concede that without all of the information, it is the typical Slashdot ???? profit model. But business can ruin any idea, no matter how good. The question is, what comes before the unpredictable ???? part of this RockMelt idea? IMHO, if content aggregation is built into a browser properly, in a way that the average Web user can understand, this could be pretty kick ass.
On a tangential note, I just recently rediscovered "iGoogle" and thought, "Why am I not using this more?" After a few days, though, I remembered why: It's just an overwhelmingly clumsy content aggregation web page. I spent lots of time trying to figure how to best layout the content, but it is still too burdensome to be useful.
Of course, another way to look at it is that this is the first step to all content being freely available all the time, with a guarantee that you will be billed for what you view.
Your brother, in a professional sense, really only depends on his talent and not the music business model. His talent (and subsequent reputation) is his primary product; he gets paid to make music sound good. If nobody buys the songs that he engineers and produces, it is no skin off of his back because he was already paid to make it sound good. So it seems like he is merely towing the industry line without giving this free music model its due consideration.
When he started out, did he charge everyone $12,000 for engineering and producing music? Or, did he work cheaply (or even free) in order to get his work out there for people to listen to?
If he-- out of the gate-- started commanding thousands of dollars, then I commend him and the rest of this post is invalid. I suspect, though, that he worked cheaply to have stuff for others to hear. This built his reputation that now allows him to command more money and to make a living.
It is the same with musicians-- they must generate interest before they can even consider making any real money with music. Since putting music online is so cheap, why shouldn't an unknown band make songs that nobody ever heard of freely available? Do you buy songs without hearing them first?* Are you a fan of bands whose music you have never heard?
The point is that cost is no longer a significant factor in the ability of independent musicians to record and make their music available; it is only a matter of time before we start seeing a lucrative non-music-industry route to success emerge from this situation. If I were an industry person, I would scoff at the notion of free music, too, because the status quo would be the foundation of my living.
* Technically, if you buy a CD, you probably do; but for this discussion, I'm referring to online music.
I can't speak for everyone who has negative feelings toward Windows; but there are some really practical reasons to dislike the MS monopoly.
If you have a computer that does everything you want, why would you want to change the foundation upon which it works? In the MS world, it is because they are going to drop support for your version of Windows; and because of that, software companies are going to stop supporting their software for that unsupported Windows platform.
If that software is windows only, there's a pretty good chance that any data created with it that you value will be damaged, if not rendered completely unusable.
Further, one of the most important pieces of software that will likely stop working on an unsupported version of Windows is the Antivirus software-- it's not economically feasible for AV companies to keep pumping out updated virus definitions for an outdated and unsupported operating system.
Add to this the fact that there will no longer be updates for that Windows version, and continuing to run the unsupported OS is a pretty big security risk (assuming, of course, that you care about connecting to the Internet).
So, do you not see that in the Windows world you have no *choice* but to eventually upgrade, if you are at all interested in being able to continue to use your computer?
When my Windows XP machines start breaking, that will likely mark my exit from the Windows world. If I'm going to have to learn a new UI anyway, and if I'm going to invest in new hardware, I may as well make a clean break from my dependency on Windows. I know that I can do this with very little pain because I only choose platform-agnostic software so that my data has a better chance of remaining usable for a longer period of time.
So, the point isn't whether Windows 7 is good or not. It probably is, judging from what I've read. But I'm not likely to get any first-hand experience with it. I will have real freedom of OS choice when I'm ready to upgrade my hardware, and I will make my choice based on the longevity, usefulness, and accessibility of my data.
I don't think your post is at all a flame. I'll go one step farther and say that I don't think most people even *know* what an Operating System is. This is at the heart of why, outside of tech circles, praise for Linux falls on deaf ears.
Don't get me wrong: They know that there is this thing called "Windows". I just think that, much like people think that Internet Explorer *is* the internet, they think that Windows *is* the computer.
I remember when I first started my current job, in a web developer position. We were using "templates" for developing custom products. The templates had about 90% of what was needed at any given time, but when I was first given a task that was essentially a new feature, I asked naively, "How do we handle this? I see that we're using templates, but this is new. I'd like to code this so that everyone could use it."
That was met with bafflement. As it turns out, every single developer-- when faced with the same situation-- had simply added to his/her own stash of code that was never shared. Therefore, a lot of time was (and probably still is, I'm not a developer anymore) wasted re-coding stuff that already existed. That is because the notion of delving into code, with the intent to share knowledge in a meeting, was a foreign concept.
Somewhere in between "zero" code reviews like the situation that I was in, and spending zillions of hours on tedious code reviews which may or may not be useful, there exists the right balance. Like anything other situation, you should avoid useless meetings. But if you have a particular project that would benefit from it in some way-- either from a re-usability or a time-saving or a code maintenance perspective-- I think it's worth it.
As always, the obstacle is finding someone in management who understands these concepts. I haven't figured out how to effectively explain the "obvious" to PHBs. You would do well to consider communication as a key necessity when wrestling with your question...
Pardon me, but at the risk of losing my geek cred, I was just wondering how many sides a "religon" has? I Binged it, and couldn't seem to find the answer.
I don't know why this would "mark the end" for wikipedia? The main goal of wikipedia as I understand it is not to be "free and open" but to *use* the notion of "free and openness" to present information as thoroughly and accurately as possible.
Therefore, this is necessary. Specifically, an entity who is abusing "The Commons" is getting blocked. Of course there will always be a "way in" to the Commons. This is just taking the next logical step of having a "Commons" while attempting to prevent "The Tragedy of the Commons" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Garrett_Hardin.27s_essay).
Slashdot Mirror
>> i have no problem with someone saying the believe in something because they choose to - that's what faith is.
First of all, I agree with your overall sentiments. However, I think that the attitude conveyed in the above quote is actually a problem-- essentially, you are saying that you don't have a problem with people believing things that are contrary to things dictated by logic and things that the human race continues to discover through science.
This IS a problem; brainwashing people should NOT be required to cause people to believe something. FACTS and LOGIC should be enough. Folks who are immune to FACTS and LOGIC are, at best, stupid people to stay away from; at worst, they are gun-wielding fundamentalists whose world-view gives them the right to kill you, an infidel.
And actually, I don't even believe that anyone "chooses" to have faith. I believe that there is an ecosystem in which children are brainwashed into believing dogma, and into thinking that it's their job to spread that dogma. Further, lots of adult "rehabilitation programs" exist that pray on people at low points of their lives who may be criminals or drug addicts; instead of giving them a healthy framework to think about the choices they make, they instead teach these folks to submit their will to God.
Is faith bad? I'm not sure. But I think that when we speak of it, we should think beyond the positive effects it has on a brainwashed automaton and ask whether or not it's really doing us, society, in this day and age, any good? When thinking about this question, also consider that "faith" is mutually exclusive to the concept of "morality," which seems to be something that the "faithful" believe they have a monopoly on.
Personally, I inherited an old laptop that I figured I would just stick a free OS on it and surf the web. I love the web, and it is my main form of entertainment.
However, what I've discovered is that consuming web content often stretches beyond just "surfing"-- especially the ability to download useful software. So half the time I'm annoyed because the natural extension of consuming web content goes beyond what my crappy laptop can do.
That said, for "free" I still have a couple of USB ports; can still route the audio and video to an external media center; still do some decent basic audio recording; still look at Flash-based web sites; still hook into my network and listen to my audio on my choice of software, in multiple formats.
I think that the iPad is a rip-off because I'm guessing that people (non-nerdy techie normal whatever) will discover that it doesn't meet *their* needs, either-- there are certain capabilities that folks take for granted that won't be there. Unless they buy that weird port adapter thing. Which kind of sucks because they already laid out a few hundred bucks as it is.
I agree with your assessment that most folks tend to congregate with others who agree with them. I believe that's okay, though. That's pretty much how society works offline, too.
I would be interested to see some numbers around how many people have "well-rounded" information sources today vs. pre-internet. People interested in seeking out data and alternative viewpoints will probably always be a minority of the population-- but given today's abundance of information, the chances are that the percentage of such people will only increase.
So to answer the original original question: No, personalized news does not lead to ignorance. The mediocrity of most of the population already takes care of that.
There is really no question that the new way of finding information, including the news, is online. The thing that makes online information finding desirable is that you can filter out the crap that you don't want to read.
Old media such as newspapers want to force you to look at things that you aren't interested in. We can debate all we want about the value of The New York Times, but as long as I can get search results on the particular subject I am interested in-- and get feeds about the things I'm interested in-- I don't really care about the New York Times.
I get what you're saying, but actually any formal punishment is just institutional "revenge".
The fact that people are blood-thirsty when it comes to capital crimes may be barbaric, but the fact is that one could make the argument that it's equally barbaric to subject someone to the horror of a life sentence.
In fact, it seems downright cruel to make someone live in a cage.
Agreed. Also, many of your favorite television shows have a staff of several writers, who all manage to consistently keep your interest. Why would this situation be objectionable?
I totally agree with this-- the whole "format" battle was really goofy and useless. I've been using a Roku box to stream Netflix movies-- the experience is flawless.
It seems almost barbaric to buy a disc, or to have to wait for one to come in the mail.
Of course. It's ceremonial.
It will be necessary going forward to cultivate profitability for entities accountable for making credibility judgments within the universe of information that is available.
In this model, the designation of "blogger" or "investigative journalist" or whatever will is irrelevant, because the demand for accurate and timely information persists. In turn, this model necessitates that people providing information get compensated for their efforts so that they can keep working.
The people doing the research would own the articulation of their research, and the "critics" of this information who would aggregate that in whatever format they find appropriate and profitable. In other words, the current news media, but completely independent of the medium of delivery.
I currently support web apps for a living; while in real life, I'm not an apologist for poor web design, the nature of my job is troubleshooting problems that often stem from environments that are somewhat outside of our control.
If you've ever worked a significant amount of time support web apps, you are probably painfully aware that, despite any contracts or signed system requirements documents-- and the fact that the products you sell are coded to those specs-- the reality is that users tend to have more control over their browsing experience that you could ever account for in QA testing.
First, QA costs money. So, it is reasonable to limit the scope to something less than the infinite possibilities of combinations presented by browser toolbars and plugins.
Second, even if you were able to roughly approximate testing with lots and lots of plugin combinations, there is the matter of users' environments. Lots of stuff happens between a browser and a web server, some of which, such as proxy caching, can break a web application. Yes, there are proxy directives; no, they are not always effective. It depends on how the proxy is set up. Also, some anti-virus products are known to cause false-positives and block certain code. Also, in general terms, you can never underestimate users' ability to much up their PCs in some manner or another.
So, I empathize with eBay. While in my job I could point to some things, such as working with the IT department, that might mitigate problems, eBay has zero possibility of doing that because most of their customers are consumers, not enterprises. It looks like they have reacted to some feedback to improve the experience of users, but are now suffering from caching and plug-in issues that they did not count on.
Standardization sounds like a very promising concept; but I'm guessing that reality is years away still.
While riding New Jersey Transit the day after this crime took place, I heard a conversation about it. One guy actually said, "What do they expect with only a plate glass window between the outside and all of that stuff?"
I know that this was meant to be funny, but around 1995-ish, my digital camera (a rarity at the time) got stolen. Luckily, the police were able to recover it.
It was damaged, though. Apparently the thief had no clue that it was digital and was trying to pry it open to figure out where the film goes.
I was always satisfied with Doom, as far as first-person shooters. However, I was recently surprised at the level of immersion that happened while playing Asphalt 4 (racing game) on my Nintendo DSi while on the bus. It seems that the relatively meaningless speed while playing the game in a stationary environment actually feels pretty cool while you're actually moving forward...
I can't imagine why this was modded insightful. It seems like the typical "if you know what you're doing, you can achieve anything you want already." This doesn't take into account the growing audience of people who view the Web as an entertainment medium.
It's pretty clear the Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Ubiquity, and technologies like RSS, are centered around content aggregation, and that content is the most important thing. Taken individually, these things are relatively simple to understand. But the fact is that they each require their own learning curve-- and my (admittedly cursory) experience with plug-ins points to a very primitive set of underwhelming individual applications.
I did RTFA and, of course, there is zero detail about this thing. But I see stuff like ning.com, which Andreesen had a large hand in creating, and I believe that there is probably some pretty hefty creative thinking going on. I can only guess that the idea of content aggregation, if built properly into a browser, would be pretty huge.
I definitely concede that without all of the information, it is the typical Slashdot ???? profit model. But business can ruin any idea, no matter how good. The question is, what comes before the unpredictable ???? part of this RockMelt idea? IMHO, if content aggregation is built into a browser properly, in a way that the average Web user can understand, this could be pretty kick ass.
On a tangential note, I just recently rediscovered "iGoogle" and thought, "Why am I not using this more?" After a few days, though, I remembered why: It's just an overwhelmingly clumsy content aggregation web page. I spent lots of time trying to figure how to best layout the content, but it is still too burdensome to be useful.
http://www.somethingawful.com/flash/shmorky/babby.swf
Of course, another way to look at it is that this is the first step to all content being freely available all the time, with a guarantee that you will be billed for what you view.
If this is true, then cats must be about as smart as an average third-grade teacher.
Your brother, in a professional sense, really only depends on his talent and not the music business model. His talent (and subsequent reputation) is his primary product; he gets paid to make music sound good. If nobody buys the songs that he engineers and produces, it is no skin off of his back because he was already paid to make it sound good. So it seems like he is merely towing the industry line without giving this free music model its due consideration.
When he started out, did he charge everyone $12,000 for engineering and producing music? Or, did he work cheaply (or even free) in order to get his work out there for people to listen to?
If he-- out of the gate-- started commanding thousands of dollars, then I commend him and the rest of this post is invalid. I suspect, though, that he worked cheaply to have stuff for others to hear. This built his reputation that now allows him to command more money and to make a living.
It is the same with musicians-- they must generate interest before they can even consider making any real money with music. Since putting music online is so cheap, why shouldn't an unknown band make songs that nobody ever heard of freely available? Do you buy songs without hearing them first?* Are you a fan of bands whose music you have never heard?
The point is that cost is no longer a significant factor in the ability of independent musicians to record and make their music available; it is only a matter of time before we start seeing a lucrative non-music-industry route to success emerge from this situation. If I were an industry person, I would scoff at the notion of free music, too, because the status quo would be the foundation of my living.
* Technically, if you buy a CD, you probably do; but for this discussion, I'm referring to online music.
I can't speak for everyone who has negative feelings toward Windows; but there are some really practical reasons to dislike the MS monopoly.
If you have a computer that does everything you want, why would you want to change the foundation upon which it works? In the MS world, it is because they are going to drop support for your version of Windows; and because of that, software companies are going to stop supporting their software for that unsupported Windows platform.
If that software is windows only, there's a pretty good chance that any data created with it that you value will be damaged, if not rendered completely unusable.
Further, one of the most important pieces of software that will likely stop working on an unsupported version of Windows is the Antivirus software-- it's not economically feasible for AV companies to keep pumping out updated virus definitions for an outdated and unsupported operating system.
Add to this the fact that there will no longer be updates for that Windows version, and continuing to run the unsupported OS is a pretty big security risk (assuming, of course, that you care about connecting to the Internet).
So, do you not see that in the Windows world you have no *choice* but to eventually upgrade, if you are at all interested in being able to continue to use your computer?
When my Windows XP machines start breaking, that will likely mark my exit from the Windows world. If I'm going to have to learn a new UI anyway, and if I'm going to invest in new hardware, I may as well make a clean break from my dependency on Windows. I know that I can do this with very little pain because I only choose platform-agnostic software so that my data has a better chance of remaining usable for a longer period of time.
So, the point isn't whether Windows 7 is good or not. It probably is, judging from what I've read. But I'm not likely to get any first-hand experience with it. I will have real freedom of OS choice when I'm ready to upgrade my hardware, and I will make my choice based on the longevity, usefulness, and accessibility of my data.
I don't think your post is at all a flame. I'll go one step farther and say that I don't think most people even *know* what an Operating System is. This is at the heart of why, outside of tech circles, praise for Linux falls on deaf ears.
Don't get me wrong: They know that there is this thing called "Windows". I just think that, much like people think that Internet Explorer *is* the internet, they think that Windows *is* the computer.
I remember when I first started my current job, in a web developer position. We were using "templates" for developing custom products. The templates had about 90% of what was needed at any given time, but when I was first given a task that was essentially a new feature, I asked naively, "How do we handle this? I see that we're using templates, but this is new. I'd like to code this so that everyone could use it."
That was met with bafflement. As it turns out, every single developer-- when faced with the same situation-- had simply added to his/her own stash of code that was never shared. Therefore, a lot of time was (and probably still is, I'm not a developer anymore) wasted re-coding stuff that already existed. That is because the notion of delving into code, with the intent to share knowledge in a meeting, was a foreign concept.
Somewhere in between "zero" code reviews like the situation that I was in, and spending zillions of hours on tedious code reviews which may or may not be useful, there exists the right balance. Like anything other situation, you should avoid useless meetings. But if you have a particular project that would benefit from it in some way-- either from a re-usability or a time-saving or a code maintenance perspective-- I think it's worth it.
As always, the obstacle is finding someone in management who understands these concepts. I haven't figured out how to effectively explain the "obvious" to PHBs. You would do well to consider communication as a key necessity when wrestling with your question...
Pardon me, but at the risk of losing my geek cred, I was just wondering how many sides a "religon" has? I Binged it, and couldn't seem to find the answer.
This is awesome. First, notebooks. Then, netbooks.
Now, migrainebooks.
"Why didn't you just Google it?"
"To be honest with you, I was too busy Binging off!"
I don't know why this would "mark the end" for wikipedia? The main goal of wikipedia as I understand it is not to be "free and open" but to *use* the notion of "free and openness" to present information as thoroughly and accurately as possible.
Therefore, this is necessary. Specifically, an entity who is abusing "The Commons" is getting blocked. Of course there will always be a "way in" to the Commons. This is just taking the next logical step of having a "Commons" while attempting to prevent "The Tragedy of the Commons" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Garrett_Hardin.27s_essay).