Thanks. I hope my comment came across as more of a request to consider free knowledge ecosystems than an advertisement. I think a donation whore would've included a link.:) Textual communication is error-prone-- what means one thing to one person often means something else to others.
You do what you think you should. If I had more disposable income, I'd donate to both Wikipedia and Citizendium. But I take exception at your rather shortsighted insult to my previous comment-- speaking of the ecology of free knowledge projects in the context of funding free knowledge projects is hardly off-topic. It's a discussion that should happen.
And re: cryptoluddite's post, we have unforked from Wikipedia.
Best of luck to Wikipedia. They're a fine project and deserve to get funded.
I would suggest that people consider splitting their donations (in whatever ratio) between Wikipedia and Citizendium. We're just getting started and currently operating on a smaller scale, and thus donations go a *long* way. And all of us (including Wikipedia) benefit from a richer free knowledge ecosystem.
MECP2 as "the cause" of autism is overblown-- scientists have isolated several genetic areas that are somewhat probable contributors toward developing autism, but 1. Autism is definitely caused by the contributions of many genes; 2. There are various ways autism presents itself- presumably due to varying genetic contributions. Rett Syndrome is (in my understanding) an atypically (genetically) simple form of autism.
One of the central ideas behind Citizendium is to defer to subject experts for key decisions (such as inclusion/exclusion) that fall within their area of expertise.
There's definitely a distinction to be made between accuracy and vandalism-- the title of this story is a bit unfortunate in that regard, because Citizendium aims to be much more than a graffiti-free Wikipedia.
The million-dollar question seems to be whether large numbers of contributors or editorial evaluations make for more accurate articles. I would say there's no reason Citizendium can't have both, but ultimately this seems like an empirical question. I'd suggest taking a look at Wikipedia's article on Biology and compare it to Citizendium's article on Biology - if there's something to Citizendium, the proof should be in the pudding.
The community does. We're setting up (and requesting comments on) a governance structure which includes checks and balances. I'd write more and include links, but I have to go help with a Slashdotting.:)
DCA kills many sorts of cancer in mice. This is a good sign. It's based on something found naturally in food and is already used safely in humans. That's also good.
But many, many things kill cancer in mice but don't in humans-- mice have significantly different molecular machinery than we do re: cancer prevention (just look at the cancer rates of control lab rats!). This is promising, but it's no breakthrough until it proves itself in humans.
I feel there's a lot of politicking going on behind the scenes on this issue.
I'm not a neurophysiologist, so perhaps the answer to this is obvious, but I've got a question: if the chip can detect light impulses and stimulate the optic nerve, why does there need to be cellular regeneration? Given time, wouldn't the brain learn to interpret those signals as optical input, just like it did with the rods and cones the eye was born with? Obviously, the "grain" and responsiveness of the photodiodes is much worse than that of the Mark I eyeball, but it's still a path for light information to get to the brain. The resultant "sight" would be far inferior to natural vision, but also better than blindness.
The human brain is nothing if not adaptable; I would think it could learn to use anything which was able to pump signals onto the optic nerve.
I'm not a neurophysiologist either (perhaps BWJones will chip in here) but here's my two cents.
The chip can detect light impulses and stimulate the optic nerve, as you say- the article even mentions "We're placing it right where the photoreceptors are and if they're lacking, this is supposed to replace what they're doing." So why isn't this plug-and-play with our eyes- why do we need these implants to work via cellular regeneration?
Put simply, there is a limit to the eye's plasticity during maturity-- if these cats had been born with these chips implanted in their eyes, they could probably use them to see in some fashion (at lower quality, as you note). However, they're so far out of spec with the type of input given by normal photoreceptors (with which they're currently operating in parallel) that the mature eye/brain calibrated to normal photoreceptors simply tends to screen these inputs out.
Someday we'll understand the "spec" of the eye well enough for tech that plugs-and-plays with the rest of the eye, but currently we're limited to promoting the body's own healing, or, in cases of total blindness, just bypassing the eye and just stimulating the visual cortex directly (at very low resolution).
It's just how it is, by its nature. When people say "Wikipedia is not reliable", they seem to mean "I have to think, waaah."
Some people misunderstand what Wikipedia is, definitely. But I think we differ on the importance of reliability: I see an unreliable source as not merely 'requiring people to think' but potentially deeply messing up someone's understanding of a topic. Once the brain learns something incorrect or biased, it often takes effort and attention to unlearn it.
There are all sorts of ideas on how to abstract a "reliable" subset of Wikipedia. Someone just has to bother, really.
I do think reliable things can probably come out of Wikipedia, and I look forward to them. That said, I'm helping pursue a slightly different model as part of the executive committee of Citizendium.
My hope is that there'll be some opportunity for complementarity between Wikipedia and Citizendium-- ultimately we're on the same side, after all. Maybe we can chat about it more after we've had some time to sink or swim (so far things look good).
Just a quick analysis of the numbers: I don't think it's fair to derive a simple miles per hour speed from the 200 miles in 360 seconds number-- this thing is arcing ~95 miles up into the atmosphere, and then plummeting down from there. It travels more total distance than the 200 miles number would indicate, and its total velocity is probably going to be increasing during the second half of flight.
So, it's going to be going really fast (definitely faster than 2933fps).
That said, I'd be interested to see what this would do to a building, too. I think it'd be hard to say. I can imagine what it'd do to another ship, tanks, or airfields, though.
If I had a website relying on ads and a reliable way to do it, I'd terminate accounts of people with an ad blocker right off the bat. You are using a free service in exchange of which they are putting a bunch of advertisement on your screen. By blocking it, you become a free loader, absolutely useless for them as a customer. If you don't like the business model, pay for your webmail.
I would disagree for two reasons:
1. That's not true that adblockers are complete freeloaders on the Yahoo network. Attached to every mail you send from Yahoo is an advertisement for Yahoo Mail. That's presumably worth something- very possibly more than the ads you're blocking (especially as the type of customer who blocks ads is not likely to click on them).
2. Yahoo simply can't do this. People would scream bloody murder if their email- their online identity- was terminated. Bad, bad publicity and a quick erosion of trust for very little gain.
Personally? I'd switch to gmail. They've never pulled any shenanigans on me.
I definitely see where you're coming from. I think we differ in the details of where the optimal balance should be between "help thyself" and "help thy neighbor" should be. Which is fine.
Immigration is a very complicated issue (which you note), and though I'm all for helping those who would call the U.S. their home, I'm also sympathetic to those who are dragging their feet on opening the doors wide open because it is a complicated issue, and once large numbers of people have moved in, you can't very well kick them out.
Honestly, in terms of would-be immigrants (legal or illegal) from Mexico, we might be better served (and they might be better served) if instead of opening our doors wide open we were to put more effort into helping Mexico, specifically lending a hand where appropriate to help clean up Mexican politics. It's a pretty bad system and perhaps the single biggest reason for Mexico's economic stagnation.
I live in South Minneapolis as well. I generally agree with your anecdote. South Minneapolis has become a better place to live.
Two comments, though: the first is that you say, "If someone wants to emmigrate to build a better life from his or her family, it is our responsibility to provide the opportunity. Yes, it would be good if we were able to help non-US citizens. However, do we have an equal responsibility to help out potential immigrants as we do current citizens? Does our responsibility to potential immigrants take precedence over helping, say, people in Africa? The devil's in the details. I don't think the answers to these questions are unambiguously yes.
Secondly, and this is not directly a reply to your comment but I feel it bears mentioning, the study being discussed notes that 25% of startups have at least one foreign-born founder. Which seems more striking than it actually is (if 4/5 of the founders are US-born and they bring in one Indian programmer, it counts).
'It is going to take a generation for scholars to go through the material declassified under this process,' said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.
I find this very unlikely. Not to dismiss the sheer number of documents to sort through, correlate, and summarize, but search isn't exactly a dead field. A significant portion of the smartest people in the world are working on problems which parallel this one.
It'll be years, not tens of years, before these documents are fully understood.
This is not as groundbreaking as it would seem. I believe all new automobile tires in the U.S. come with unique, tamper-proof RFID chips in them already.
No encyclopedia is going to be perfect, but I would recommend that you check out Citizendium once we're officially launched. I believe it'll deal with most of the concerns you bring up.
Honestly... not that I'm a big fan of litigation, but this seems like a problem a high-profile lawsuit (regarding the needless identity-theft risk companies are exposing their users to) could fix. The market won't fix it, and if politicians haven't fixed it by now it's hard justify just waiting until a law comes along to outlaw it.
You make an interesting point with how someone falsely accused in a public venue could "have his name cleared among colleagues yet be villified among neighbors." I'll think about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. I hope my comment came across as more of a request to consider free knowledge ecosystems than an advertisement. I think a donation whore would've included a link. :) Textual communication is error-prone-- what means one thing to one person often means something else to others.
I do already contribute *plenty* to citizendium, by contributing articles and edits and money to wikipedia to fund you guys mirroring their content.
You do not, because we do not mirror Wikipedia's content. We unforked weeks ago.
You do what you think you should. If I had more disposable income, I'd donate to both Wikipedia and Citizendium. But I take exception at your rather shortsighted insult to my previous comment-- speaking of the ecology of free knowledge projects in the context of funding free knowledge projects is hardly off-topic. It's a discussion that should happen.
And re: cryptoluddite's post, we have unforked from Wikipedia.
Best of luck to Wikipedia. They're a fine project and deserve to get funded.
I would suggest that people consider splitting their donations (in whatever ratio) between Wikipedia and Citizendium. We're just getting started and currently operating on a smaller scale, and thus donations go a *long* way. And all of us (including Wikipedia) benefit from a richer free knowledge ecosystem.
Mike Johnson
Citizendium Executive Committee
MECP2 as "the cause" of autism is overblown-- scientists have isolated several genetic areas that are somewhat probable contributors toward developing autism, but
1. Autism is definitely caused by the contributions of many genes;
2. There are various ways autism presents itself- presumably due to varying genetic contributions. Rett Syndrome is (in my understanding) an atypically (genetically) simple form of autism.
One of the central ideas behind Citizendium is to defer to subject experts for key decisions (such as inclusion/exclusion) that fall within their area of expertise.
Good post.
There's definitely a distinction to be made between accuracy and vandalism-- the title of this story is a bit unfortunate in that regard, because Citizendium aims to be much more than a graffiti-free Wikipedia.
The million-dollar question seems to be whether large numbers of contributors or editorial evaluations make for more accurate articles. I would say there's no reason Citizendium can't have both, but ultimately this seems like an empirical question. I'd suggest taking a look at Wikipedia's article on Biology and compare it to Citizendium's article on Biology - if there's something to Citizendium, the proof should be in the pudding.
Mike Johnson
Citizendium Executive Committee
The link you supplied goes to a page that states, "This Wikipedia page is currently inactive and is kept primarily for historical interest."
I'm aware that the German Wikipedia is working on the vandalism problem, but do you have a better link?
As soon as we have enough money to pay for the servers and bandwidth involved in going fully public, we'll do so.
Mike Johnson
Citizendium Executive Committee
Wikipedia is great. But it has so much community momentum that it can't change in certain ways (people have tried!).
To implement the changes that Citizendium implements, you've gotta start a new project.
The community does. We're setting up (and requesting comments on) a governance structure which includes checks and balances. I'd write more and include links, but I have to go help with a Slashdotting. :)
Mike Johnson
Citizendium Executive Committee
DCA kills many sorts of cancer in mice. This is a good sign. It's based on something found naturally in food and is already used safely in humans. That's also good.
But many, many things kill cancer in mice but don't in humans-- mice have significantly different molecular machinery than we do re: cancer prevention (just look at the cancer rates of control lab rats!). This is promising, but it's no breakthrough until it proves itself in humans.
I feel there's a lot of politicking going on behind the scenes on this issue.
I'm not a neurophysiologist, so perhaps the answer to this is obvious, but I've got a question: if the chip can detect light impulses and stimulate the optic nerve, why does there need to be cellular regeneration? Given time, wouldn't the brain learn to interpret those signals as optical input, just like it did with the rods and cones the eye was born with? Obviously, the "grain" and responsiveness of the photodiodes is much worse than that of the Mark I eyeball, but it's still a path for light information to get to the brain. The resultant "sight" would be far inferior to natural vision, but also better than blindness.
The human brain is nothing if not adaptable; I would think it could learn to use anything which was able to pump signals onto the optic nerve.
I'm not a neurophysiologist either (perhaps BWJones will chip in here) but here's my two cents.
The chip can detect light impulses and stimulate the optic nerve, as you say- the article even mentions "We're placing it right where the photoreceptors are and if they're lacking, this is supposed to replace what they're doing." So why isn't this plug-and-play with our eyes- why do we need these implants to work via cellular regeneration?
Put simply, there is a limit to the eye's plasticity during maturity-- if these cats had been born with these chips implanted in their eyes, they could probably use them to see in some fashion (at lower quality, as you note). However, they're so far out of spec with the type of input given by normal photoreceptors (with which they're currently operating in parallel) that the mature eye/brain calibrated to normal photoreceptors simply tends to screen these inputs out.
Someday we'll understand the "spec" of the eye well enough for tech that plugs-and-plays with the rest of the eye, but currently we're limited to promoting the body's own healing, or, in cases of total blindness, just bypassing the eye and just stimulating the visual cortex directly (at very low resolution).
That's great. I thought your name looked familiar.
It's a pretty exciting time for wikis no matter how you look at it.
It's just how it is, by its nature. When people say "Wikipedia is not reliable", they seem to mean "I have to think, waaah."
Some people misunderstand what Wikipedia is, definitely. But I think we differ on the importance of reliability: I see an unreliable source as not merely 'requiring people to think' but potentially deeply messing up someone's understanding of a topic. Once the brain learns something incorrect or biased, it often takes effort and attention to unlearn it.
There are all sorts of ideas on how to abstract a "reliable" subset of Wikipedia. Someone just has to bother, really.
I do think reliable things can probably come out of Wikipedia, and I look forward to them. That said, I'm helping pursue a slightly different model as part of the executive committee of Citizendium.
My hope is that there'll be some opportunity for complementarity between Wikipedia and Citizendium-- ultimately we're on the same side, after all. Maybe we can chat about it more after we've had some time to sink or swim (so far things look good).
Mike Johnson
Wikipedia does not save the reader from having to think.
I deeply appreciate Wikipedia's usefulness, but this makes it sound as though Wikipedia's sporadic unreliability is a feature, not a bug.
Just a quick analysis of the numbers: I don't think it's fair to derive a simple miles per hour speed from the 200 miles in 360 seconds number-- this thing is arcing ~95 miles up into the atmosphere, and then plummeting down from there. It travels more total distance than the 200 miles number would indicate, and its total velocity is probably going to be increasing during the second half of flight.
So, it's going to be going really fast (definitely faster than 2933fps).
That said, I'd be interested to see what this would do to a building, too. I think it'd be hard to say. I can imagine what it'd do to another ship, tanks, or airfields, though.
If I had a website relying on ads and a reliable way to do it, I'd terminate accounts of people with an ad blocker right off the bat. You are using a free service in exchange of which they are putting a bunch of advertisement on your screen. By blocking it, you become a free loader, absolutely useless for them as a customer. If you don't like the business model, pay for your webmail.
I would disagree for two reasons:
1. That's not true that adblockers are complete freeloaders on the Yahoo network. Attached to every mail you send from Yahoo is an advertisement for Yahoo Mail. That's presumably worth something- very possibly more than the ads you're blocking (especially as the type of customer who blocks ads is not likely to click on them).
2. Yahoo simply can't do this. People would scream bloody murder if their email- their online identity- was terminated. Bad, bad publicity and a quick erosion of trust for very little gain.
Personally? I'd switch to gmail. They've never pulled any shenanigans on me.
I definitely see where you're coming from. I think we differ in the details of where the optimal balance should be between "help thyself" and "help thy neighbor" should be. Which is fine.
Immigration is a very complicated issue (which you note), and though I'm all for helping those who would call the U.S. their home, I'm also sympathetic to those who are dragging their feet on opening the doors wide open because it is a complicated issue, and once large numbers of people have moved in, you can't very well kick them out.
Honestly, in terms of would-be immigrants (legal or illegal) from Mexico, we might be better served (and they might be better served) if instead of opening our doors wide open we were to put more effort into helping Mexico, specifically lending a hand where appropriate to help clean up Mexican politics. It's a pretty bad system and perhaps the single biggest reason for Mexico's economic stagnation.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I live in South Minneapolis as well. I generally agree with your anecdote. South Minneapolis has become a better place to live.
Two comments, though: the first is that you say, "If someone wants to emmigrate to build a better life from his or her family, it is our responsibility to provide the opportunity. Yes, it would be good if we were able to help non-US citizens. However, do we have an equal responsibility to help out potential immigrants as we do current citizens? Does our responsibility to potential immigrants take precedence over helping, say, people in Africa? The devil's in the details. I don't think the answers to these questions are unambiguously yes.
Secondly, and this is not directly a reply to your comment but I feel it bears mentioning, the study being discussed notes that 25% of startups have at least one foreign-born founder. Which seems more striking than it actually is (if 4/5 of the founders are US-born and they bring in one Indian programmer, it counts).
I find this very unlikely. Not to dismiss the sheer number of documents to sort through, correlate, and summarize, but search isn't exactly a dead field. A significant portion of the smartest people in the world are working on problems which parallel this one.
It'll be years, not tens of years, before these documents are fully understood.
This is not as groundbreaking as it would seem. I believe all new automobile tires in the U.S. come with unique, tamper-proof RFID chips in them already.
No encyclopedia is going to be perfect, but I would recommend that you check out Citizendium once we're officially launched. I believe it'll deal with most of the concerns you bring up.
Honestly... not that I'm a big fan of litigation, but this seems like a problem a high-profile lawsuit (regarding the needless identity-theft risk companies are exposing their users to) could fix. The market won't fix it, and if politicians haven't fixed it by now it's hard justify just waiting until a law comes along to outlaw it.
Perhaps the EFF could step in.
I can sympathize with that.
You make an interesting point with how someone falsely accused in a public venue could "have his name cleared among colleagues yet be villified among neighbors." I'll think about that.