I sometimes contribute on wikipedia. Will I contribute here? No. I do not expect to have to wait while my proletarian prose is vetted by some presumably second- or even third-rate "expert." (Who else are they going to get to watch each little tweak?) If I see something wrong on wikipedia, I'll fix it; I'll even start articles. But if you want me to invest my time, don't treat me as a second-class citizen.
For background: I am nearly finished with a doctorate in the sciences. I respect expert knowledge, peer review and all sorts of wonderful tiered knowledge systems. I just don't want to contribute to the version they have -- a version in which my anonymous submissions are vetted by a presumably unaccountable group of experts whose credentials I imagine are less than stellar.
That said, I wish them well. My guess is that they will end up relying very little on public contributions, and that this is a hook. In any case, again, well done for making a stab at improving the information quality of the web.
Hey, there's a lot of good advice in the comments here, but if you are working purely for fun, I recommend playing with / learning LISP. ANSI Common Lisp has a great manual by Paul Graham, and there is a great set of books on Scheme (closely related) in dialogue format (forget the titles, go on amazon, Little Schemer I think?)
These are great languages, truly beautiful in a really deep conceptual manner. They are also very flexible. You are beyond the OMG I can create a dialog box like a real program stage, and LISP really lets you do tricks very easily. I wrote a genetic algorithm evolver in LISP -- something I couldn't have come close to doing in C without a huge amount of ugly hack.
The community surrounding LISP is very, very smart, and helpful as well. You won't be drowning in crap as you would if you wanted to get involved in the Perl community (great language, but it's a metropolis now.)
Good luck, and congrats on wanting to get your hands dirty again. By the way, if you do pick up LISP, it will make you a better programmer; I speak from experience. I'll stop evangelizing now, but Graham has his own website where he does it for me. Best quote:
"Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Probably because they know what they are doing, and take the necessary precautions.
Hee hee. You've never hung out with physicists, have you? Have you ever seen what happens when someone who's spent four years studying GR and Quantum Mechanics tries to play engineer?
Worst. Safety. Protocol. Ever. Just among the things I remember from my time in an atomic physics lab -- exposed 220V, shorts-n-sandals (as opposed to OSHA required long pants and steel-toed boots), random high-power lasers setting fire to cardboard, lunchtime on the lab counter... I went back into pencil-and-paper theory, which I think has doubled my life expectancy...
It's been awhile; I do GR now, not QM (much simpler.) But any measurement will change the state; this is the famous "collapse of the wavefunction" (in the Copenhagen interpretation.) What they mean is that the measurement will collapse the wavefunction as usual, but that it will not then alter the system being measured so that the state changes. i.e., if the amplitude is 0.1 A and 0.9 B, and the measurement collapses the wf to B 90% of the time as it will, then when the measurement is done the system will be B 90% of the time as expected, and it will be B "the right" times.
You want in some sense to provide prodigies with as "normal" a life as possible. That means finding them things that are as challenging to them as ordinary lessons are to the more regular students. The worst thing, I think, for a prodigy is for them to find themselves with nothing to do, all day, all week. That's when the weird superiority complexes start.
As Freud says, to be healthy is to be able to love, and to work. Prodigies need to experience work as part of their everyday life, or they won't develop a psyche that we would consider in any way functional.
as someone lumped with the prodigies for awhile...
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The Prodigy Puzzle
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I was lumped with the prodigies for a while -- at least as long as the term still made sense for my age group (i.e., until around senior year of high school.) I was never the "top" of the prodigy heap, but that was the word that was liberally sprinkled around my recommendations and so forth.
I saw a lot of prodigies, even "true" prodigies, and I learned one thing (I'm now 26): it doesn't last.
Some people have brains that switch on earlier. You absorb things at rates far in excess of your peers, and you just can't stop it. But it doesn't mean you're smarter; you may have a head start, but others rapidly catch up. Now, ten years on, I would be hard pressed to remember exactly who of my friends were "prodigies" according to the powers-that-be, and who were just regular students. On every measure -- and I include things like getting Ph.D.s and having sharp academic careers in the hard sciences -- having been rated a prodigy is at best a very weak predictor.
(You can see this another way: apply for a job with one of the hot shot consulting firms. Do they care if you were a 15 year old genius? No. They don't want to hear it. If there was any predictive power in these things, D.E. Shaw would be on it like a demon.)
So I think these foundations are wasting their money (and probably wrecking a few lives along the way.) Being labelled prodigy is tough enough, and you're smart enough to cause yourself a huge amount of trouble -- I was fortunate in that neither I nor any close friends really got into deep water.
What to do with prodigies? Keep them busy, give them interesting things to do, and keep them out of trouble until the peers they'll meet at their hot-shot universities catch up.
I've done the online dating thing on Spring Street networks (those are the personals advertised through the Onion and the SF Chronicle; they also have a sort of "central" site, nerve.com.)
People commenting here are right about a number of things. A large fraction of folks are "second time around" (I'm not.) There is a fraction of crazy people (none of whom I've met in person), and a fraction of insanely dull people (I mean, really, who would have thought you needed the internet to find the most boring person in the world.)
If you are outside a major urban area, the majority of people are either older divorcées (40-50) or have some major problem that prevents them getting dates in the real world. In the cities -- especially places like New York or San Francisco, major magnets -- huge numbers of very cool twenty and thirty somethings are on them. You're post-college, you've moved to the big cheese to make it big in your urban professional job, and suddenly you know nobody and nobody knows you. You can either date colleagues (ugh), or you can go online. A lot of grad students do it as well.
I'm not surprised the larger sites have had problems. It's hard to make money running a personals site. You have to attract women (and very few women pay anything to use them), and at the same time get the boys to cough up. Server costs, promotion, and maintenance add up very quickly. Springstreet was just sold to some other company which is actually incredibly sketchy, and they've had some issues (that seem to be clearing up, but it was bad for a month or so.)
I haven't taken the time to read the prior article carefully, but whatever the point he was originally trying to make has been completely lost in his attempt to shift the goalposts of the argument. (As far as I can tell, his original article said we should be allow to sue programmers for bugs.)
This second article says "people should write better code". Well, um, I disagree! Wait, no. Of course not. Yes, the quality of code should improve, and should always be improving.
The analogy to automobiles seems quite ridiculous. While there are some rare and unusual automobile failures, the basic system you have to check to make sure a car is "fatal accident free" is both completely transparent (mechanical connections that you can fully simulate if need be) and has been unchanged for years. Furthermore, it is possible to "overdesign" -- you know what the failure is going to look like (car hits object stops suddenly) and you can plan against it.
Software is something completely different. Each piece of software does something new (or, at least, it should.) The connection between different components is not transparent and while there are overall structural similarities, and long tested protocols, those protocols are nowhere near as "clean" as a car's drivetrain. Not to mention the fact that truly new software has to invent protocols along with the code.
I would imagine if car manufacturers changed basic facts about the drivetrain or the steering mechanism or the car structure each time they built a new car, they'd have a bug rate close to the average piece of software. And, of course, car bugs are not new -- there are the famous ones, like the Pinto (and less famous ones, like the "suicide doors.") To put things in perspective, when the Pinto was built, cars had been around for decades on decades. Are there any remaining fatal bugs in a classic C compiler?
Three comments. I am not a wiki fanatic, but I seem to be playing one tonight...
1. I'm not sure I see your objection clearly. The "etymology" article does indeed assert that etymology is connected to the field of historical lingusitics. You don't seem to disagree with that statement -- you instead assert that etymology is a rather dull, uninteresting part of lingusitics and really not a central problem of the field as some people seem to think. If you go to the article on Historical Linguistics itself, there is no mention of etymology! In any case, following your comments, I removed the three words you objected to linking etymology to historical linguistics, I couldn't resist.
In general, I can see what you're saying -- people not really grasping the difference between Linguistics, the field, and linguistics "the study of language and stuff". But it seems to be a minor problem (if irritating)? (Oh, and to be fair, what seems to be a reasonable, certaintly non-zero, number of lingustics people don't mind calling etymology an aspect of historical linguistics -- follow up some of the webpages here.)
2. I think you point out an interesting problem with wikipedia, which is that a big difficulty exists in the large-scale structures of the information. Generally, a factually incorrect sentence or paragraph gets fixed pretty quickly. But large-scale problems -- involving how various articles are "threaded" together -- are much harder to fix.
3. I personally would be terrified of editing the linguistics articles, since linguistics to me is astrophysics to you. But I can definitely see the problems that might arise when dealing with concepts that "everybody" understands, including things in psychology and anthropology. In general, fixing these problems takes work and a bit of dedication from experts; what's weird is that wikipedia seems to, on occasion, attract just those people.
Three comments. I am not a wiki fanatic, but I seem to be playing one tonight...
1. I'm not sure I see your objection clearly. The "etymology" article does indeed assert that etymology is connected to the field of historical lingusitics. You don't seem to disagree with that statement -- you instead assert that etymology is a rather dull, uninteresting part of lingusitics and really not a central problem of the field as some people seem to think. If you go to the article on Historical Linguistics itself, there is no mention of etymology! In any case, following your comments, I removed the three words you objected to linking etymology to historical linguistics, I couldn't resist.
In general, I can see what you're saying -- people not really grasping the difference between Linguistics, the field, and linguistics "the study of language and stuff". But it seems to be a minor problem (if irritating)? (Oh, and to be fair, what seems to be a reasonable, certaintly non-zero, number of lingustics people don't mind calling etymology an aspect of historical linguistics -- follow up some of the webpages here.
2. I think you point out an interesting problem with wikipedia, which is that a big difficulty exists in the large-scale structures of the information. Generally, a factually incorrect sentence or paragraph gets fixed pretty quickly. But large-scale problems -- involving how various articles are "threaded" together -- are much harder to fix.
3. I personally would be terrified of editing the linguistics articles, since linguistics to me is astrophysics to you. But I can definitely see the problems that might arise when dealing with concepts that "everybody" understands, including things in psychology and anthropology. In general, fixing these problems takes work and a bit of dedication from experts; what's weird is that wikipedia seems to, on occasion, attract just those people.
I seem to be running interference for wikipedia today against touchy conservatives when I should be working.
Both AIM and MM are referred to respectively as conservative and liberal organizations. Actually, to be fair, MM is described in the first paragraph as a group that attacks "conservative" information, and is referred to as a "progressive" organization; the word "liberal" is not used until the second paragraph, where MM's sources of funding as described as "wealthy liberals".
Meanwhile, yes, indeed, AIM is referred to as a conservative organization. I'm not sure I understand: should wikipedia not refer to it as conservative? It's certaintly true that AIM likes to spin things, and doesn't describe itself as conservative, but everybody (and that means everybody, on the left and right) recognizes it as such.
I agree with you that the MM intro has a slight NPOV problem, however. I've rephrased it: "Media Matters monitors for and criticizes what it identifies as materially substantiated conservative misinformation found in media news reports, public affairs and talk radio shows from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and others."
As for the Communism articles, I don't get it? Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive web source on the evils of various Communist states around the world. You don't dispute that. What you do dispute is that because there is so much information on Communism, the pages have been split up so that some of them deal with the theory of Communism, while others deal with its implementation in practice. Presumably, you would want big warning labels on the theory article declaring "warning: following the descriptions in this article in your own country may lead to famine and genocide?"
That's what cracks me up the most about most allegations of "liberal bias": conservatives who alledge it seem to have a very, very low opinion of the average person's intelligence. Something that's well reflected in FOX news I might add.
Ah, slashdot. Where "no personal attacks" and "assume good faith" don't apply.
1. I just glanced over the Little Saigon article. The story you freaked out about involves a store owner who posted a Ho Chi Minh poster in his window. There was a riot. The sentence you object to was "[t]he event also raised some controversial issues about constitutional free speech in the United States." According to a New York Times article about the event, "The Vietnamese immigrant who has battled his former countrymen here for weeks about his right to display a poster of Ho Chi Minh in his video store rehung the picture today, but it took dozens of police officers and sheriff's deputies to protect him and the First Amendment." Um, a major police presence to protect someone's first amendment rights doesn't count as "raising controversial issues"? You seem to think the person should not have been allowed to display the poster -- so presumably you yourself find the police actions controversial?
2. Newt's daughter. Don't you think it's rather interesting that the daughter of a prominent and anti-gay conservative is a leader of a gay-rights group? Even in a case where the activities of a son or daughter don't directly bear of those of the parents, don't you think an article about a prominent person should include some information about their children? (Most wikipedia articles do.) How is presenting factual, relevant information "liberal bias"? Perhaps you would like to expunge all information about Ron Hubbard's son from the Hubbard article?
3. Nice catch. I was going to remove it from the article, but it seems like someone already did. Thanks for helping to improve wikipedia!
I wonder which article this was. I've never had this problem at all, and I've contributed to dozens of articles, both in science (I'm a Ph.D. in astrophysics), and in politics (where I have worked on "hot button" topics like the ACLU.) I have certaintly had occasional issues with people, but it's actually quite rare. In general, contentious but well-sourced material that belongs in an article, stays in an article, and people who try to remove it are considered vandals by the community and dealt with accordingly.
Reading between the lines of your post, it seems entirely possible that your edits, even if they were sourced by peer-reviewed journals, were inappropriate for the articles you edited. Wikipedia is not meant to be a series of technical review articles. The information you added may well have been considered at an inappropriately high level, it may have just been "too much" (articles are not supposed to grow without bounds) or, indeed, you may have added too much information about only one side of a contentious topic -- in the third case, people are likely to worry that you are subverting NPOV. (Adding detail to one side of an issue but not the other is probably the most tricky aspect of wikipedia -- I personally think it's OK, but it does, reasonably, set off people's NPOV alarms.)
Why bother with a flash USB when you can just gmail the material to yourself? If you're paranoid, encrypt it beforehand, but I doubt someone who broke into google is going to poke inside your PDF attachments. Come on, someone must have said it already? Mod me redundant!
Oh yeah? Well, think of it like... instead of scanning someone's network, it's like flying a plane... over a city... and looking at people's swimming pools... seeing if they're safe. I mean... how can you object to that? To me it seems identical.
If we're talking about highly-educated upper-middle class programmers, then fine. But contracts have their limits. I think most people (maybe not you) agree that it should be illegal to enter into a contract where you get paid less than minimum wage.
The employer-employee dynamic is never (well, almost never) one of two equal parties. It's silly to pretend otherwise.
I don't -- I don't have to. But there must be some out there. The internet is an extremely transparent medium, and it is very hard to astroturf your fraudulence out of the public view. If I was looking for a registrar, I'd figure out what the biggest forum was, and browse around there for awhile (perhaps this one? Maybe.) I imagine I'd discover pretty quickly who was and wasn't shady.
Man, I sort of want to snark all over this poor guy for using a shady registrar and getting shafted, but can we have a moment here, please? Does anyone remember the old, old days of, say, 1994?
Back when the internet was just this weird old place full of academics, old-school hacker types, weird "cyberspace" early adopters and the few commerical institutions who had some kind of online presence were seen as strange little furry mammals slinking around in the shadows not bothering anybody? When you actually e-mailed the guys at Cantor and Segal for misuing the internet, and thought it might work?
Now it's all hucksters and fraud.
Anyone remember those days? Can I get a "where have all the flowers gone"?
The only problem I've had with my Mac came, surprisingly, not from some unknown and undiscovered internet vulnerability, but from Symantic.
That would be the "Norton Utilities" for Mac OS X they wrote and sold, that corrupts your hard drive because Symantic didn't bother to figure out how our filesystem works. Wonderful. I had to buy Diskwarrior to sort it out.
If you go to the Amazon page for the Norton Utilities they sold, it's still there, but along with the dozens of one-star reviews, there is a suggestion that Symantic has quietly stopped shipping it.
It will be a long time before Mac users trust Symantic again.
Jeez, chill. It's a simple matter to make things anonymous, but I doubt the process would be in violation of the act anyway (the teacher can make up the grades later based on the student's percentages.)
We used to do this as well, and it was a very educational experience. I can imagine it now... "Jimmy, what is the answer to question six?" "I'm sorry, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act prohibits the release of any information from my education record. Since my knowledge of the answer constitutes part of my record, I respectfully refuse to answer."
political bias of the author...
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I was surprised to find on googling Paul that she has pretty serious "liberal" credentials (here, from her bio). She seems less like one of those annoying distort-the-data right wingers and more like a sort of "pulse-of-the-culture" type people.
I doubt Paul is clamoring for the banning of porn, but it is certaintly true that we can create technology with consequences that far outstrip our mamamilian brain's ability to compensate.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever heard of a study that showed long-term psychological damage from exposure to words or (self-chosen) pictures. It would be surprising (though not impossible) to discover that porn really did cause problems for people.
In other words, there's a difference between porn and alcohol. People with seriously fucked up issues probably often consume both at rates and methods we'd considered messed up -- but alcohol actually causes additional problems, whereas I would be surprised if such causation could be demonstrated for porn. People with messed up ideas about sex probably consume messed up porn, but it's not like the porn "made them do it".
One thing that struck me, which I haven't heard before, is that University Ethics boards prohibit showing dirty films to human subjects. I'd be very interested to see a link to such a restriction.
I'm getting 7% from what Pay Pal charges me for transactions with verified shipping to confirmed addresses for amounts between $10 and $20. Maybe he gets a better deal, I can't read the link.
In the end, it's of course everyone's right to waste money as they see fit. If people want to pay seven cents on the charity dollar to say "Something Awful Rules" then that's fine. It doesn't make it any less foolish in my mind, though.
You guys sound like good nerds, but I'm sorry, I still don't get it. Pay Pal fees are horrendous.
Look at it from the outside (my perspective.) The website is soliciting donations for the Red Cross. 7% of all those donations go down the drain -- all so that the webmaster can verify that the donation was actually made and give people "free merchendise"?
It's definitely not standard practice, and I'm sure not the way the Red Cross would want it done.
Again, imagine it from the outside: "WalMart Red Cross donation button! Donate to the Red Cross here! 93% of your donation will go DIRECTLY TO THE RED CROSS! Donations over $10 will recieve free Wal Mart goodies!"
I have nothing against people running their own clever, innovative charitable projects via Pay Pal, but this complicated and lossy system of passing the buck is foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
I sometimes contribute on wikipedia. Will I contribute here? No. I do not expect to have to wait while my proletarian prose is vetted by some presumably second- or even third-rate "expert." (Who else are they going to get to watch each little tweak?) If I see something wrong on wikipedia, I'll fix it; I'll even start articles. But if you want me to invest my time, don't treat me as a second-class citizen.
For background: I am nearly finished with a doctorate in the sciences. I respect expert knowledge, peer review and all sorts of wonderful tiered knowledge systems. I just don't want to contribute to the version they have -- a version in which my anonymous submissions are vetted by a presumably unaccountable group of experts whose credentials I imagine are less than stellar.
That said, I wish them well. My guess is that they will end up relying very little on public contributions, and that this is a hook. In any case, again, well done for making a stab at improving the information quality of the web.
These are great languages, truly beautiful in a really deep conceptual manner. They are also very flexible. You are beyond the OMG I can create a dialog box like a real program stage, and LISP really lets you do tricks very easily. I wrote a genetic algorithm evolver in LISP -- something I couldn't have come close to doing in C without a huge amount of ugly hack.
The community surrounding LISP is very, very smart, and helpful as well. You won't be drowning in crap as you would if you wanted to get involved in the Perl community (great language, but it's a metropolis now.)
Good luck, and congrats on wanting to get your hands dirty again. By the way, if you do pick up LISP, it will make you a better programmer; I speak from experience. I'll stop evangelizing now, but Graham has his own website where he does it for me. Best quote:
Probably because they know what they are doing, and take the necessary precautions.
Hee hee. You've never hung out with physicists, have you? Have you ever seen what happens when someone who's spent four years studying GR and Quantum Mechanics tries to play engineer?
Worst. Safety. Protocol. Ever. Just among the things I remember from my time in an atomic physics lab -- exposed 220V, shorts-n-sandals (as opposed to OSHA required long pants and steel-toed boots), random high-power lasers setting fire to cardboard, lunchtime on the lab counter... I went back into pencil-and-paper theory, which I think has doubled my life expectancy...
It's been awhile; I do GR now, not QM (much simpler.) But any measurement will change the state; this is the famous "collapse of the wavefunction" (in the Copenhagen interpretation.) What they mean is that the measurement will collapse the wavefunction as usual, but that it will not then alter the system being measured so that the state changes. i.e., if the amplitude is 0.1 A and 0.9 B, and the measurement collapses the wf to B 90% of the time as it will, then when the measurement is done the system will be B 90% of the time as expected, and it will be B "the right" times.
Hee hee.
You want in some sense to provide prodigies with as "normal" a life as possible. That means finding them things that are as challenging to them as ordinary lessons are to the more regular students. The worst thing, I think, for a prodigy is for them to find themselves with nothing to do, all day, all week. That's when the weird superiority complexes start.
As Freud says, to be healthy is to be able to love, and to work. Prodigies need to experience work as part of their everyday life, or they won't develop a psyche that we would consider in any way functional.
I was lumped with the prodigies for a while -- at least as long as the term still made sense for my age group (i.e., until around senior year of high school.) I was never the "top" of the prodigy heap, but that was the word that was liberally sprinkled around my recommendations and so forth.
I saw a lot of prodigies, even "true" prodigies, and I learned one thing (I'm now 26): it doesn't last.
Some people have brains that switch on earlier. You absorb things at rates far in excess of your peers, and you just can't stop it. But it doesn't mean you're smarter; you may have a head start, but others rapidly catch up. Now, ten years on, I would be hard pressed to remember exactly who of my friends were "prodigies" according to the powers-that-be, and who were just regular students. On every measure -- and I include things like getting Ph.D.s and having sharp academic careers in the hard sciences -- having been rated a prodigy is at best a very weak predictor.
(You can see this another way: apply for a job with one of the hot shot consulting firms. Do they care if you were a 15 year old genius? No. They don't want to hear it. If there was any predictive power in these things, D.E. Shaw would be on it like a demon.)
So I think these foundations are wasting their money (and probably wrecking a few lives along the way.) Being labelled prodigy is tough enough, and you're smart enough to cause yourself a huge amount of trouble -- I was fortunate in that neither I nor any close friends really got into deep water.
What to do with prodigies? Keep them busy, give them interesting things to do, and keep them out of trouble until the peers they'll meet at their hot-shot universities catch up.
I've done the online dating thing on Spring Street networks (those are the personals advertised through the Onion and the SF Chronicle; they also have a sort of "central" site, nerve.com.)
People commenting here are right about a number of things. A large fraction of folks are "second time around" (I'm not.) There is a fraction of crazy people (none of whom I've met in person), and a fraction of insanely dull people (I mean, really, who would have thought you needed the internet to find the most boring person in the world.)
If you are outside a major urban area, the majority of people are either older divorcées (40-50) or have some major problem that prevents them getting dates in the real world. In the cities -- especially places like New York or San Francisco, major magnets -- huge numbers of very cool twenty and thirty somethings are on them. You're post-college, you've moved to the big cheese to make it big in your urban professional job, and suddenly you know nobody and nobody knows you. You can either date colleagues (ugh), or you can go online. A lot of grad students do it as well.
I'm not surprised the larger sites have had problems. It's hard to make money running a personals site. You have to attract women (and very few women pay anything to use them), and at the same time get the boys to cough up. Server costs, promotion, and maintenance add up very quickly. Springstreet was just sold to some other company which is actually incredibly sketchy, and they've had some issues (that seem to be clearing up, but it was bad for a month or so.)
A stunningly content-free article, with a word to ad ratio that rivals Vogue.
I haven't taken the time to read the prior article carefully, but whatever the point he was originally trying to make has been completely lost in his attempt to shift the goalposts of the argument. (As far as I can tell, his original article said we should be allow to sue programmers for bugs.)
This second article says "people should write better code". Well, um, I disagree! Wait, no. Of course not. Yes, the quality of code should improve, and should always be improving.
The analogy to automobiles seems quite ridiculous. While there are some rare and unusual automobile failures, the basic system you have to check to make sure a car is "fatal accident free" is both completely transparent (mechanical connections that you can fully simulate if need be) and has been unchanged for years. Furthermore, it is possible to "overdesign" -- you know what the failure is going to look like (car hits object stops suddenly) and you can plan against it.
Software is something completely different. Each piece of software does something new (or, at least, it should.) The connection between different components is not transparent and while there are overall structural similarities, and long tested protocols, those protocols are nowhere near as "clean" as a car's drivetrain. Not to mention the fact that truly new software has to invent protocols along with the code.
I would imagine if car manufacturers changed basic facts about the drivetrain or the steering mechanism or the car structure each time they built a new car, they'd have a bug rate close to the average piece of software. And, of course, car bugs are not new -- there are the famous ones, like the Pinto (and less famous ones, like the "suicide doors.") To put things in perspective, when the Pinto was built, cars had been around for decades on decades. Are there any remaining fatal bugs in a classic C compiler?
Three comments. I am not a wiki fanatic, but I seem to be playing one tonight...
1. I'm not sure I see your objection clearly. The "etymology" article does indeed assert that etymology is connected to the field of historical lingusitics. You don't seem to disagree with that statement -- you instead assert that etymology is a rather dull, uninteresting part of lingusitics and really not a central problem of the field as some people seem to think. If you go to the article on Historical Linguistics itself, there is no mention of etymology! In any case, following your comments, I removed the three words you objected to linking etymology to historical linguistics, I couldn't resist.
In general, I can see what you're saying -- people not really grasping the difference between Linguistics, the field, and linguistics "the study of language and stuff". But it seems to be a minor problem (if irritating)? (Oh, and to be fair, what seems to be a reasonable, certaintly non-zero, number of lingustics people don't mind calling etymology an aspect of historical linguistics -- follow up some of the webpages here.)
2. I think you point out an interesting problem with wikipedia, which is that a big difficulty exists in the large-scale structures of the information. Generally, a factually incorrect sentence or paragraph gets fixed pretty quickly. But large-scale problems -- involving how various articles are "threaded" together -- are much harder to fix.
3. I personally would be terrified of editing the linguistics articles, since linguistics to me is astrophysics to you. But I can definitely see the problems that might arise when dealing with concepts that "everybody" understands, including things in psychology and anthropology. In general, fixing these problems takes work and a bit of dedication from experts; what's weird is that wikipedia seems to, on occasion, attract just those people.
Three comments. I am not a wiki fanatic, but I seem to be playing one tonight... 1. I'm not sure I see your objection clearly. The "etymology" article does indeed assert that etymology is connected to the field of historical lingusitics. You don't seem to disagree with that statement -- you instead assert that etymology is a rather dull, uninteresting part of lingusitics and really not a central problem of the field as some people seem to think. If you go to the article on Historical Linguistics itself, there is no mention of etymology! In any case, following your comments, I removed the three words you objected to linking etymology to historical linguistics, I couldn't resist. In general, I can see what you're saying -- people not really grasping the difference between Linguistics, the field, and linguistics "the study of language and stuff". But it seems to be a minor problem (if irritating)? (Oh, and to be fair, what seems to be a reasonable, certaintly non-zero, number of lingustics people don't mind calling etymology an aspect of historical linguistics -- follow up some of the webpages here. 2. I think you point out an interesting problem with wikipedia, which is that a big difficulty exists in the large-scale structures of the information. Generally, a factually incorrect sentence or paragraph gets fixed pretty quickly. But large-scale problems -- involving how various articles are "threaded" together -- are much harder to fix. 3. I personally would be terrified of editing the linguistics articles, since linguistics to me is astrophysics to you. But I can definitely see the problems that might arise when dealing with concepts that "everybody" understands, including things in psychology and anthropology. In general, fixing these problems takes work and a bit of dedication from experts; what's weird is that wikipedia seems to, on occasion, attract just those people.
I seem to be running interference for wikipedia today against touchy conservatives when I should be working.
Both AIM and MM are referred to respectively as conservative and liberal organizations. Actually, to be fair, MM is described in the first paragraph as a group that attacks "conservative" information, and is referred to as a "progressive" organization; the word "liberal" is not used until the second paragraph, where MM's sources of funding as described as "wealthy liberals".
Meanwhile, yes, indeed, AIM is referred to as a conservative organization. I'm not sure I understand: should wikipedia not refer to it as conservative? It's certaintly true that AIM likes to spin things, and doesn't describe itself as conservative, but everybody (and that means everybody, on the left and right) recognizes it as such.
I agree with you that the MM intro has a slight NPOV problem, however. I've rephrased it: "Media Matters monitors for and criticizes what it identifies as materially substantiated conservative misinformation found in media news reports, public affairs and talk radio shows from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and others."
As for the Communism articles, I don't get it? Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive web source on the evils of various Communist states around the world. You don't dispute that. What you do dispute is that because there is so much information on Communism, the pages have been split up so that some of them deal with the theory of Communism, while others deal with its implementation in practice. Presumably, you would want big warning labels on the theory article declaring "warning: following the descriptions in this article in your own country may lead to famine and genocide?"
That's what cracks me up the most about most allegations of "liberal bias": conservatives who alledge it seem to have a very, very low opinion of the average person's intelligence. Something that's well reflected in FOX news I might add.
Ah, slashdot. Where "no personal attacks" and "assume good faith" don't apply.
Wow, you seem to have some issues.
1. I just glanced over the Little Saigon article. The story you freaked out about involves a store owner who posted a Ho Chi Minh poster in his window. There was a riot. The sentence you object to was "[t]he event also raised some controversial issues about constitutional free speech in the United States." According to a New York Times article about the event, "The Vietnamese immigrant who has battled his former countrymen here for weeks about his right to display a poster of Ho Chi Minh in his video store rehung the picture today, but it took dozens of police officers and sheriff's deputies to protect him and the First Amendment." Um, a major police presence to protect someone's first amendment rights doesn't count as "raising controversial issues"? You seem to think the person should not have been allowed to display the poster -- so presumably you yourself find the police actions controversial?
2. Newt's daughter. Don't you think it's rather interesting that the daughter of a prominent and anti-gay conservative is a leader of a gay-rights group? Even in a case where the activities of a son or daughter don't directly bear of those of the parents, don't you think an article about a prominent person should include some information about their children? (Most wikipedia articles do.) How is presenting factual, relevant information "liberal bias"? Perhaps you would like to expunge all information about Ron Hubbard's son from the Hubbard article?
3. Nice catch. I was going to remove it from the article, but it seems like someone already did. Thanks for helping to improve wikipedia!
I wonder which article this was. I've never had this problem at all, and I've contributed to dozens of articles, both in science (I'm a Ph.D. in astrophysics), and in politics (where I have worked on "hot button" topics like the ACLU.) I have certaintly had occasional issues with people, but it's actually quite rare. In general, contentious but well-sourced material that belongs in an article, stays in an article, and people who try to remove it are considered vandals by the community and dealt with accordingly.
Reading between the lines of your post, it seems entirely possible that your edits, even if they were sourced by peer-reviewed journals, were inappropriate for the articles you edited. Wikipedia is not meant to be a series of technical review articles. The information you added may well have been considered at an inappropriately high level, it may have just been "too much" (articles are not supposed to grow without bounds) or, indeed, you may have added too much information about only one side of a contentious topic -- in the third case, people are likely to worry that you are subverting NPOV. (Adding detail to one side of an issue but not the other is probably the most tricky aspect of wikipedia -- I personally think it's OK, but it does, reasonably, set off people's NPOV alarms.)
Why bother with a flash USB when you can just gmail the material to yourself? If you're paranoid, encrypt it beforehand, but I doubt someone who broke into google is going to poke inside your PDF attachments. Come on, someone must have said it already? Mod me redundant!
tag, my apologies. I tried to come up with the lamest analogy possible.
Oh yeah? Well, think of it like... instead of scanning someone's network, it's like flying a plane... over a city... and looking at people's swimming pools... seeing if they're safe. I mean... how can you object to that? To me it seems identical.
Well OK --
If we're talking about highly-educated upper-middle class programmers, then fine. But contracts have their limits. I think most people (maybe not you) agree that it should be illegal to enter into a contract where you get paid less than minimum wage.
The employer-employee dynamic is never (well, almost never) one of two equal parties. It's silly to pretend otherwise.
I don't -- I don't have to. But there must be some out there. The internet is an extremely transparent medium, and it is very hard to astroturf your fraudulence out of the public view. If I was looking for a registrar, I'd figure out what the biggest forum was, and browse around there for awhile (perhaps this one? Maybe.) I imagine I'd discover pretty quickly who was and wasn't shady.
Man, I sort of want to snark all over this poor guy for using a shady registrar and getting shafted, but can we have a moment here, please? Does anyone remember the old, old days of, say, 1994?
Back when the internet was just this weird old place full of academics, old-school hacker types, weird "cyberspace" early adopters and the few commerical institutions who had some kind of online presence were seen as strange little furry mammals slinking around in the shadows not bothering anybody? When you actually e-mailed the guys at Cantor and Segal for misuing the internet, and thought it might work?
Now it's all hucksters and fraud.
Anyone remember those days? Can I get a "where have all the flowers gone"?
The only problem I've had with my Mac came, surprisingly, not from some unknown and undiscovered internet vulnerability, but from Symantic.
That would be the "Norton Utilities" for Mac OS X they wrote and sold, that corrupts your hard drive because Symantic didn't bother to figure out how our filesystem works. Wonderful. I had to buy Diskwarrior to sort it out.
If you go to the Amazon page for the Norton Utilities they sold, it's still there, but along with the dozens of one-star reviews, there is a suggestion that Symantic has quietly stopped shipping it.
It will be a long time before Mac users trust Symantic again.
Jeez, chill. It's a simple matter to make things anonymous, but I doubt the process would be in violation of the act anyway (the teacher can make up the grades later based on the student's percentages.)
We used to do this as well, and it was a very educational experience. I can imagine it now... "Jimmy, what is the answer to question six?" "I'm sorry, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act prohibits the release of any information from my education record. Since my knowledge of the answer constitutes part of my record, I respectfully refuse to answer."
I was surprised to find on googling Paul that she has pretty serious "liberal" credentials (here, from her bio). She seems less like one of those annoying distort-the-data right wingers and more like a sort of "pulse-of-the-culture" type people.
I doubt Paul is clamoring for the banning of porn, but it is certaintly true that we can create technology with consequences that far outstrip our mamamilian brain's ability to compensate.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever heard of a study that showed long-term psychological damage from exposure to words or (self-chosen) pictures. It would be surprising (though not impossible) to discover that porn really did cause problems for people.
In other words, there's a difference between porn and alcohol. People with seriously fucked up issues probably often consume both at rates and methods we'd considered messed up -- but alcohol actually causes additional problems, whereas I would be surprised if such causation could be demonstrated for porn. People with messed up ideas about sex probably consume messed up porn, but it's not like the porn "made them do it".
One thing that struck me, which I haven't heard before, is that University Ethics boards prohibit showing dirty films to human subjects. I'd be very interested to see a link to such a restriction.
I'm getting 7% from what Pay Pal charges me for transactions with verified shipping to confirmed addresses for amounts between $10 and $20. Maybe he gets a better deal, I can't read the link.
In the end, it's of course everyone's right to waste money as they see fit. If people want to pay seven cents on the charity dollar to say "Something Awful Rules" then that's fine. It doesn't make it any less foolish in my mind, though.
I'll bow out of the flame war now.
You guys sound like good nerds, but I'm sorry, I still don't get it. Pay Pal fees are horrendous.
Look at it from the outside (my perspective.) The website is soliciting donations for the Red Cross. 7% of all those donations go down the drain -- all so that the webmaster can verify that the donation was actually made and give people "free merchendise"?
It's definitely not standard practice, and I'm sure not the way the Red Cross would want it done.
Again, imagine it from the outside: "WalMart Red Cross donation button! Donate to the Red Cross here! 93% of your donation will go DIRECTLY TO THE RED CROSS! Donations over $10 will recieve free Wal Mart goodies!"
I have nothing against people running their own clever, innovative charitable projects via Pay Pal, but this complicated and lossy system of passing the buck is foolish.