At Metafilter, I suggested the following sometime back. I think the basic idea is sound.
--- On the general topic of open source knowledge as far as the academic subjects go, how's this for a partial solution: oversight by credentialed experts who may be anonymous if they wish?
Here's how it would work -
1)For each of the broad science fields (physics, biology..), the WP admins make a request for participation by credentialed experts. Users submit their information confidentially and have their identity and information verified by some official channel of communication. All the verified become members of a college, say, Wikipedia College of Physics. A select number of those verified become members of an interim subject oversight committee. This is the bootstrapping phase.
2)The selected committee, once in place, assumes charge of admitting new experts and assigning nuanced declarations of expertise onto members of that college.
3)So, let's say now that you have a contentious chemistry article. All the basic aspects remain the same as before. Anyone can edit, even anonymous users. Should there be a dispute which remains unresolved after a couple of to-and-fros, then the college is approached to have the final say on the matter. Its decision is final and binding.
4)This system also allows legitimate experts to assert their expertise anonymously. Admitted members can put up a banner/icon/whatever on their user page and committee-restricted pages can list member-rolls for sake of verification. Only the college committee personnel responsible for expertise verification know of identities. For sake of accountability, these personnel may be required to have their identities be public.
5)In addition to dispute resolution, maybe the relevant members can assume charge of specific topics and pages. They then periodically review high-traffic articles within their domain.
6)In order to prevent ideological bias within a college, requirement should be essential but minimal i.e. a graduate or greater degree in that field, or current full-time pursuit of such qualification at an accredited institution. ---
If it does, it will have a similar side effect profile: constipation, nausea, respiratory depression and probably addictive potential.
Not exactly. Peripheral opioid antagonists, like methylnaltrexone, can neutralise effects like constipation without affecting CNS sctivity. In theory, even respiratory depression may be averted since it's a different MOR subtype involved in that autonomic role, compared to the analgesic circuit (although I'm not aware of any products so far).
many people believe that crack is a worse substance than cocaine...because nobody informed them that they are the same drug, taken in a different form (crack is smoked and therefore absorbed faster; but cocaine can be injected, and absorbed still faster)
But the speed of administration makes a huuuge difference.
The US War on Drugs is a sham and the politicians know it. But the constant barrage of absolutist demonization has left no feasible opening to seriously suggest the alternative: legalization.
The UK isn't so bad. Atleast they have had the courage to allow medical marijuana research, which has resulted in the legal Sativex. Cannabis is classified as Class C, resulting in warnings & fine for possession. And very recently, a parliamentary committee lambasted the whole classification system. Even many senior politicians (like David Cameron) and police chiefs have called for considering legalization. The US does have an equivalent movement in LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) with about 5,000 officers, but getting the word out relies on media accomodation, and unlike the UK, the US is not a very tolerant venue.
Primarily, it depends on the cost of the drug. Also, on the addictive potential. But a very addictive but cheap drug won't lead to much acquisition crime (see cigarettes).
In the UK, according to a 2003 govt. report, most drug-related crime is committed by crack/heroin users. Notice the costs.
Drug addiction, being primarily metabolic, may have a more limited set of idenitifying characteristics. Game addiction, being primarily mental (or maybe even social) has more varying charactistics as psyches and social structures have a lot of built-in variance.
1)Unless you're a soulist, the mind is a product &reflection of the physical.
2)'The 'metabolic' aspect is specific to physical dependence. Psychological dependence is a function of psyches and social structures. A select number of heroin addicts in Britain who recieve heroin legally from the NHS lead functional lives, whereas those who maintain their addictions on the street are not so integrated or stable.
3)There's a single brain, which mediates all experiences. Dopamine encodes valence for any input (drugs, games, food). There are no neatly divorced subdivisions in the brain to deal with psychological addiction to drugs and psychological addiction to video games. The visible difference in their intensity occurs because drugs flood the brain and induce wholesale potent changes in neuroactivity, whereas video games work via the usual sensory channels. With regular conditioning, it's not surprising to see very similar expectation-triggered dopamine surges with both activities.
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
One thing I have found on Wikipedia is it is politically biased.
Name one entity that isn't. Bias isn't a problem. Hiding it, is.
The closest to genuine problem with Wikipedia is that due to the perverse application of the Neutral Point of View policy, articles aren't OK unless they include all points of view, including the obscure. The truth isn't balanced. It may coincide anywhere on the spectrum from the extreme thesis to the synthesis in the centre. Wikipedia's policy keeps the door a bit too wide open.
Bollywood's viewership is 3.8 billion vs Hollywood's 3.2 billion.
No, it's not!!
This is the same dubious PR logic that pegs Super Bowl viewership at a billion and also the Oscars. Just PR nonsense.
What the bait and switch is, of course, the combined populations of all the countries where Bollywood is marketed, is presented as the "viewership". Leave alone the fact that even in India, a typical Bollywood movie doesn't get more than maybe 100 million to ever watch it. Only the really hyped movies may get 300-400 million viewers when measured a couple of years after release.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the book, nor do I currently hold a firm opinion on this matter.
I suppose you could say that 'understanding systems' does not necessarily involve assigning a value preference. You may study how some new technology works, without being awed by it. Empathy would indicate some sort of positive bias towards it. Now, both empathy and understanding are obviously interrelated. But Cohen's use of understanding seems to be in the sense of analysis and objectification.
From the beginning of the book: "The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems."
Has anyone read it?
P.S. This guy is a cousin of Ali G. Don't know what that ought to signify:)
Having better training facilities is not the same as being altered by drugs or especially engineering.
And what's the specified "natural growth vector" for a human? There is none. Ultimately, all change is biological. Only a distinction between socially acceptable vectors of change and unacceptable vectors.
You'll see that some people are so convinced that this kind of human enhancements will happen that they predict than in a few decades, all sporting events 'will be split up to accommodate enhanced and unenhanced athletes.'"
What's the difference between enhanced and unenhanced?
Isn't the athlete from a rich country with well-equipped training facilities, tailored nutrition and good trainers already an enhanced athlete compared to an athlete from some small 3rd world country?
This dichotomy to what constitutes enhancement and what doesn't smacks of a medieval perspective of the human condition.
In order to deal with the 'reliability' aspect constantly brought up, Wikipedia's appointed management, could use an audit to ascertain the quality of the project.
My rough idea is, pick the 10 most popular articles, 10 random articles of moderate-to-high traffic, 10 random articles of low traffic and then do a compare/contrast against 'reputable' references. Then, check those references (and Wikipedia) against primary source references (if they exist, like journals/textbooks, for medical facts..etc). It will provide a good, quantified metric of the quality, acting as a rough indicator of where Wikipedia stands.
As many people have already commented, as of yet, a general audience can't invest as much trust in Wikipedia, as in a regular encyclopedia, irrespective of the actual relative merits.
As an internal benchmarking tool, the regular Wikipedia community should employ a 'Quality' metric to judge the state of the project. Roughly, this involves randomly selecting articles from all ends of the spectrum (featured articles, some estoric subjects, some mundane topics, most visited topics, in-between traffic...etc) and have a trusted & skilful panel compare these specimens against socially and academically accepted sources like regular encyclopedias, journals and books. These reviews ought to be conducted at a suitable frequency, like every 6-8 weeks.
Other areas, directly connected to improvement, involve the wiki engine. Currently, there are many articles that could be subsumed within larger articles. Instead of maintaining the data in a separate node, they should be accessible as extracts from within the larger article. HTML anchor targets only do half the work, as they load the entire article. The mediawiki engine should be specialized to handle a modern encyclopedia. Some articles have external citations, some don't. Some articles have category boxes underneath, some don't. Some articles have structured content, some don't. Like the country entries, there ought to be article templates and tools that one can inject into, and transform a page, e.g. there can be a tool: Citations, a section of the page where all citations are collected and linked to the content they're responsible for. The difference between this feature and manually creating a HTML "citations" section is that the HTML solution is context agnostic. I should be able to search only citations from a specific group of articles or check if a citation is used elsewhere on Wikipedia, e.g. let there be a single comprehensive external link "resource repository". So, if I write an article on the sport of cricket and I inject a link to a cricket history website, that link alongwith suitable keywords I provide (metadata) gets indexed. Then anyone who searches this repository and bring up all cricket links, will have my link also come up. One can cite the same source by citing the index ID of the link. Subsequently, one can call up all articles that reference that specific link.
Basically, this is about imposing some order on this wonderful initiative.
Don't try too hard to beat or overtake the system. It frequently happens that the class/project/whatever is too slow and/or easy for you. Don't get distracted and procrastinate on something else. Societies and formal institutional systems don't give free reign or tolerate deviants too much unless someone in power recognizes your potential and empathizes. There will be a few aspects where you can do as you wish, but not on the whole. It's not very optimistic advice, but it's practical.
One obvious solution would be to prepare the released paper such that all blacked out words are normalized to say, 30 characters by prefixing/suffixing strings.
Slashdot Mirror
At Metafilter, I suggested the following sometime back. I think the basic idea is sound.
---
On the general topic of open source knowledge as far as the academic subjects go, how's this for a partial solution: oversight by credentialed experts who may be anonymous if they wish?
Here's how it would work -
1)For each of the broad science fields (physics, biology..), the WP admins make a request for participation by credentialed experts. Users submit their information confidentially and have their identity and information verified by some official channel of communication. All the verified become members of a college, say, Wikipedia College of Physics. A select number of those verified become members of an interim subject oversight committee. This is the bootstrapping phase.
2)The selected committee, once in place, assumes charge of admitting new experts and assigning nuanced declarations of expertise onto members of that college.
3)So, let's say now that you have a contentious chemistry article. All the basic aspects remain the same as before. Anyone can edit, even anonymous users. Should there be a dispute which remains unresolved after a couple of to-and-fros, then the college is approached to have the final say on the matter. Its decision is final and binding.
4)This system also allows legitimate experts to assert their expertise anonymously. Admitted members can put up a banner/icon/whatever on their user page and committee-restricted pages can list member-rolls for sake of verification. Only the college committee personnel responsible for expertise verification know of identities. For sake of accountability, these personnel may be required to have their identities be public.
5)In addition to dispute resolution, maybe the relevant members can assume charge of specific topics and pages. They then periodically review high-traffic articles within their domain.
6)In order to prevent ideological bias within a college, requirement should be essential but minimal i.e. a graduate or greater degree in that field, or current full-time pursuit of such qualification at an accredited institution.
---
If it does, it will have a similar side effect profile: constipation, nausea, respiratory depression and probably addictive potential.
Not exactly. Peripheral opioid antagonists, like methylnaltrexone, can neutralise effects like constipation without affecting CNS sctivity. In theory, even respiratory depression may be averted since it's a different MOR subtype involved in that autonomic role, compared to the analgesic circuit (although I'm not aware of any products so far).
many people believe that crack is a worse substance than cocaine...because nobody informed them that they are the same drug, taken in a different form (crack is smoked and therefore absorbed faster; but cocaine can be injected, and absorbed still faster)
But the speed of administration makes a huuuge difference.
--daksya
The US War on Drugs is a sham and the politicians know it. But the constant barrage of absolutist demonization has left no feasible opening to seriously suggest the alternative: legalization.
The UK isn't so bad. Atleast they have had the courage to allow medical marijuana research, which has resulted in the legal Sativex. Cannabis is classified as Class C, resulting in warnings & fine for possession. And very recently, a parliamentary committee lambasted the whole classification system. Even many senior politicians (like David Cameron) and police chiefs have called for considering legalization. The US does have an equivalent movement in LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) with about 5,000 officers, but getting the word out relies on media accomodation, and unlike the UK, the US is not a very tolerant venue.
--posted on behalf of daksya
Primarily, it depends on the cost of the drug. Also, on the addictive potential. But a very addictive but cheap drug won't lead to much acquisition crime (see cigarettes).
In the UK, according to a 2003 govt. report, most drug-related crime is committed by crack/heroin users. Notice the costs.
- daksya
Drug addiction, being primarily metabolic, may have a more limited set of idenitifying characteristics. Game addiction, being primarily mental (or maybe even social) has more varying charactistics as psyches and social structures have a lot of built-in variance.
1)Unless you're a soulist, the mind is a product &reflection of the physical.
2)'The 'metabolic' aspect is specific to physical dependence. Psychological dependence is a function of psyches and social structures. A select number of heroin addicts in Britain who recieve heroin legally from the NHS lead functional lives, whereas those who maintain their addictions on the street are not so integrated or stable.
3)There's a single brain, which mediates all experiences. Dopamine encodes valence for any input (drugs, games, food). There are no neatly divorced subdivisions in the brain to deal with psychological addiction to drugs and psychological addiction to video games. The visible difference in their intensity occurs because drugs flood the brain and induce wholesale potent changes in neuroactivity, whereas video games work via the usual sensory channels. With regular conditioning, it's not surprising to see very similar expectation-triggered dopamine surges with both activities.
Except Nibbana goes beyond self-extinguishing.
As long as they're in the talk pages, that's fine.
The flamefests are confined to the talk pages, but the content isn't.
Over the last couple of years, I've observed drawn-out flamefests that would make what's written in the NPOV article, just words on a paper.
One thing I have found on Wikipedia is it is politically biased.
Name one entity that isn't. Bias isn't a problem. Hiding it, is.
The closest to genuine problem with Wikipedia is that due to the perverse application of the Neutral Point of View policy, articles aren't OK unless they include all points of view, including the obscure. The truth isn't balanced. It may coincide anywhere on the spectrum from the extreme thesis to the synthesis in the centre. Wikipedia's policy keeps the door a bit too wide open.
Bollywood's viewership is 3.8 billion vs Hollywood's 3.2 billion.
No, it's not!!
This is the same dubious PR logic that pegs Super Bowl viewership at a billion and also the Oscars. Just PR nonsense.
What the bait and switch is, of course, the combined populations of all the countries where Bollywood is marketed, is presented as the "viewership". Leave alone the fact that even in India, a typical Bollywood movie doesn't get more than maybe 100 million to ever watch it. Only the really hyped movies may get 300-400 million viewers when measured a couple of years after release.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the book, nor do I currently hold a firm opinion on this matter.
I suppose you could say that 'understanding systems' does not necessarily involve assigning a value preference. You may study how some new technology works, without being awed by it. Empathy would indicate some sort of positive bias towards it. Now, both empathy and understanding are obviously interrelated. But Cohen's use of understanding seems to be in the sense of analysis and objectification.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a psych prof. at Cambridge has a book:
:)
The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain.
From the beginning of the book: "The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems."
Has anyone read it?
P.S. This guy is a cousin of Ali G. Don't know what that ought to signify
Only in historical and social terms, not as a fundamental distinction.
Having better training facilities is not the same as being altered by drugs or especially engineering.
And what's the specified "natural growth vector" for a human? There is none. Ultimately, all change is biological. Only a distinction between socially acceptable vectors of change and unacceptable vectors.
You'll see that some people are so convinced that this kind of human enhancements will happen that they predict than in a few decades, all sporting events 'will be split up to accommodate enhanced and unenhanced athletes.'"
What's the difference between enhanced and unenhanced?
Isn't the athlete from a rich country with well-equipped training facilities, tailored nutrition and good trainers already an enhanced athlete compared to an athlete from some small 3rd world country?
This dichotomy to what constitutes enhancement and what doesn't smacks of a medieval perspective of the human condition.
In order to deal with the 'reliability' aspect constantly brought up, Wikipedia's appointed management, could use an audit to ascertain the quality of the project.
My rough idea is, pick the 10 most popular articles, 10 random articles of moderate-to-high traffic, 10 random articles of low traffic and then do a compare/contrast against 'reputable' references. Then, check those references (and Wikipedia) against primary source references (if they exist, like journals/textbooks, for medical facts..etc). It will provide a good, quantified metric of the quality, acting as a rough indicator of where Wikipedia stands.
To learn it the other way around, as mentioned above, pick up Tom Apostol's Calculus (2 vols).
I somehow doubt that there are scientists which have such a large mass.
How much can hot air weigh?
It works great for physics but it's so naive and/or grandoise to think you can solve "humans" with it.
Maybe it's a just a matter of complexity. Or are you insecure with the philosophical implications?
As many people have already commented, as of yet, a general audience can't invest as much trust in Wikipedia, as in a regular encyclopedia, irrespective of the actual relative merits.
As an internal benchmarking tool, the regular Wikipedia community should employ a 'Quality' metric to judge the state of the project. Roughly, this involves randomly selecting articles from all ends of the spectrum (featured articles, some estoric subjects, some mundane topics, most visited topics, in-between traffic...etc) and have a trusted & skilful panel compare these specimens against socially and academically accepted sources like regular encyclopedias, journals and books. These reviews ought to be conducted at a suitable frequency, like every 6-8 weeks.
Other areas, directly connected to improvement, involve the wiki engine. Currently, there are many articles that could be subsumed within larger articles. Instead of maintaining the data in a separate node, they should be accessible as extracts from within the larger article. HTML anchor targets only do half the work, as they load the entire article. The mediawiki engine should be specialized to handle a modern encyclopedia. Some articles have external citations, some don't. Some articles have category boxes underneath, some don't. Some articles have structured content, some don't. Like the country entries, there ought to be article templates and tools that one can inject into, and transform a page, e.g. there can be a tool: Citations, a section of the page where all citations are collected and linked to the content they're responsible for. The difference between this feature and manually creating a HTML "citations" section is that the HTML solution is context agnostic. I should be able to search only citations from a specific group of articles or check if a citation is used elsewhere on Wikipedia, e.g. let there be a single comprehensive external link "resource repository". So, if I write an article on the sport of cricket and I inject a link to a cricket history website, that link alongwith suitable keywords I provide (metadata) gets indexed. Then anyone who searches this repository and bring up all cricket links, will have my link also come up. One can cite the same source by citing the index ID of the link. Subsequently, one can call up all articles that reference that specific link.
Basically, this is about imposing some order on this wonderful initiative.
Can you cite some human/animal studies that LSD is neurotoxic within recreational dose ranges?
(All substances are neurotoxic at *some* dose, so let's not go there.)
Don't try too hard to beat or overtake the system. It frequently happens that the class/project/whatever is too slow and/or easy for you. Don't get distracted and procrastinate on something else. Societies and formal institutional systems don't give free reign or tolerate deviants too much unless someone in power recognizes your potential and empathizes. There will be a few aspects where you can do as you wish, but not on the whole. It's not very optimistic advice, but it's practical.
Guth might be right, after all. Automata rules!
One obvious solution would be to prepare the released paper such that all blacked out words are normalized to say, 30 characters by prefixing/suffixing strings.