Good insightful point: to confuse the two, e.g. by generalising the claims made from chain letters to memes in a general sense, would be a very stupid error. On the other hand, TFA does actually try to cast the evolution of the chain letter in a biological light, so I think their use of the term is defensible.
On the other other hand, one of the key weaknesses of the meme idea has always been that there's no such thing as parsimony, so biological parallels are always going to be inexact. On the other other other hand, a chain letter is a medium for the meme to be transmitted in: the existence of a substrate makes it reasonable to at least look for parsimony and, if it's there, assess how it works.
I wouldn't go that far. I'd simply apply the same penalty that I apply to all work that uses improperly sourced information. There's nothing magic about Wikipedia that makes citing it a worse crime than, say, citing a livejournal site.
Sounds more like a failure of investigative journalism, not Wikipedia.
Riiiight. If the print media cite an erroneous "fact" from Wikipedia, the print media are wrong and Wikipedia is right.
And if Wikipedia cites an erroneous "fact" from the print media that demonstrably has Wikipedia itself as its ultimate source, then the print media are wrong and Wikipedia is right.
Does that kind of automatic rejection of any criticism sound more like (a) an intellectual endeavour, or (b) a religion?
So you should be! As this is not Wikipedia, we are allowed to cite a primary source.
And it's a very apt comparison. An excellent story illustrating some fundamental problems with how sources work. It was also, I get the impression, an important inspiration for things like The Dumas Club and the prologue to The Name of the Rose.
Or is that Toyota still funny Japanese engineering that falls apart?
Um...what?
It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time when Japanese cars had a reputation for being shoddy pieces of crap. The GP refers to this belief, which was clung to by particularly jingoistic westerners up until, oooh say around the mid-1980s (and maybe still today, in the US, for all I know). In the beginnings of the Japanese car industry, say in the 1950s, it was certainly true; now, as we know, the US is decades behind. The GP draws attention to the fact that this scenario is being repeated in some industries, this time in China, and is very likely to be played out again in still other industries.
I am seriously beginning to think all this "police state" stuff is actually a campaign by the BNP/UKIP. Civil Liberties in the UK are actually being threatened to some extent by the right wingers in the Government, but the "police state" stuff is wild exaggeration. And if the BNP/UKIP ever did form a government, how long would civil liberties last?
The truly wondrous irony is when the BNP complains about living in a police state, e.g. ashfieldbnp.org.uk/?p=278 (not an active link as I don't want to encourage hits). As someone on the News Quiz said when the BNP complained of police oppression some weeks ago, surely you'd think they'd be pleased!
... it would be nice if you could post a link to a full article in English, what with this being an english site and all. No, babelfish doesn't count.
Yes, we should ignore all foreign articles until they've been officially translated,...
And it's not as if this is specifically an English-language site anyway, is it? I mean, look at the URL -- ".org". Not ".us", ".uk", ".au" or anything nation- or language- specific. The URL clearly indicates that it's supposed to be a pan-national site.
(Yes, I know what the FAQ says. The URL sends a stronger and more direct message than the FAQ, however.)
I've had the mouse on the left myself, and found it preferable in many ways, but I had to give up for two reasons. The first, less important, reason is that it's difficult to get a keyboard that has the numpad on the left. But what really put a stop to it was when I discovered that about half of all games refused to respect my reassignment of the mouse buttons. (Never mind tutorials that tell you to "press the left mouse button" instead of "press MOUSE0" or whatever; that piece of gratuitous thoughtlessness I could cope with.) Of course, there are also sometimes issues with design stupidity, like cables that are placed specifically so that they can't reach far enough.
For most purposes the switchover has made little difference to me, though it's still a huge time-waster having the mouse on the right when I need to draw/select a shape freehand in image editing. If that were my profession, I'd be much more troubled.
In other words, there's nothing bizarre about swapping around the keyboard and mouse. It's just that it's effectively prohibited by thoughtlessness. If it were possible to swap things round and have everything still make sense, I'm sure most left-handed people would.
Wrong. In Germany as well as in Austria 'Mein Kampf' is an illegal book prohibited under laws against glorifying and identifying with the National Socialist German Workers Party.
It may or may not be subject to the laws you've mentioned, but you're talking bollocks if you suggesting that that's the reason that only versions with a commentary are available. Oh look! Here's a copy of a 1939 edition of Mein Kampf being held legally in Germany.
The main reason you can't get it in other forms is simply that it's under copyright. In the library catalogue link above, notice the line saying "Keine Kopien möglich"? In Germany and Austria, as elsewhere in the EU, the copyright term on a book is life-plus-70 years. Therefore, it becomes public domain in 2015, and you will then be entitled to reproduce it and sell it in whatever form you damn well please. (Though at the time Hitler died I believe it was life-plus-80 years; I'm not sure if the change to life-plus-70 is retroactive or not.)
The copyright on the English translation has lapsed, which is why it's more readily available in English. A quick search shows that German bookshops don't carry the English translation either, but there's hardly much reason why they would.
Google Apps Education Edition is free for educational institutions. In addition, we have add-on security and compliance software that can be purchased at a 66% educational discount.
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You are mostly wrong. Lewis & Short dictionary entry: "virus, i, n." It's 2nd declension, so the plural in Latin would be viri. You are correct only to the extent that the word doesn't seem to be attested in the plural (at least not in the passages referenced by Lewis & Short).
I sort of agree. Though I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer a 96 kHz/24-bit lossy Vorbis file to a 44 kHz/16-bit lossless FLAC file. On the equipment I currently have I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, of course. But there are still other metrics to consider than just whether a format is lossless or not.
I really doubt that the US Army is going to try and punish an innocent New Zealander for trying to do the right thing.
Not punish, as such, no. But he has had access to information that the US didn't want him to have. I would imagine red flags will be popping up next to his name for quite a long time: he should be very very circumspect if he ever has to go through US immigration, for the foreseeable future.
Although I guess I'm not sure that announcing this to the news was "the right thing."
He gave a copy of the files to the local news, according to the TVNZ article.
I'm just waiting for schools be it junior, high or college to assign "wikipedia papers" as assignments.
I used to offer that as an assignment option in some of my courses, but had to give up in the last year because of rampant deletionism and imposition of idiosyncratic conventions that one or two admins require all edits in a given subject area to follow. You're absolutely right about the pedagogical merits, but it's just not feasible any more.
Teacher's shouldn't accept wikipedia as a source, for the same reasons they shouldn't accept other Encyclopedias. An encyclopedias entire point is to act as a reference, fine for casual research but only to be used as a starting point in finding academic material.
This comes up every time there's an article about Wikipedia, and it's so obviously correct that I wonder why it still hasn't reached the status of being a given. Personally, I advise my students to avoid both the EB and Wikipedia, though for different reasons. They are (quote):
Encyclopaedia Britannica
— Some articles [in discipline X] feature outdated information, and almost no articles provide bibliography or sources.
Wikipedia — Most articles [in discipline X] are extremely outdated, and citations are partial and unreliable.
They're both pretty bad. I certainly do refer to Wikipedia articles myself, but the "External sources" section is generally the only part of the article worth looking at.
There are exceptions to the general principle that "encyclopaedias are trash". There are some encyclopaedias that consist primarily or even solely of references to primary sources. Those are good encyclopaedias.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Referencing to a non-encyclopedic source *and* Wikipedia is much better than the traditional source alone. Yes, the meatspace/research source is probably more trustworthy/up to date, but a second verification helps not just add to the reliability of a given statement, but has an effect of almost multiplying the reliability.
Is this meant as a joke, or are you serious? This is complete nonsense. Multiple people saying a thing is true do not in any way at all help to verify that the thing is true. Your statement is the exact inverse of how reliable information-gathering works. You're taking "multiple sources repeating one another" as a synonym for "well-informed people agreeing". One of these things is a relatively good source of reliable information, the other is a group of armchair theorists re-posting each other's blogs. You even conflate "verification" with "source". That's not how verification works.
I'm not sure whether to be more horrified that someone could actually believe what you said, or that someone modded it up.
I agree with all the problems you identify, but since I have been wrestling with Impress today I want to develop on a couple of them. <rant>
2. Powerpoint fonts: Fonts are sometimes changed when going between Powerpoint and Impress.
Fonts are often changed when going between Impress and Impress -- at least, if you're copying and pasting slides from one presentation to another. This is something I do routinely, as I'm creating presentations based on older ones.
4. Alignment of bullets, and bullet characters: Bullets are often changed when converting, in terms of their positioning and the character used to represent the bullet itself.
This too is a problem within Impress: in Impress you actually cannot control the distance between bullets and content. My jaw dropped when I realised that the problem was not, after all, my fault, but a huge, gaping, blundering omission. (Go on, try it. Open up Impress and start modifying one of the Outline styles. See anything missing?)
I am going to be devoting some time this weekend to trying to learn how to do some less-obvious tricks in the S5 presentation format. (I had thought of using LaTeX instead, but I mess around with layout a lot: I don't want LaTeX to take care of that for me. With XML the gap between WYS and WYG is simply a bit briefer.) I'm not going to switch to PowerPoint because that has its own quirks, overall equal in severity to those of Impress for my purposes. </rant>
As a matter of both logic and principle I never believe any assertions or promises from a politician. So all the stuff he said about "We will build the roads", "We will restore science", I take with several kg of salt.
However, the way someone talks can, under some circumstances, reveal actual information. I was greatly impressed by the rather subtle, but tremendously important change, indicated by this sentence near the start of his speech:
Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.
Thank all the gods and little fishes for that little ray of sanity, at least. This is something the world hasn't seen for decades: a US president who isn't fixated on having wars against abstractions, methodologies, and inanimate objects, but who is willing to use a kind of language that at least admits of the possibility of achievable goals. As for the content of the promises, we shall see; but clarity is a start, and a big change in itself. I'm cautiously optimistic. Enough to say, well chosen, America.
Remember what we see is a 3000 year old image of the planet. It may not even exist today.
It's not clear to me what "today" should mean in this context. Presumably there's a frame of reference in which Earth today and this other planet 3000 years ago are simultaneous...
... er, come to think of it, that frame of reference would be... here, wouldn't it?
For what it's worth, I think it's a pretty sad reflection on the Slashdot community that a post citing numerous specific cases where Windows might be considered superior to Linux has got hit with enough troll mods to make it disappear for most people, yet there are no replies actually countering the points made in that post.
You're right, and if the old metamoderation system were still in place, I'd certainly metamod the "Troll" mods as unfair.
The correct mod in this case would have been "Offtopic", which would encompass both the irrelevance and the rambling longwindedness of the post. Unfortunately, in the new metamod system we can't metamod as "unfair"; we can only "digg" up or down. And since that post most certainly doesn't deserve to be "dugg" up, I can't metamoderate it. The new metamod system has, IMHO, seriously damaged, if not the level of discussion, then at least the thought that ought to go into moderation.
(And yes, both this post and the parent deserve an "Offtopic" mod as well, from a certain point of view.)
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Good insightful point: to confuse the two, e.g. by generalising the claims made from chain letters to memes in a general sense, would be a very stupid error. On the other hand, TFA does actually try to cast the evolution of the chain letter in a biological light, so I think their use of the term is defensible.
On the other other hand, one of the key weaknesses of the meme idea has always been that there's no such thing as parsimony, so biological parallels are always going to be inexact. On the other other other hand, a chain letter is a medium for the meme to be transmitted in: the existence of a substrate makes it reasonable to at least look for parsimony and, if it's there, assess how it works.
... and Desi Arnaz was Cuban. Certainly not off-topic.
Well, I guess there are now forty-three ways to generate power from a hamster.
I'm kind of hoping that this research is in reference to that old list ... my favourite was always number 41.
I wouldn't go that far. I'd simply apply the same penalty that I apply to all work that uses improperly sourced information. There's nothing magic about Wikipedia that makes citing it a worse crime than, say, citing a livejournal site.
Sounds more like a failure of investigative journalism, not Wikipedia.
Riiiight. If the print media cite an erroneous "fact" from Wikipedia, the print media are wrong and Wikipedia is right.
And if Wikipedia cites an erroneous "fact" from the print media that demonstrably has Wikipedia itself as its ultimate source, then the print media are wrong and Wikipedia is right.
Does that kind of automatic rejection of any criticism sound more like (a) an intellectual endeavour, or (b) a religion?
And I'm very sorry for the Wikipedia link.
So you should be! As this is not Wikipedia, we are allowed to cite a primary source.
And it's a very apt comparison. An excellent story illustrating some fundamental problems with how sources work. It was also, I get the impression, an important inspiration for things like The Dumas Club and the prologue to The Name of the Rose.
Or is that Toyota still funny Japanese engineering that falls apart?
Um...what?
It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time when Japanese cars had a reputation for being shoddy pieces of crap. The GP refers to this belief, which was clung to by particularly jingoistic westerners up until, oooh say around the mid-1980s (and maybe still today, in the US, for all I know). In the beginnings of the Japanese car industry, say in the 1950s, it was certainly true; now, as we know, the US is decades behind. The GP draws attention to the fact that this scenario is being repeated in some industries, this time in China, and is very likely to be played out again in still other industries.
I am seriously beginning to think all this "police state" stuff is actually a campaign by the BNP/UKIP. Civil Liberties in the UK are actually being threatened to some extent by the right wingers in the Government, but the "police state" stuff is wild exaggeration. And if the BNP/UKIP ever did form a government, how long would civil liberties last?
The truly wondrous irony is when the BNP complains about living in a police state, e.g. ashfieldbnp.org.uk/?p=278 (not an active link as I don't want to encourage hits). As someone on the News Quiz said when the BNP complained of police oppression some weeks ago, surely you'd think they'd be pleased!
It's almost like they are trying to hand the market to Google and the webapp gang.
Browser + MP3 player + IM app = "oh, shit, can't open Email."
Gmail + Gtalk + Google Apps + Pandora = still two local app slots open.
Two slots open -- that's assuming you're not trying to use those tools in Chrome, of course.
Yes, we should ignore all foreign articles until they've been officially translated, ...
And it's not as if this is specifically an English-language site anyway, is it? I mean, look at the URL -- ".org". Not ".us", ".uk", ".au" or anything nation- or language- specific. The URL clearly indicates that it's supposed to be a pan-national site.
(Yes, I know what the FAQ says. The URL sends a stronger and more direct message than the FAQ, however.)
I've had the mouse on the left myself, and found it preferable in many ways, but I had to give up for two reasons. The first, less important, reason is that it's difficult to get a keyboard that has the numpad on the left. But what really put a stop to it was when I discovered that about half of all games refused to respect my reassignment of the mouse buttons. (Never mind tutorials that tell you to "press the left mouse button" instead of "press MOUSE0" or whatever; that piece of gratuitous thoughtlessness I could cope with.) Of course, there are also sometimes issues with design stupidity, like cables that are placed specifically so that they can't reach far enough.
For most purposes the switchover has made little difference to me, though it's still a huge time-waster having the mouse on the right when I need to draw/select a shape freehand in image editing. If that were my profession, I'd be much more troubled.
In other words, there's nothing bizarre about swapping around the keyboard and mouse. It's just that it's effectively prohibited by thoughtlessness. If it were possible to swap things round and have everything still make sense, I'm sure most left-handed people would.
Wrong. In Germany as well as in Austria 'Mein Kampf' is an illegal book prohibited under laws against glorifying and identifying with the National Socialist German Workers Party.
It may or may not be subject to the laws you've mentioned, but you're talking bollocks if you suggesting that that's the reason that only versions with a commentary are available. Oh look! Here's a copy of a 1939 edition of Mein Kampf being held legally in Germany.
The main reason you can't get it in other forms is simply that it's under copyright. In the library catalogue link above, notice the line saying "Keine Kopien möglich"? In Germany and Austria, as elsewhere in the EU, the copyright term on a book is life-plus-70 years. Therefore, it becomes public domain in 2015, and you will then be entitled to reproduce it and sell it in whatever form you damn well please. (Though at the time Hitler died I believe it was life-plus-80 years; I'm not sure if the change to life-plus-70 is retroactive or not.)
The copyright on the English translation has lapsed, which is why it's more readily available in English. A quick search shows that German bookshops don't carry the English translation either, but there's hardly much reason why they would.
If you're a school, not only is it not beta, you don't even need to pay. http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html:
Google Apps Education Edition
Google Apps Education Edition is free for educational institutions. In addition, we have add-on security and compliance software that can be purchased at a 66% educational discount.
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Here's another copy. This copy is, appropriately enough, made accessible thanks to the efforts of a Swedish organisation.
You are mostly wrong. Lewis & Short dictionary entry: "virus, i, n." It's 2nd declension, so the plural in Latin would be viri. You are correct only to the extent that the word doesn't seem to be attested in the plural (at least not in the passages referenced by Lewis & Short).
I sort of agree. Though I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer a 96 kHz/24-bit lossy Vorbis file to a 44 kHz/16-bit lossless FLAC file. On the equipment I currently have I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, of course. But there are still other metrics to consider than just whether a format is lossless or not.
I really doubt that the US Army is going to try and punish an innocent New Zealander for trying to do the right thing.
Not punish, as such, no. But he has had access to information that the US didn't want him to have. I would imagine red flags will be popping up next to his name for quite a long time: he should be very very circumspect if he ever has to go through US immigration, for the foreseeable future.
Although I guess I'm not sure that announcing this to the news was "the right thing."
He gave a copy of the files to the local news, according to the TVNZ article.
I'm just waiting for schools be it junior, high or college to assign "wikipedia papers" as assignments.
I used to offer that as an assignment option in some of my courses, but had to give up in the last year because of rampant deletionism and imposition of idiosyncratic conventions that one or two admins require all edits in a given subject area to follow. You're absolutely right about the pedagogical merits, but it's just not feasible any more.
Teacher's shouldn't accept wikipedia as a source, for the same reasons they shouldn't accept other Encyclopedias. An encyclopedias entire point is to act as a reference, fine for casual research but only to be used as a starting point in finding academic material.
This comes up every time there's an article about Wikipedia, and it's so obviously correct that I wonder why it still hasn't reached the status of being a given. Personally, I advise my students to avoid both the EB and Wikipedia, though for different reasons. They are (quote):
They're both pretty bad. I certainly do refer to Wikipedia articles myself, but the "External sources" section is generally the only part of the article worth looking at.
There are exceptions to the general principle that "encyclopaedias are trash". There are some encyclopaedias that consist primarily or even solely of references to primary sources. Those are good encyclopaedias.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Referencing to a non-encyclopedic source *and* Wikipedia is much better than the traditional source alone. Yes, the meatspace/research source is probably more trustworthy/up to date, but a second verification helps not just add to the reliability of a given statement, but has an effect of almost multiplying the reliability.
Is this meant as a joke, or are you serious? This is complete nonsense. Multiple people saying a thing is true do not in any way at all help to verify that the thing is true. Your statement is the exact inverse of how reliable information-gathering works. You're taking "multiple sources repeating one another" as a synonym for "well-informed people agreeing". One of these things is a relatively good source of reliable information, the other is a group of armchair theorists re-posting each other's blogs. You even conflate "verification" with "source". That's not how verification works.
I'm not sure whether to be more horrified that someone could actually believe what you said, or that someone modded it up.
I agree with all the problems you identify, but since I have been wrestling with Impress today I want to develop on a couple of them. <rant>
2. Powerpoint fonts: Fonts are sometimes changed when going between Powerpoint and Impress.
Fonts are often changed when going between Impress and Impress -- at least, if you're copying and pasting slides from one presentation to another. This is something I do routinely, as I'm creating presentations based on older ones.
4. Alignment of bullets, and bullet characters: Bullets are often changed when converting, in terms of their positioning and the character used to represent the bullet itself.
This too is a problem within Impress: in Impress you actually cannot control the distance between bullets and content. My jaw dropped when I realised that the problem was not, after all, my fault, but a huge, gaping, blundering omission. (Go on, try it. Open up Impress and start modifying one of the Outline styles. See anything missing?)
I am going to be devoting some time this weekend to trying to learn how to do some less-obvious tricks in the S5 presentation format. (I had thought of using LaTeX instead, but I mess around with layout a lot: I don't want LaTeX to take care of that for me. With XML the gap between WYS and WYG is simply a bit briefer.) I'm not going to switch to PowerPoint because that has its own quirks, overall equal in severity to those of Impress for my purposes. </rant>
Many thanks for the clarification. I didn't exactly want to make a joke of it, but lacked the expertise to work out what you just said ...
Well, yes, it was on TV... Now what?
As a matter of both logic and principle I never believe any assertions or promises from a politician. So all the stuff he said about "We will build the roads", "We will restore science", I take with several kg of salt.
However, the way someone talks can, under some circumstances, reveal actual information. I was greatly impressed by the rather subtle, but tremendously important change, indicated by this sentence near the start of his speech:
Thank all the gods and little fishes for that little ray of sanity, at least. This is something the world hasn't seen for decades: a US president who isn't fixated on having wars against abstractions, methodologies, and inanimate objects, but who is willing to use a kind of language that at least admits of the possibility of achievable goals. As for the content of the promises, we shall see; but clarity is a start, and a big change in itself. I'm cautiously optimistic. Enough to say, well chosen, America.
Remember what we see is a 3000 year old image of the planet. It may not even exist today.
It's not clear to me what "today" should mean in this context. Presumably there's a frame of reference in which Earth today and this other planet 3000 years ago are simultaneous ...
... er, come to think of it, that frame of reference would be ... here, wouldn't it?
For what it's worth, I think it's a pretty sad reflection on the Slashdot community that a post citing numerous specific cases where Windows might be considered superior to Linux has got hit with enough troll mods to make it disappear for most people, yet there are no replies actually countering the points made in that post.
You're right, and if the old metamoderation system were still in place, I'd certainly metamod the "Troll" mods as unfair.
The correct mod in this case would have been "Offtopic", which would encompass both the irrelevance and the rambling longwindedness of the post. Unfortunately, in the new metamod system we can't metamod as "unfair"; we can only "digg" up or down. And since that post most certainly doesn't deserve to be "dugg" up, I can't metamoderate it. The new metamod system has, IMHO, seriously damaged, if not the level of discussion, then at least the thought that ought to go into moderation.
(And yes, both this post and the parent deserve an "Offtopic" mod as well, from a certain point of view.)