This sort of pronouncement sounds more like a play by drug companies to get more subsidies and shoulder less of the basic science financial burden. Drug companies have pretty much picked all the low-hanging fruit for new drugs, which is the real reason there are so few new ones brought to market. Now the cost of developing a new drug is getting massively larger, while often only providing a marginally more effective solution compared to existing drugs.
But is the slowdown of new drugs really a crisis? Maybe the Big Pharma just needs to downsize, and put those scientists to work somewhere else.
The 42 entries were the same for each encyclopedia; they chose experts on each respective topic to do each review (for example, the author of a Mendeleev biography for the Mendeleev articles).
They did not release the actual reviews, so the errors are unknown, although the number in each specific article is published. And no, it was not double-blind... that refers to when neither the researcher (i.e., the journalist) nor the subject (in this case, the reviewer) knows which is which. It was single-blind; that's all that matters, unless you think the fact that the person supplying the (unlabeled) articles would influence the results by his/her behavior.
But the Nature article implies that it was mostly obvious which one was the Wikipedia article because of the (mis)organization of information and writing quality, factuality aside.
This could be a really good way of doing things... as long as there was no way to specifically choose which articles you were going to moderate.
The fanatic edit-mongers would probably like it if they were presented with as many random new edits to give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to as they like. And the number of reviews necessary could be adjusted to match the amount of moderation going on. Maybe there could be a standard wait period of an hour or two before edits go into effect, during which time lots of people would be presented with the edit to weed out vandalism and other bad edits.
If feedback is not unanimous and some people flag an edit as questionable, it goes through another hour or two of feedback, and gets bumped up in the moderation algorithm so more people see it. Then some threshold of positive to negative feedback would be needed for it to go into effect. It might cause some problems on controversial topics, but as long as the threshold isn't too high, it might work well.
My area of interest (not quite expertise, but getting there) is history (of science, in particular). In general, there is room for a massive, huge, gargantuan, enormous number of new articles on historical topics... Wikipedia is just scratching the surface. I don't see the time for big contributions ending any times soon in that regard.
But the biggest problem I see with Wikipedia on more traditional encyclopedia content types (as opposed to the esoteric culture articles for which it is a great resource) is organization. The thematic hierarchies of topics are very limited. For example, there are lots of history of science-related articles that don't get linked to from the broad "history of science" or "history of physics," etc. articles. At least for the kind of articles I'm interested it, I haven't seen very much vandalism at all.
FreeCiv.org doesn't so much bypass legal limitations... it's more like the Civilization IP owners just don't think it's worth alienating so many fans of a relatively small genre. A lot of FreeCiv (it's based on Civ 2, is it not) are still going to buy Civ 4, while older Civilization games aren't exactly bringing in the big bucks anymore.
RISK has a somewhat broader base, and still finds its way onto toy store shelves all over. Alhough I'm not sure how the Google Maps version could hurt them (it seems like it would remind people of the joys of risk and push sales rather than compete with the board game version).
Actually, the scientific method is always up for debate. If there's one thing the history of science shows, it's that there has never been just one scientific method; it's more like whatever work is what gets used... kinda Darwinian, really.
Explicit debates about scientific method were at the forefront of science several times even in the 20th century (especially during the emergence of quantum physics, and in biology during the rise of genetics and again during the Evolutionary Synthesis). Regarding the border between the natural and preternatural or supernatural, debates never really even slowed down from about the time of Thomas Aquinas to the mid-20th century. R. A. Millikan, for example, was all about using science to answer essentially theological questions. The scientific hypotheses generated by that outlook didn't pan out, but that doesn't mean the question weren't valid. If you're a scientist and religious, you can't simply rule out the possibility that science could investigate the effects of God, etc. on the natural world. If there were observable indications of divine intervention, you absolutely could use science to investigate them.
ID is unsuccessful science, precisely because there don't seem to be observable indications of divine intervention (or whatever other intelligent agent you care to hypothesize). But defining such questions as "not science" a priori is basically a political and cultural issue.
The problem is, the big click rackets run all their traffic through proxies, so you can't tell what country the clicks are really coming from; it can look like they are from all over, even though it's from a single computer.
I actually know a few people who went into science (and are currently in grad school or soon will be) because ID got them interested. Of course, not ID of the school board flavor (which basically IS just an excuse to put religion back into the schools); they think there are some implications of the concept of ID that are testable. They are Christians, but they don't hinge their beliefs on whether ID is scientifically demonstrable or not (of course they do believe the world is designed, but whether that can be demonstrated scientifically is a separate issue).
It's true that there isn't much research that really supports ID to the exclusion of modern evolutionary theory, but it's also true that there is enough science in ID that even with, say, a typical undergraduate biochemistry education, you would have a tough time discrediting it (without reference to the anti-ID arguments of professional scientists). And if you don't have actually quite a lot of training in biology you pretty much have to take the experts' word for it. The line between "science" and "not science" just isn't that simple.
All this is not to say that ID good science, but at least in some ways it is science. Even if the people driving into schools (or driving it anywhere, really) are totally religiously motivated, that doesn't mean they can't make the idea scientific. After all, explicit religious motivation went in to the work of Kepler, Maxwell, and Millikan, to name but a very. Considering how good most evolutionary biologists consider the support for the orthodox account, it seems doubtful that ID will ever have the success of, say, the religiously motivated reformulation of physics in terms of energy (instead of force) that happened in North Britain in the late 19th century. Then again, that was the feeling about physics before Maxwell and his circle, too. But if ID was ever to become significant scientifically, it would need much more convincing non-religious factors going for it than it has now.
Yes, there are major flaws with the way science is taught, and also the attitudes kids have toward science. Ironically, Intelligent Design and even straight-forward creationism (at least in places where the accepted science is actually taught) are probably doing more good than bad. I remeber reading an article several years ago from an education journal that showed that kids who engaged with the conflict, particularly the ones who took the creationist side, actually knew evolutionary biology much better than those who did not.
The way I see it, anything that gets kids to ask question and find something interesting in science, even if what gets them interested is a theory that is completely wrong, is a good thing. (I'm definitely opposed to teaching Intelligent Design in high school, or in any circumstances as being better than or equal to the evolutionary story, but I think it might have long-term benefits even if it never comes to anything scientifically.) Particularly with Intelligent Design, it encourages kids to actually learn the relevant biology to come to a conclusion. Even if the biology they get through in high school isn't sophisticated enough to make an accurate judgement, it isn't like being wrong is fatal. At that level, accurate conclusions are the least important thing; the key is asking questions and developing an interest in science. In grad school they can worry about being right.
This is just one step away from TRON.
But seriously, the question is, why are video games so much more absorbing than real life for this kid? Our society needs to do something to pep itself up. Wars are a good start, but Iraq is just too far away to capture our attention. I've always daydreamed about a situation where nearly everyone (usually all adults) suddenly disappeared, and the people left formed groups and took over stores, and had to barter or take by force whatever their store didn't have. Wal-mart was of course the gold standard, and then you could demand all kinds of high trading values for your massive store of food, if you could successful defend it (fortunately the large gun sections in most Wal-marts would help). But I also thought about how tough it would be to get by if the best you could manage was to hole up in a Goodwill.
They need to make that happen, or at least make a post-apocalyptic video game like that.
Sorry, no such thing. I looked for them for a while last night, actually. GIMP for Windows is just for noobs who can't be trusted with "unstable" software.
Isn't it obvious? If you respect an artist (or industry) too much to infringe on their copyright, but can't afford the stuff, you shoplift. Possession is 9/10 of the law, so clearly shoplifting is only 9/10 as bad as downloading as far as the copyright is concerned.
Of course, with shoplifting you are also ripping off your local retailer (who could care less about copyright). So it comes down to a matter of principle. Who do you dislike more: Wal-Mart or RIAA?
I have a soft spot for Wal-Mart, despite their low pay and low benefits for employees. I have no pity for the RIAA, which takes advantage of artists and consumers.
(Unfortunately, I do have a moderate amount of old-fashioned respect for laws, but the limits of that respect are reached more and more easily these days.)
It seems like there is an obvious free-market solution to this problem: if a big company actually let people do what they wanted (and people definitely want to, for example, use their photos and easily transfer other content they have rights to), they have a big competitive advantage with no upfront costs. Yet the US providers stick together and all restrict their phones as a group, despite the opportunity to get a clear advantage in a (seemingly) very competitive market.
What's wrong with this picture?
I have a Samsung phone from Cingular, and even though I can upload ringtones to it for just the price of Cingular web bandwidth (overpriced but not in the $2 for a ringtone range), all those ringtones are so quiet as to be practically useless. Only the built in ones (and ones you buy from Cingular) are loud enough to use.
It would hopefully only take one major company to change its policy before the others followed suit, but I don't see that happening. Companies can more and more often assume political and technical ignorance on the part of their consumers. And this leads to all the DRM fun these days.
On the one hand, it's not like that sort of consensus truth building hasn't been around at least since the 17th century (the circle of people whose opinions matter has just changed).
But really, if you look at a few articles on controversial topics (try Intelligent Design) and particularly at the discussion pages, you'll find that the articles get pared down to mostly facts and statements of the views of each side. The editors do a pretty good job of keeping blatant bias out of the articles. It's still the wisdom of crowds, but with some pretty clear standards.
In fact, I'd say Wikipedia is much less ideological and political than the first Encyclopdia of Diderot and D'Alembert.
If you ever do presentations, PowerPoint Office 2000 is incredibly bad compared to either 2003 or OOo 2. I think OOo Impress can actually do a few things better PP, like draw curves. And OOo runs my PP presentations, animations and custom vectors and all, flawlessly.
As for Calc vs. Excel, I never use any advanced features, but I find the basic interface slightly better on OOo Calc.
The only advantage I've found for Writer is that it doesn't do as many of the really obnoxious autoformatting that Word 2003 does by default. The only feature that I really miss, though, is Track Changes.
But (aside from speed issues), OOo seems superior in every way to Office 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
But is the slowdown of new drugs really a crisis? Maybe the Big Pharma just needs to downsize, and put those scientists to work somewhere else.
What's an "enius"?
They did not release the actual reviews, so the errors are unknown, although the number in each specific article is published. And no, it was not double-blind... that refers to when neither the researcher (i.e., the journalist) nor the subject (in this case, the reviewer) knows which is which. It was single-blind; that's all that matters, unless you think the fact that the person supplying the (unlabeled) articles would influence the results by his/her behavior.
But the Nature article implies that it was mostly obvious which one was the Wikipedia article because of the (mis)organization of information and writing quality, factuality aside.
The fanatic edit-mongers would probably like it if they were presented with as many random new edits to give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to as they like. And the number of reviews necessary could be adjusted to match the amount of moderation going on. Maybe there could be a standard wait period of an hour or two before edits go into effect, during which time lots of people would be presented with the edit to weed out vandalism and other bad edits.
If feedback is not unanimous and some people flag an edit as questionable, it goes through another hour or two of feedback, and gets bumped up in the moderation algorithm so more people see it. Then some threshold of positive to negative feedback would be needed for it to go into effect. It might cause some problems on controversial topics, but as long as the threshold isn't too high, it might work well.
My area of interest (not quite expertise, but getting there) is history (of science, in particular). In general, there is room for a massive, huge, gargantuan, enormous number of new articles on historical topics... Wikipedia is just scratching the surface. I don't see the time for big contributions ending any times soon in that regard. But the biggest problem I see with Wikipedia on more traditional encyclopedia content types (as opposed to the esoteric culture articles for which it is a great resource) is organization. The thematic hierarchies of topics are very limited. For example, there are lots of history of science-related articles that don't get linked to from the broad "history of science" or "history of physics," etc. articles. At least for the kind of articles I'm interested it, I haven't seen very much vandalism at all.
RISK has a somewhat broader base, and still finds its way onto toy store shelves all over. Alhough I'm not sure how the Google Maps version could hurt them (it seems like it would remind people of the joys of risk and push sales rather than compete with the board game version).
Explicit debates about scientific method were at the forefront of science several times even in the 20th century (especially during the emergence of quantum physics, and in biology during the rise of genetics and again during the Evolutionary Synthesis). Regarding the border between the natural and preternatural or supernatural, debates never really even slowed down from about the time of Thomas Aquinas to the mid-20th century. R. A. Millikan, for example, was all about using science to answer essentially theological questions. The scientific hypotheses generated by that outlook didn't pan out, but that doesn't mean the question weren't valid. If you're a scientist and religious, you can't simply rule out the possibility that science could investigate the effects of God, etc. on the natural world. If there were observable indications of divine intervention, you absolutely could use science to investigate them.
ID is unsuccessful science, precisely because there don't seem to be observable indications of divine intervention (or whatever other intelligent agent you care to hypothesize). But defining such questions as "not science" a priori is basically a political and cultural issue.
The problem is, the big click rackets run all their traffic through proxies, so you can't tell what country the clicks are really coming from; it can look like they are from all over, even though it's from a single computer.
I actually know a few people who went into science (and are currently in grad school or soon will be) because ID got them interested. Of course, not ID of the school board flavor (which basically IS just an excuse to put religion back into the schools); they think there are some implications of the concept of ID that are testable. They are Christians, but they don't hinge their beliefs on whether ID is scientifically demonstrable or not (of course they do believe the world is designed, but whether that can be demonstrated scientifically is a separate issue).
It's true that there isn't much research that really supports ID to the exclusion of modern evolutionary theory, but it's also true that there is enough science in ID that even with, say, a typical undergraduate biochemistry education, you would have a tough time discrediting it (without reference to the anti-ID arguments of professional scientists). And if you don't have actually quite a lot of training in biology you pretty much have to take the experts' word for it. The line between "science" and "not science" just isn't that simple.
All this is not to say that ID good science, but at least in some ways it is science. Even if the people driving into schools (or driving it anywhere, really) are totally religiously motivated, that doesn't mean they can't make the idea scientific. After all, explicit religious motivation went in to the work of Kepler, Maxwell, and Millikan, to name but a very. Considering how good most evolutionary biologists consider the support for the orthodox account, it seems doubtful that ID will ever have the success of, say, the religiously motivated reformulation of physics in terms of energy (instead of force) that happened in North Britain in the late 19th century. Then again, that was the feeling about physics before Maxwell and his circle, too. But if ID was ever to become significant scientifically, it would need much more convincing non-religious factors going for it than it has now.
The way I see it, anything that gets kids to ask question and find something interesting in science, even if what gets them interested is a theory that is completely wrong, is a good thing. (I'm definitely opposed to teaching Intelligent Design in high school, or in any circumstances as being better than or equal to the evolutionary story, but I think it might have long-term benefits even if it never comes to anything scientifically.) Particularly with Intelligent Design, it encourages kids to actually learn the relevant biology to come to a conclusion. Even if the biology they get through in high school isn't sophisticated enough to make an accurate judgement, it isn't like being wrong is fatal. At that level, accurate conclusions are the least important thing; the key is asking questions and developing an interest in science. In grad school they can worry about being right.
This is just one step away from TRON. But seriously, the question is, why are video games so much more absorbing than real life for this kid? Our society needs to do something to pep itself up. Wars are a good start, but Iraq is just too far away to capture our attention. I've always daydreamed about a situation where nearly everyone (usually all adults) suddenly disappeared, and the people left formed groups and took over stores, and had to barter or take by force whatever their store didn't have. Wal-mart was of course the gold standard, and then you could demand all kinds of high trading values for your massive store of food, if you could successful defend it (fortunately the large gun sections in most Wal-marts would help). But I also thought about how tough it would be to get by if the best you could manage was to hole up in a Goodwill. They need to make that happen, or at least make a post-apocalyptic video game like that.
Is it secret?
Sorry, no such thing. I looked for them for a while last night, actually. GIMP for Windows is just for noobs who can't be trusted with "unstable" software.
Of course, with shoplifting you are also ripping off your local retailer (who could care less about copyright). So it comes down to a matter of principle. Who do you dislike more: Wal-Mart or RIAA?
I have a soft spot for Wal-Mart, despite their low pay and low benefits for employees. I have no pity for the RIAA, which takes advantage of artists and consumers.
(Unfortunately, I do have a moderate amount of old-fashioned respect for laws, but the limits of that respect are reached more and more easily these days.)
What's wrong with this picture?
I have a Samsung phone from Cingular, and even though I can upload ringtones to it for just the price of Cingular web bandwidth (overpriced but not in the $2 for a ringtone range), all those ringtones are so quiet as to be practically useless. Only the built in ones (and ones you buy from Cingular) are loud enough to use.
It would hopefully only take one major company to change its policy before the others followed suit, but I don't see that happening. Companies can more and more often assume political and technical ignorance on the part of their consumers. And this leads to all the DRM fun these days.
Who would want to be an engineer, when there are plenty of construction work jobs available in the sprawling suburbs.
On the one hand, it's not like that sort of consensus truth building hasn't been around at least since the 17th century (the circle of people whose opinions matter has just changed). But really, if you look at a few articles on controversial topics (try Intelligent Design) and particularly at the discussion pages, you'll find that the articles get pared down to mostly facts and statements of the views of each side. The editors do a pretty good job of keeping blatant bias out of the articles. It's still the wisdom of crowds, but with some pretty clear standards. In fact, I'd say Wikipedia is much less ideological and political than the first Encyclopdia of Diderot and D'Alembert.
If you ever do presentations, PowerPoint Office 2000 is incredibly bad compared to either 2003 or OOo 2. I think OOo Impress can actually do a few things better PP, like draw curves. And OOo runs my PP presentations, animations and custom vectors and all, flawlessly. As for Calc vs. Excel, I never use any advanced features, but I find the basic interface slightly better on OOo Calc. The only advantage I've found for Writer is that it doesn't do as many of the really obnoxious autoformatting that Word 2003 does by default. The only feature that I really miss, though, is Track Changes. But (aside from speed issues), OOo seems superior in every way to Office 2000.